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Sound Advice: Natural Sound to the Rescue

Remember MacGyver? With his trusty Swiss Army knife, some bubble gum and duct tape, he could fashion weapons, build flying machines and repair almost anything -- all this, just in time to thwart the bad guys and save the damsel in distress. You have a similar tool at your disposal - perfect for defeating the evils of audio editing. No, it's not gaffer's tape, it's Natural Sound or Nat Sot, for short. Natural sound is often misunderstood or, worse, ignored by many video editors, but it works great covering tough edits and creating a real sense of space. Whether you're shooting standard DV or a high-def project, natural sound can save the day just like our intrepid hero.

I've thought about natural sound quite a bit lately as I've been editing a high-def movie and its associated extras for the DVD. Let me walk you through a couple of typical editing scenarios to explain the importance of natural sound and how to use it in your productions. Scene 63, for example, involves a conversation between two of the lead actors, sitting over a running creek on a low-water bridge. It's a wooded area and there are plenty of birds and insects chirping in the background. As nice as the setting was, the water running beneath the actor's feet was impossibly loud and completely masked all but the loudest of dialog. We went ahead and shot the scene wide to establish the location, then moved the actors away from the noise to shoot the close-ups. After the shoot, I dutifully recorded several minutes of the environment, knowing we'd need it in editing.

The scene starts and ends with the wide shot, but all the dialog uses the medium and close shots from the quieter location. After cutting the scene together, I dropped my natural sound recording into the mix to re-create the environment we'd lost at the new location. With some volume tweaks, that worked great, but there was another problem. During editing, the director decided we should build some uncomfortable pauses in the conversation to heighten the tension. We accomplished this by cutting away to some B-roll. While the close-up location was quieter, it was not silent, and now, there were obvious audio holes in the soundtrack. We patched these by finding some "silence" between takes and using that audio to fill the gaps.

It's easy to record natural sound from your locations. Before the talent arrives (or after they leave), simply roll a minute or two of tape to capture the audio environment. As for microphones, you can use the same mics the talent will use, or use the stereo microphone in your camcorder. If you're interested in recording surround sound, Reason Products and Sony make simple, inexpensive surround microphones that are perfect for this purpose. Capture your audio-only clips along with the other video material and remove the video to create your natural soundtrack. While it's not difficult to do this in most editing software, Adobe Audition has a handy feature called "Open Audio From Video" that simplifies the process dramatically. If the edited video goes longer than your recording, just loop it again and trim any excess. To create smooth transitions, apply a fade-in and fade-out to the ends of your audio seg…