Editing Digital Audio (page 2)

Great chefs talk about "balancing flavors." In audio, it's just as critical to achieve the proper balance between your different sounds. Particularly when it comes to mixing background music with the program's narration or dialog.
One sure way to ruin an otherwise well-made video is to bury the dialog with background music that's too loud. Here, the quality of your audio monitoring equipment can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Most video monitors, including even high-dollar professional units, are woefully inadequate when it comes to their audio capabilities. Sporting tiny speakers, these units emphasize midrange sounds. They do an often woeful job at high frequencies, and an absolutely dreadful job at letting you hear common low frequency sounds such as traffic noise and air conditioning rumble.
How can you properly balance your soundtrack elements if you can't even hear them accurately? Headphones. Even a modest set of headphones will out-perform a typical video monitor speaker. Plus a decent set of headphones will do double duty since you can take them on location and use them to make sure your field audio recordings are free from sonically "sour" ingredients.

Nearly all editing software has some pretty fancy audio processing tools built-in. These usually include audio transitions such as soundtrack cross-fades and the ability to season your "audio stew" by applying a variety of filters and effects.
Cross fades are the sonic equivalent of a visual dissolve. Instead of an abrupt transition between the sound of two adjacent scenes, the sounds overlap smoothly as the scenes change. This effect is particularly useful if you need to smooth out the audio transitions between two scenes which need to be cut together, but were shot at different times.
Simple audio effects such as reverb and basic echo are also built into nearly every editing program and can add a sense of "depth" to sounds. High-pass and low-pass filters help eliminate unwanted low-frequency rumble, or high pitched whistles and whines from your soundtracks. And a software audio compressor is useful for reducing the dynamic range of an audio track - a process that can make some sounds such as voiceovers appear more "present" in your mix. And don't forget to experiment with audio filters.
Whether built into your software or purchased later in the form of "plug-ins" there are audio filters for many edit programs that do everything from simulating a canyon-wide echo, to turning a 10-year-old's voice into something like Darth Vader's menacing Star Wars rasp.
As with bold flavors in the kitchen, try to use these audio spices carefully so you don't "over season" your mix.
For a more "in-depth" look at audio for digital video, consider checking out the Sound Track column in Videomaker magazine, dedicated to the art of audio for video.

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