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Lesson Info

Audio Effects Part 1

Michael's for the session or to give you a bunch of audio effects the way that we were looking at video effects two sessions ago, we'll give everybody a chance to ask questions, so if you've got questions on anything we've covered in this course, be sure to send him along because jim is feeling lonely if he doesn't have somebody to talk to his, his piece is gonna pop out and this is not a pretty sign then after we have some time for questions, we'll talk about sharing and exporting how to export a master file which gives you the highest possible quality howto export a still frame howto export for mobile devices and then one last chance for questions and answers and jim does he happy dances we wrap this whole thing up, jim, before we start anything else you want to cover sh we jump right into it no, we're good to go thank you alright so let's talk audio effect justice we can have video effects which changed the look of a clip. We can also have audio effects which changes the sound of a ...

clip and I would argue that making your sound a sound good does a better job for making your picture looked good and anything else that you do even the world's best color greatest a color grader color grady ist whoever it is, even if the world's best your people are not going to watch if the audio is terrible I know this for a personal fact I went to an imax and it was a huge five storey image and it was gloriously exposed perfectly color grated the images were tack sharp it was beautiful and the speakers were too loud I lasted for twenty seconds I got up and walked out the pictures were not compelling enough to let me stay with bad audio on the other hand looking exist look at the success of of poltergeist and blair witch project and something the number eight which I'm blanking on the moment every single one of those whose really really low budge it really low quality almost security camera style video editing but they all had half million two million dollar audio mixes and people were fascinated with the quality of the story captivated by the audio and they believe that the low grade video was a directorial choice because it helped to improve the quality of story know they just don't have the money to shoot good quality pictures, but they did have the good sense to have high quality sound when in doubt spend the time and the effort to make really good quality audio and then the audience is so comfortable listening that they're going to soak up the picture that you spend the rest of your time crafting so how do we do good quality sound well, let's, start with some really obvious things. Let's say we want to take a listen to the pan and let's, make sure that computer audio is on. I have tired jim, you'll be very proud of this. You don't have to say things, just nod your head and smile wisely. I have hired the world's best voiceover announcer to narrate this scene. You're ready? One of our key audio challenges. What a voice that's amazing! Okay, go backto work now I'm done so let's. Just take a listen to this and let's turn on our audio meters by clicking on the audio meter here so we could display with the audio meters look like grab this vertical lines so you could make him thick enough to see, grab this horizontal line and drag it up so I can make the timeline a little bit taller. We can also go up to the window menu and say revert to original layout, it resets the layout of all of our screens should we totally hosed stuff and can't figure out how we got from where we are to where we're going? I want to take a listen to this clip on notice where the view meters are, one of our key audio challenges is getting the same talent recorded on different days using different mikes. To sound the same ok, we're going to hear that quote in a number of different situations but notice that the audio was peeking around minus three the bulk of it was around minus six it wasn't too bad was coming equally out the left on the right speaker we're just going to pull that up like one more d b here's a really cool tip if you grab the volume and you drag it up and down just a little bit of dragging causes a whole lot of change in the audio level way too much change in fact if on the other hand you hold the command key down and drag while holding the command key it gears down your ability to drag so you drag mohr and make less change this is a much better way command dragging to change audio level so they're not whipping all over everywhere if I select the clip open up the inspector keyboard shortcut is command for go to the audio tab notice that there is no pan setting here I can't pan this to the left and the right speaker that's because the pan modus set to none means it will pan based upon how it was recorded it was recorded monaural monaural means that it's going to come equally out the left and the right speaker which is going to give it the apparent illusion of centering between the two speakers I don't want that when you click on pan mode, ah, whole lot of choices show up every single one of these except two refers to surround sound, which we just don't have the time today to talk about, so I want to do a stereo mics, so I'm going to select stereo left, right? This now opens up a pan slider, and now if we listen to this and pan this all the way to the left, one of our key audio challenges and now I panicked all the way to the right is getting the same talent, and now we're in a pan it partially left recorded on different days, using different mikes to sound the same. Now here's a really important point if you have a dialogue between two people, don't pan one person all the way to the left speaker and the other person all the way to the right speaker. And the reason is you have no control over what the playback environment is going to be. Do you know that they're listening on the stereo tv set? Do you know that both headsets work? Do you know that both speakers worker? Maybe the parakeet has nested in the left speaker and you only have one working speaker on the tv set of all of your dialogue is both left speaker. War right speaker I hear the person on the left but I don't hear the person on the right suddenly people are tuning out of my show because they can't hear the dialogue so you want to take your main actors and keep him really really close to the center lean this one little left lean this one little right but keep it principally centered because otherwise even people going to not because they can't hear the speaker sound effects could go wall the wall music can go wall the wall but your dialogue your main driving intellectual impetus of the entire presentation needs to be close to centre now jim I need your help this is a very difficult challenge and it's going to require you to do a physical test are you ready? I'm ready okay, now I have right here a forty inch hd tv set and you're watching us from your living room and although you're farther from your tv set in this studio than you are from you are in your living room because you're about six to seven feet away and living room let's pretend that this is your tv set okay I want to take your two fingers like this and put it upto one eye and just look through one eye I want you to put one finger on the left edge of the tv set so look over here lined it up on pan over to that you know this my arms okay already so put the left finger on this side you put the right finger on this side okay there's no way that's correct is that really move your hands a little closer to your face okay, now squeeze your fingers together okay good now lock your hands your fingers don't move okay okay and I just keep them together but lower them down so I can see your face how far part of your fingers right there two inches I'm sorry two inches okay if I was doing a stereo pan across a forty inch tv set from the point of view of your brain from point of view your eye the characters are moving about two inches is um left to right correct how important this stereo when you're looking at a two inch movement probably very much precisely correct now let's pretend you're sitting in a movie theater and now you're about one and a half to two times the screen height put one finger over in that corner of the studio and the other finger over in that corner of studio and now you're looking at a twenty inch movie theater screen how far part of your fingers about twelve inches now stereo effect makes a lot of sense as you start to make the image bigger so there's more room for the characters to move having a bigger stereo effect to make sense so one of things you want to consider when you're doing the mix is how big assis playing back am I looking at on a youtube picture where it's this big? Maybe I want to have a big stereo effect cause it's music, but you don't need a big stereo effect because it's dialogue, but if I'm looking at it on a movie screen or a protecting us part of a corporate screen where twenty feet, forty feet, sixty feet wide, having a large stereo effect where I can control the audio output where it's going to appear now, having a big stereo effect makes a big difference. Remember the very first session on planning, I said, one of the things you need to ask yourself is how my distributing this final product wouldn't it be nice to know before you went to the cost of an audio mix? What the output was going to be to say, do I need to mix this for youtube? Or do I need to mix it for us theatre? Well, it would make a difference in your budget make a difference in your deadline, make a difference of how you prep the clips and where you spend your this's, why planning is so important, but a lot of people don't plan until all of a sudden you're looking at the deadline and say wait a minute, I can't get there from here and then franek screaming and shouting and sews, all right, so we see that we can pan a clip by selecting the clip, changing the pan mode from none to stereo left right and grabbing the pan mode we can also and we'll just do this to prove a point, I'm going to set a key frame for pan notice again a grey diamond means no key frame click on the diamond it turns to yellow there is a key frame I'm going to set the pan all the way to the left and we'll move over to here set a key frame, pan it all the way to the right and take a listen we can automate the pan. One of our key audio challenges is getting the same talent recorded on different days, using different mikes to sound the same now right there, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but if I am walking and talking on the screen and I'm walking from the left hand side to the right hand side left side left hand side of the right hand side than having that pan follow me as I walk simply reinforces the movement that's going on on the screen so pan is a simple effect here's another one this is the same microphone but this's the same dialogue but recorded on two different days on two different microphones let's take a listen here just, um pull this down this is microphone one one of our key audio challenges is getting the same talent recorded on different days using different mikes to sound the same this is microphone too one of our key audio challenges is getting the same talent recorded on different days using different mikes to sound the same. This is a good illustration of how using different microphones actually has a different sound that different timber to the voice this is very rich one of our key audio listen to the richness in the base that doesn't exist over here. Oh hush your feelings or not that hurt. All right, so what we've got is a much thinner sound. Well, I can pull the gain up and if I do that will just make a little bit louder so it sounds like it's about the same level if I play here if our ki audio challenges that if I play over here I wonder why it does that I'll have to speak strongly to it put it on different days using different mikes to sound the same. This is microphone too one of our the levels are the same, but the quality of the sound is not so we're going to click on this goto our magic wand menu and notice there's a choice under the magic wand called match audio this works exactly the same as match color except it's matching sound not picture when I select match audio, it says click on a clip that has thie audio characteristics you like well, that's this clip so wanna click it? I'm going to say, apply the match and now listen to the difference. But come on, people. I know why that is. Don't warn me again recorded on different days, using different mikes to sound the same. This is microphone to one of our key audio challenges is getting the same talent. Notice how the second mike now has that much richer sound. They sound close enough that even though they were recorded on different days on different mikes, the totality, the timber of the two mikes sounds similar enough that the audience is not goingto worry about it now, there's another thing that we can do, and now we start to get into if you remember that whiteboard conversation we had yesterday. Well, I was talking about the fact that human hearing goes from twenty cycles per second to twenty thousand cycles per second that's the range of human hearing, then we broke it down into human speech is only a portion of that it's, roughly a tw two hundred cycles at the bottom end for a guy roughly four hundred cycles at the bottom end for a girl and then when we shift over to the high frequency sound, the high frequency sound is roughly six to seven thousand cycles for guy and eight to nine thousand cycles for a girl kids are a little bit higher they'll go up to about ten k, but they won't go much beyond that low end sounds air caused by vowels, eh? A e I o u they add richness, they add character, sexiness, identify ability to a voice but diction intelligibility iss added by continents, which are higher frequency sounds, and his june made a really good point of illustrating when we're talking about the letter f, as in frank and ss and sam, the difference of being able to distinguish the letter f from the letter s is being able to hear or not hear that hiss sound, which exists with the letter s and doesn't exist with the letter f well, one of things that we often want to do is sometimes when we're recording with a laval there, mike, we need to boost the base level their mikes, which is what I'm wearing here is part of the studio is a wonderful mike for video it's inconspicuous it could be clipped onto a shirt doesn't require anybody to operate the microphone, but as jamie pointed out in a pre show this morning, laval their mikes pick up room noise big time they tend not to have a good bass response they tend to be too far away from the voice they don't have good high quality pick up it's a compromise of having something which is inconspicuous and still be better than picking up talent from a microphone which is ten feet away lovelier mikes are good but they're always a trade off which means that many times we take a lot of their mike and we've got to make adjustments to it we've gotta boost the bottom in tow add some richness to the voice and we've got a boost the high end to make sure that the the voice the addiction is intelligible when we start to manipulate individual frequencies this is a process called e q or equalization so for instance here if I take a listen to dr cerf teaching is a problem solving activity we learned by solving problems we learned faster by example then we learned by having somebody give us some wrote teo procedure okay so that's not bad it's a little bit soft I'm gonna crank the gain up as much as I can at this moment until I teach you another technique which is going to come in about five minutes but I want to boost him I want to make it sound better we could go up to the equalization menu under audio enhancements and remember we get tau audio enhancements by going to the inspector command for and going to the audio tab and inside the audio tab is audio enhancements and we can then say enhance this for voice or enhance it for music or boost the loudness thes air perfectly okay but not my first choice my first choice is some really outstanding audio filters called audio effects inside final cut ten we get there by going to the effects menu keyboard shortcut command five for the effects browser go down to the audio section here and we look for the section called e q now there's lots and lots of different e q settings but they're really divided into two categories final cut and logic logic is a really high end music creation package which apple acquired several years ago that has world class audio filters inside it and I want to spend a little time talking about about three of the filters the one that I really like is called the fat filter you apply the fatty if you fell to the same way you apply any other effect you grab the filter dragon on top of the clip and the filter appears at the top of the audio tab in the inspector when you click on the fat geek you notice that it's on because the blue chuck boxes on the name is highlighted and a preset of set to default and you say good I'm going to go to the pre set and there just isn't anything to pick from crust fallen, you then delete the filter because you don't realize the secret hidden place to click, which is this icon right here? This icon opens up in interface, which is initially terrifying. I know, but it is enormously powerful and it's worth the time you spend learning how it works. So powerful, in fact, that we're going to take the time this afternoon because I need to explain how this filter khun benefit you all audio filter describe human hearing at twenty cycles per second on the left to twenty thousand cycles per second on the right, always everywhere, bases on the left, troubled us on the right. This divides human hearing from twenty to twenty thousand cycles into a serious of five bands. This band is below human speech, low end human speech, midrange human speech, high end human speech and above human speech. Human speech is roughly around two hundred cycles per second to roughly around six or seven thousand cycles per second. Guys racheted lower girls racheted higher. I'm going to give you some specific numbers in a couple minutes, boosting the base, which is a favorite activity off every radio deejay that has ever lived because they wanna have the sexiest, most powerful voice possible, which means plenty of base is a natural if this is the microphone and it's a hand mike as opposed to a lovelier because the rules are slightly different. But if this is a hand mike, if I talk on a hand mike this far away it's going to pick up my voice with no problem but as a microphone gets closer to the sound source called the proximity effect appears when I get within about an inch inch and a half maybe three quarters of an inch to the microphone as long as I'm not popping my peas and tease directly into it. A proximity effect means that the microphone itself enhances the bass response of a voice especially a guy's voice and guys they're very concerned about this, which is why radio announcers tend to want to swallow the mike they wanted this close to the mic as they can to boost the bass response to the mike. Now I can understand why I did that myself when I was doing a lot of voice over work and still in fact worry about having my my mouth get close enough to the microphone to give myself a good bass pitch, but the problem is boosting the base bruce ruins intelligibility let me just take some high frequency out here boost the base on dr cerf take the high frequency out so we're just going to notch this see how hard it is to hear what he's saying I'm gonna boost this whole gay in just a bit teaching is a problem solving activity we learned by solving problems we learn see how muffled that is see how hard it is to understand now you've already heard the quote once where he says, teaching us a problem solving activity, but our ability to distinguish the words is not from the base. The base ends lens warmth but doesn't lend intelligibility the ability to distinguish the words comes from hearing the high frequency let's. Just reset this and play it again take a listen. Teaching is a problem solving activity we learn by solving problems here, how much easier it is to understand what he's saying, so I want a warm the voice up, okay, that makes perfect sense. I'm going to add between two and four d be around two hundred cycles, maybe just a little less I'm gonna click hold on drag, set that a little bit lower, but notice that when I warm the bass up, I'm really boosting a range of frequencies I'm not not upsetting on I'm not notching this, I'm not building a spike that would sound terrible would sound very artificial. I wanna have a smooth flow. The queue controls the smoothness of the slope going into and coming out of the boosted frequency, so you want to have something which is relatively range like a soft hill, not a gigantic mountain we're not boosting it like this you're boosting between two and four d be around one hundred and eighty two, two hundred cycles for a guy and around four hundred cycles for a girl now here, if you're dealing with james earl challenge, you're going to be a little bit lower. In fact, I wouldn't boost him it all. If you're dealing with chris colfer, you're going to be a little bit higher everybody's voice is different there's bases and baritones and tenors, so you would want to slide this anyway, you slide it is to clique hold on, drag on the frequency and you put the center of the hill on that base frequency that you want to emphasize for my voice it's around one hundred and seventy for most men, I would put it around two hundred and again close is good enough there's no such thing as the perfect frequency because you're building arrange ah bubble at the base and and you're also building it so it's no more than about four d b you don't need to really punch the base hard where we really concentrate. Our effort, though, is on the higher frequency, and here I recommend that you set the high frequency between three and five d b a little bit louder somewhere around three thousand cycles for a guy and around four thousand cycles for a girl again, girls, women's voices are higher than men's voices, so you want to set it by just a little bit higher? I've debated a lot as to whether I want to set this much higher, like around the letter s is and sam, but really, this is such a high pitch that I'm losing a lot of addiction. That's available to me if I set this around three thousand cycles for a guy around four thousand cycles for a girl and I boosted between three and five d b while I don't boost the bass frequencies all the time. Most the time I leave the bass frequencies alone, I instead invest in good microphones to make sure that the mic is properly recording the low end of the voice. I almost always boost high frequencies and that's, because I'm in the business of training adults and adults. The older you get, the harder it is to hear high frequencies, so I give them a chance at understanding what's being said by boosting the high frequencies around three thousand cycles for a guy around four thousand cycles for a girl to make sure that that diction properly is heard teaching is a problem solving activity we learned by solving problems because I want people to understand what my actors are talking about. And if everything is basie and muffled and warm and sexy, the actor feels, oh gosh, I've got a great deep voice and the audience is saying, I can't understand what's being said, martha changed the channel. I don't want people to change the channel. I want people to hear what's being said to get caught up in the story, and then once they're able to here, they can watch. But we've got to get him to hear first that's just the most important critical first up e q allows us to do that, then, once we have this setting the way we want. So for instance, if I'm boosting a guy two to four d be around two hundred cycles, three to five d be around four thousand cycles, I go back to this preset menu close this window, goto the preset menu and save the precept, and I'm gonna call this male voice boost and click save now, whenever I need to pull that back again, I simply go to the preset menu. I don't even have to open the filter. The preset is there that allows me to then apply that all my selected clips at the same time. I've been working with a single clip, but I can apply this filter toe all selected clips to simply drag it across. All the clips that are selected would have that filter applied to it, so I would select all of my guy clips and select all of my girl clips and applied the filter first, the guys and under the girls. This is just a really important point, because we often especially guys get so hung up on is my voice deep enough. Is it warm enough? Is it sexy enough? Well, that's cool and I've I've been there. I know exactly what that's like I still to this day obsess about whether my voice is deep enough, but whether it's intelligible has nothing to do with the base. It has everything to do with the trouble, and if all you do is concentrate on making it warm and bottom heavy nobody's going understand it's like you're listening to people talking on the other side of the wall.