Sound editing: voice clips and sound effects

When ever my group and I went out for filming often we would capture are actors in dialogue sequence's, however due to background noise being present their voice were ether difficult to hear or have background interference. We already knew that the solution to this was to use a radio microphone that clip onto the actors clothing so that it capture their voice more clearly which did work but there were occasions where their was some sort of background interference (e.g. strong winds or traffic), this also applied to sound effects since because we were using the radio mic so much often backgrounds noises came out very quiet or sounded odd. So to redeem this we record the actors voices and sound effects with the radio mic in a sound studio so that there wasn't any background noises.


Once all the recording was finished I had to convert all the audio clips (or least all the ones we wanted) into a audio file. In order to do this I had to import all the recordings into Adobe Premiere and arrange them into a single timeline so that they all play one after another. Original I intended for our clips to be in a single sound file but because we had to record all our actors voices and sound effects using the video camera the default setting was as a video file and when ever we brought up an audio clip in the timeline the video was always present. I had to somehow get rid of the video and just leave the audio, eventually I learnt that you could do this using to methods in Adobe Premiere.


The first method was to drag the clips into the time line then unlink the video footage from the audio and remove the video footage. This method was longer than the other but it gave me the idea that this could be used for the trailer if we want have with no voice or background noise sine we can remove the audio from the footage.

The other method was to change the previewed version of the clip to display only audio levels and drag it into the time line. This method was much quick than other plus you could view the loudness of the audio just in case the volume was to little or too much which was a nice touch.

Once all the audio clips were in the timeline and arranged in the correct order I thenconverted the file into a Microsoft AVI file so that it could be used in Premiere as a single video clip (which was blank since there was no video footage and we could place it underneath the footage used in our trailer so it only appears as audio) and we could then isolate each recording needed and remove it as separate clip rather than having to shorten the entire clip and re-pasted it every time we wanted to extract and new piece of audio. 

Using Audio in our trailer plus copyright issues

In order to get the audio that would be need for our horror trailer, my group and I had to download music and sound effects off the internet. However it was made well aware to us that we shouldn't use copyrighted material since the audio could easily be taken down or muted by the rightful owners. So instead we went to a website called 'Royalty free music' which allows people to download music for free and use it how they please since it was copyright free. For a while I was finding it hard to determine what to download and use since a lot of the music was not right for what we wanted to do and because of that we felt that the soundtrack would be rather limited in the end, eventually we found some pretty good pieces of music but we felt we needed more. 

  












Link to Royality free music: http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?genre=horror

So now we had no chose but to find audio and effects on YouTube so we could have more variety to use in the trailer. We are fully aware of the risk on using copyrighted materials and hope that this doesn’t interfere with the production of this trailer.

Link to one of the audio clips we will use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBfsAUFifOo