Media Toolkit: Improving your sound

Improving sound quality post-production

Although audio quality can either make or tear down a good video, in contrast to video editing, sound editing very often goes overlooked. Perhaps it's because of the lack of necessity and accessibility to edit sound in the everyday. We don't really think about sound as being important to edit and we lack the resources to do so in the everyday, seeing as our phone's Photos app offers basic video editing (trimming clips, video filters, color correction), but options about audio editing are very few, if any. Although audio editing is available on video editing applications, the variety of options for sound editing differ from app to app, so, for the best quality edit, I recommend you to download an audio editing software. Here are 4 beginner-friendly, safe and free audio editing applications:

Audacity (available on Windows, macOS, Linux);

GarageBand (available on macOS and iOS);

WaveEditor (available on Android);

Ocenaudio (available on Windows, macOS, Linux).

Once you have recorded your audio and have the recording file in the editing app, you can start fine-tuning it with these 6 most important aspects of sound editing.

Audio synchronizing

If you have recorded your video with a microphone and camera, you are going to have two seperate audio recordings – one that was recorded from the camera and the other from the microphone. Once you import both of them into the timeline of your editing tool, there is a chance they won't match, for ex., if your microphone started recording the sound a bit earlier. What you need to do is synchronize both of them. Either you can do that automatically with the ''synchronize audio clips'' tool which helps you synchronize your microphone audio with the video file or you can manually cut the recordings so that they align.

Checking audio levels

This step is needed to check the volume of your sound. Editing apps will show the audio in the form of wavelengths under the video track with a volume slider (usually horizontal line) to make the sound louder or softer. If the peaks of your audio waves sometimes reach yellow or red, it is a good idea to turn the volume down until there are no scary bright colors left. The best volume to ensure that the audio is clear but unaffected by audio distortion is between -12dB to -6dB.

Compression

Audio compression is a super useful tool for making the audio more balanced, softening the loudest points and enhancing the most quiet parts.

Ratio between speech and background music

If there's one thing that can make a professional, well-made video immediately crumble, is blasting background music overpowering the spoken text. Although music is one of the most wonderful inventions ever, it has a time and a place, especially in a video that's meant to be taken seriously. If you're planning to use background music, make sure the speaker is clearly distinguishable – overpowering the music, even. The music can and should be turned louder when no one's speaking and there's no important sound in the video itself. When transitioning back to a shot where the audio is important, the background music's volume should be managed with audio fade-in(s) and audio fade-out(s) to ensure no sudden jarring jumps or leaps in audio loudness.

Noise suppression

This tool is great to use if the audio is a bit disturbed by background noises such as wind, traffic, echo, other people, etc.

Stereo, mono and double mono sound

Now that you've got a perfectly edited audio of your video, the last step is to make sure it's not all for nothing, which would mean checking if the audio file is a ''double mono'' or ''stereo'' sound. If it is on ''mono'' sound and not changed to ''double mono'' which is basically just copying the same audio to both speakers/earphones, the end product may be the audio only playing in one earphone. So always check and listen to your video's sound not only on the computer, but on earphones or speakers if possible.