Arranging and Audio

I haven’t been able to edit all week because of school, but guess what I started doing just as I got home?

That’s right. EDITING.

So, this is what I’ve done so far after importing everything:

1. Arrange the timeline: The first thing I always do is put all the clips in order as I want them to be. Considering the length of this video, this can take a long time. My first arrangement is rough at best, but it gives me a good understanding of the flow of the video. As editing progresses or during the final touch-ups, I’ll make the finer adjustments to clip length and placement.



2. Edit the audio: This is one of the most time-consuming aspects of my process. How do I edit the audio? Well I extract it to Adobe Soundbooth, boost the voices, and lower the background noise. How do I do that? It sounds very advanced but a single clip can take less than a minute. All I do is take an audio sample of the background noise and tell Soundbooth to eliminate all areas that match that sample. Soundbooth is AWESOME. Then, I just look for those glaring sound errors, like me speaking or screwing up the tripod work.




While it is easy to simply sample the whole clip at once, it keeps me from hearing the errors that I need to fix. This is why I arrange the clips first and then edit them—I can look at each individual area of sound and make sure they’re perfect. Also, it gives me a better understanding of how the clip should sound like in context.

How did I figure out how to do the audio thing? Well a long time ago, I was messing with Adobe Premiere, and I found an option that let me extract the audio to Soundbooth. Then the rest was more experimentation.

Anyway, I’ve only edited the sounds of the first scene. I think I have about seven more scenes to go? It’ll take a while, but the resulting sound quality is too good to pass up.