Audio Editing

Great quote to put audio editing in perspective

'50% of a film is the sound'

That's George Lucas.

Taking that literally, that means we should spend at least the same amount of time editing audio as we do pictures.

But...

Students, and newcomers generally don't.

Are they lazy? Nope. It's because audio, by its very nature, is more subtle, harder to 'see' and therefore under the surface. Novice editors concentrate on pictures because that's how they feel they'll be judged; not realising that good audio editing can preserve continuity in ways that pictures simply cannot.

And that's the driving force: preserving and enhancing the continuity of the film; the emotion.

Audio breaks down into four areas:

natural sound or atmospheric sound
dialogue
sound effects
music.

To a lot of people audio mean music, but it means a lot more than that.

However, to get us started here is chap explaining how, on final cut, you can add audio, manipulate it to good effect to make a piece of video work better.

It's a bit silly, but notice the tricks on Final Cut Pro: making tracks bigger, using the clip overlays, using key frames and watching the wave forms; all good basics of audio editing.

http://youtu.be/DZjwH3fFDEs