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In this guide, we cover the fundamentals of sound mixing and provide tips from a Hollywood professional on how to consistently achieve superb sound for your videos.
Good quality audio is essential to creating a great video, but being the unseen component in a video, it often doesn’t receive the necessary attention or pre-production planning to produce professional results.
When creating video content, it's hard not to get swept up in the magic of the visuals, but as anyone who has watched a movie with hard-to-hear dialogue or a piece of content where the sound doesn't quite match up with what you see on the screen will tell you, high-quality audio really matters.
Not only does bad audio make you look unprofessional and, dare we say, amateurish, it takes the viewer out of the experience altogether. That's why, along with taking your time to achieve crisp, clear audio that adds to the overall experience, investing in the right equipment is crucial from the get-go.
Understanding how sound works?
First, up we’re going to give a bit of a 101 on how sound works because it’s actually quite interesting and we think it helps form a good base for understanding how sound mixing works.
Sound is produced when an object vibrates, creating waves of pressure in the surrounding air that vibrates our inner ear drum. We draw this as a waveform where the frequency of the oscillations or how fast and slow the pressure of that wave is increasing and decreasing is how high or low pitch something sounds and the amplitude or how strong that pressure wave is how loud something is.
Multiple Sound Waves
Now of course there is rarely just a single sound frequency, your voice, for example, is making multiple higher and low frequencies all at the same time. And it gets even more convoluted in videos where there are often multiple sources like music and dialogue together. But the crazy thing is your ears aren't actually picking up multiple waves from these sources, you only have one eardrum per ear so it's only getting one pressure reading at once. All the waves are constantly adding and subtracting from each other interfering and creating a complex single wave that your brain then must differentiate and isolate to make sense of.
All this happens effortlessly at an incredible speed, something like 20,000 times a second and without you even really trying, until it doesn’t! This is when you have a poor sound where It’s hard and tiring to interrupt the sound, to clearly hear the dialogue amongst the noise for example. And this is where you might have guessed is where sound mixing comes in.
Sound Mixing
With sound mixing we are trying to avoid this muddle of frequencies, in essence, you’re trying to balance all the various competing frequencies carving our space for those you want the listener to hear. If you go a step further, you can craft the frequencies to create a sense of immersion and even a cinematic feel.
Have you seen one of those large format mixing consoles and wondered what all those knobs do? Well essentially, they are all just individual faders for specific frequencies. You can think of an EQ as very specific frequency faders, where you can raise and lower the volume of each to create the ideal sound.
How poor audio impacts your video content
The quality of your audio has the power to make or break your visuals. No matter how great your visuals are, people will tune out if the audio is poor.
The human ear is much less forgiving than the human eye. Although we have access to a heap of intuitive and innovative tools to make this process as easy as possible, many creators still fail to factor in the importance of audio to the project's overall impact.
Planning and understanding your audio needs before production begins can be the difference between looking like a beginner or a professional who truly knows their craft.
We spoke with audio expert Alex Knickerbocker, who has worked for major studios for decades, creating sounds for award-winning films, TV shows, and game franchises. Alex shares with us his fundamental audio production techniques for achieving premium audio.
Following Alex’s practical tips and tricks will help you ensure all your videos have outstanding audio quality from just a bit of pre-planning and post-production.
So what do you need to master high-quality audio?
1. The right microphone is key
Investing in the right microphone is one of the simplest additions to your production equipment kit to ensure good audio quality. It's essential to match the microphone not only to the environment you're shooting in but for the type of content you're producing.
If you're shooting a sit-down interview where you can control the environmental sounds, you'll want to use a different microphone than if you're outside shooting a run-and-gun style vlog where wind and other noises can affect the overall quality of your audio, that's where items like foam windscreens and windjammers can help.
At Syrp Lab, we frequently use JOBY'S Wavo PRO for this purpose with its built-in ANR (Active Noise Reduction) algorithm, it’s become our go-to on-camera shotgun microphone.
2. Benefits of a separate audio recorder
Although many cameras and phones have the in-built capability of capturing good audio, there is nothing worse than recording your content only to discover that an epic shot has been interrupted by background noises and subjects that are hard to hear.
A separate audio recorder is the easiest way to fix this issue and ensure clear, crisp, studio-quality audio. What's more, a separate audio recorder allows you to control the gain and other audio settings, giving you more control over the final sound.
3. Importance of testing and monitoring audio during production
It goes without saying that whenever you create content requiring high-quality audio, you should ensure every piece of equipment works correctly before you even begin. Yet, you may be surprised at how often this vital step is missed.
In addition, you should also monitor your audio during the shoot to ensure there are no immediate issues that need to be addressed. This will ultimately save you time and the heartache of ending up with substandard audio on your video.
4. Post-production tips for improving your audio
Although it pays to be prepared before shooting, even if you end up with less-than-perfect audio at the end of a shoot, this can often be salvaged in post-production. Increasing technological advances have provided us access to a raft of noise-reduction and EQ software that, with a few tweaks, can help you clean up and improve the audio.
Mixing audio using specialised tools is perfect for manipulating different sound sources to create a balanced, cohesive, high-quality audio output and involves adjusting various parameters like volume, frequency, and dynamics to create a smooth and consistent audio experience. When done correctly, audio mixing can clean up recorded dialogue and remove unwanted sounds like clicks and pops. At the same time, EQ can silence harsh or unwanted frequencies, leaving you with crisp and clear audio.
5. The (rise) role of AI
As we've already mentioned, noise reduction is a super important part of audio processing, and AI tools are becoming more sophisticated at addressing this issue. AI-assisted audio restoration tools can help people who don't know much about this process to recover something from poorly recorded audio.
Although AI can speed up the grunt work of the audio mixing and cleaning process by making it easier and more efficient, having a human touch is still essential. By learning how to use these AI programmes and understanding their advances and limitations, you can create high-quality audio for your video projects.
Our team recently experimented with a few AI sound mixing tools to see if they were up for the job and you can see the results in our Film Science episode Sound Mixing vs AI, What's Better For Video?
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder
Finally, it's important to note that sound is highly subjective, and what may sound incredible to one person may sound terrible to another. This is where having a clear vision for your sound from the beginning, similar to your vision for your video, is critical in creating a cohesive final product where the sound enhances the video as intended. While many new smart software and AI tools can technically correct and adjust your sound, it still comes down to you to define that vision.
At Syrp Lab, we're dedicated to discovering the most innovative solutions for your creative projects, utilizing the latest products, video techniques, and audio technologies. Explore more of our filmmaking episodes to learn how you can elevate the quality of your video content.
