[MUSIC PLAYING]
IAN SEXTON: All right, folks.
Welcome to Digital Media E-5.
Our election tonight is on audio production.
So let's just dive right in.
First thing I'd like to talk to you guys a little bit about
is recording sound, OK?
In order to do that, we're going to use microphones, all right?
It would seem sort of very obvious, but there's
many different kinds of microphones.
So we're going to demystify a little bit of the different types of microphones
and how they can be utilized in different methods.
All right.
So-- if we let this play for a second-- there's
sort of two main categories of microphones
that we're going to deal with, all right?
The first one is a dynamic microphone, and the second one
is a condenser microphone.
OK?
This diagram is describing sort of how they work.
The sound waves come in.
They strike some kind of diaphragm, which
produces an electrical signal, which then runs through the microphone
into your mixer or recorder.
And it's converted into digital audio or analog audio if it's an analog machine.
So dynamic microphones.
So dynamic microphones-- if we sort of look at this circuit a little bit more
closely--
sound waves will come in, and they'll strike this diaphragm here, OK?
This is just a thin piece of material that flexes when sound waves strike it,
which as it flexes, it causes induction in this magnet and this coil of wire,
which produces a very low voltage audio signal--
very, very low voltage--
which is then sent down the cables into your mixer or your recorder, OK?
And so one of the things to think about is
that this is so low voltage that at some point, it needs to be boosted.
So there is a preamp stage at your mixer or recorder, which
will then boost that signal up, OK?
And we'll talk a little bit more about what that means in just a second.
The nice thing about these microphones is that they're unpowered, OK?
They don't require any batteries or any kind of external power
in order to use them.
So they're wonderful for field recordings, OK?
They're also tend to be more robust and more resistant to wear and tear.
If you drop them, you're less likely to destroy them or make
them totally wonky and unfunctional.
All right?
But because they're not powered, they need a stronger preamp,
or they need to be boosted a little bit more than condenser mics.
All right?
And so this preamp becomes an important aspect in our recording sound
because it has a lot of control or effect on the signal overall.
They also tend to be cheaper than condenser mics, OK?
And they're much better for recording louder sounds.
Part of that robustness is actually a translation into being
able to record louder sounds.
They're less delicate.
All right?
So these are generalities.
You will find that there may be condenser mics that
are designed to be recorded for louder sounds
or that are maybe sturdier than one specific dynamic mic.
But this is sort of a general rule of thumb
when thinking about the categorization of a dynamic microphone
and useful for you to decide which microphone might
be best for you in any given situation.
DAN COFFEY: Feel like the classic example
of a microphone that's taken damage is the hand-held microphone that
has a big mash on it from somebody leading into a face plant.
And that's the thing about a dynamic mic, right?
It's because it doesn't actually affect the quality of the mic
as long as you don't completely destroy it.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Exactly.
Right?
So if you were to go for a mic drop or something like that,
I wouldn't drop a condenser mic.
I might drop a dynamic mic, right?
Because then it might still work again.
DAN COFFEY: [INAUDIBLE] is shaking her head.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So a condenser microphone, it's the same sort of idea.
It's just constructed a little bit differently.
The sound waves will come in, and there's
this front plate, which acts sort of as our diaphragm,
and there is another back plate.
And so the electrical signal is caused by these two things
oscillating, getting closer and further apart, OK?
In order for this to actually work though, it does need a battery.
It needs some kind of power source there to charge the circuit.
And that allows that sort of oscillation between these two plates
to adjust some sort of natural voltage that then gets sent back.
Because they are powered, they tend to have a little bit of a stronger
signal coming off the microphone than dynamic mics, which
means you need less work out of your preamp
when you get to your mixer or recorder.
So some generalities that follow condenser mics.
They require power to function.
So if you're out in the middle of a forest somewhere,
this may not be the right choice because at some point,
you're going to run out of power or not have access to power.
OK?
They tend to be more delicate and easy to damage.
So it might be a microphone-- and often you'll
find this the case-- that is used in a studio setting that's very controlled.
OK?
And then great care can be taken with the materials.
And it needs a little bit less grain to increase the preamp, as I said.
And they tend to be more expensive than dynamic mics, OK?
And they have better fidelity when recording delicate sounds.
All right?
So as the sort of general dynamic mics were more suitable for recording louder
sounds, these are much more suitable for getting fidelity
on very sort of delicate, quiet sounds.
OK?
So humans have a range of audio response to different frequencies.
And for most humans, it's about 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz, OK?
And so that's 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz.
And frequencies that fall within that range, we generally can hear.
Though as we sort of age, that sort of creeps in maybe a little bit.
We start to lose the very, very high frequencies.
And there may be some variation on the edges,
but the human voice is somewhere right in the middle of that.
And so microphones are generally tuned to a range of frequency, sort
of a specific range of frequencies.
They have what's called a frequency response
where they're better at responding to certain frequencies
than other frequencies.
Some microphones are designed for more bass sounds,
some are designed for more high sounds.
Most of the microphones that I think we will deal with
are sort of tuned to be at peak efficiency right
in the range of the human voice, which makes sense
because we want to amplify the things that we say.
OK?
So there are some other specialty microphones
that are out there that may be designed for different frequency ranges.
You often find this in musical recordings and things like that.
So there are a lot of different types of microphones.
But your most standard microphones are tuned to the human voice.
So what do these look like.
So I'm sure at some point, we've all seen an internal camera microphone
on a camcorder.
Or if you own a DSLR, maybe there's just one small hole in there
that has some microphone in it.
Or if you have an iPod or an iPhone, right there
is a small opening for a microphone on that.
OK?
So what does an internal microphone sound like?
We put together a little scenario.
We're going to listen to Dan read a storybook a lot today.
DAN COFFEY: It's going to be amazing.
IAN SEXTON: OK?
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
So just to sort of like quantify what this is, we have a sort of frontal shot
that shows Dan reading the story book.
what type of microphone is listed up in the corner.
There's a VU meter here, which will display levels.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
And we have an overhead shot to just show
the proximity of the different microphones
to the source that's reading this, which is Dan, right?
So there's a boom microphone here, a handheld, a large diaphragm,
he's wearing a lav.
And the internal microphone is on the camera,
which is somewhere even further away.
OK?
So let's listen to what this sounds like.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day."
IAN SEXTON: All right.
So let's take a moment.
What did you hear in that recording?
AUDIENCE: A lot of other noise.
IAN SEXTON: A lot of other noise, right?
We could hear a lot of air conditioning vents.
I think someone was putting something down on a table in the background.
I heard someone do something like a little [TAPPING] like that in the back.
So there was a lot of other noise that we picked up in this recording
that we don't sort of notice in the recording
that I'm giving you right now, right?
So there's something different going on with this microphone.
OK.
All right.
So another type of microphone is a hand-held microphone.
And we may have all seen these at sort of a rock concert or something
like that or at any kind of presentation.
This microphone you can hold in your hand.
You put it to your mouth and you can speak into it, OK?
So for our purposes, we clamped it to a small clamp
here in a reasonable position, pointed it at our source's mouth.
And let's listen to what it sounds like.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day."
IAN SEXTON: So what did you hear in this recording?
AUDIENCE: Well, he sounds closer.
There's less ambient noise.
IAN SEXTON: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: But we could also hear somebody else in the background laugh.
IAN SEXTON: That might have been actually one
of our audience members here.
[LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
[LAUGHS]
IAN SEXTON: Right.
So--
AUDIENCE: Stop it.
You can't tell the difference.
AUDIENCE: He was certainly a lot warmer and bigger in the bottom end.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So there's two things that's happening here.
There's a proximity issue where the internal microphone is much further
away from the subject.
So in order to get the same kind of recording out of it to boost the gain,
you have to increase the sensitivity, which picks up
a lot of other weird noise around it.
It's also not very directional, so it's picking up
lots of noise between the camera and the subject.
There's lots of things that may be happening in that space.
Where the handheld is much closer, so there's
less opportunity for other noises to sort of insert itself in between that.
You don't need to have the sensitivity of the microphone
up as high because it's closer, right?
So at the end of the day, proximity is going to be key when using microphones.
That is your sort of greatest indicator of success
will be how close your microphone is to your subject.
All right?
And I think, Alec, you mentioned too that it sounded warmer maybe.
Is that you said?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
It sounded a lot warmer, a lot fuller.
I also on that one heard the size of the room.
The room sounded a whole lot smaller.
I could hear a very short reverb time, which I couldn't
on the thinner sounding first pass.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
Right.
And it may have been that there was just so much other ambient
noise that that little bit of reverb that you might hear was just lost,
was covered up by the air conditioning vents and other things.
But so this idea that his voice has a little bit more warmth
in it is this idea of timber, that there is sort of a range of frequencies
that we each talk with, right?
You know the sound of someone else's voice
if you've come to hear it a bunch.
But the way the microphone records that is sort of different per microphone,
right?
They each have different frequency responses.
So even though we hear our voice sounds one way, when oftentimes we
listen to a recording of ourselves, we're like, oh, my god.
I can't believe that's how my voice sounds.
Right?
So we're punishing Dan in today's lecture.
OK.
So this is beginning to sort of dive into the fact
that there is this idea that there's this frequency response that can
be different between the microphones.
There can be different proximity affects between microphones.
So the other microphone that we are using here
is a lav microphone, which comes either wired or wireless, OK?
Right now, I'm wearing a wireless lav.
I have a transmitter in my back pocket, and there's a receiver over there.
And it's digitizing my audio and sending it to that location,
and then it's getting beamed out to you via--
AUDIENCE: Magic.
IAN SEXTON: --magic, right?
Other wires and cables and wireless signals.
OK.
So one of the things to think about with wireless frequencies
is that if you're transmitting something over some frequency range,
that you could possibly have interference on that.
So most all of these wireless lavs allow you to scan and select
different frequencies.
So if you ever get the chance to use a set like this,
or if you rent one or something like that,
know that you should scan the area for what
frequencies have lots of interference on them
and choose a different frequency, OK?
All right.
So let's take a listen and hear what the lavalier sounds-- and proximity wise,
the lavalier is pretty much pinned to his sternum.
It's not pinned.
It's actually a magnet.
It's fantastic.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day."
IAN SEXTON: So what did you hear?
Did you hear any more of this sort of ambient noise space of the room?
AUDIENCE: There was some reverb there at the beginning.
IAN SEXTON: Mm-hmm
AUDIENCE: It just lasted for a short time, and then it went away.
So that was kind of strange I thought.
IAN SEXTON: That's interesting.
So because this is playing in the house here, and I'm wearing a microphone,
there's some delay between the signal that's coming out of my laptop
and it playing in the speakers and arriving at my microphone
and getting re-injected back into the system, which
is that sort of idea of feedback.
So all of these videos, we'll make a folder
so you can go and listen to them with headphones on,
which I do sort of encourage you to do because then you can-- and back
to back, you can really begin to hear the different responses
of the microphones.
But again, this mic is incredibly proximal to our audio source, OK?
It's very clean sounding.
It's sort of maybe not as rich or warm as the handheld,
because the capsule that's inside it is much smaller, you know?
And that affects the range of frequencies that it's responding to.
And it responds to them in slightly different ways than the larger
element of the handheld.
OK?
But the benefit is that you get it very proximal to your subject,
and it stays there.
If I had a handheld, I could sort of be talking like this,
and then maybe I get lazy, and it's pointed over here.
It's not as close, right?
So it's very consistent.
All right.
So shotgun microphones.
This is a standard microphone mount, which
you might see used with a hand-held microphone and/or a shotgun microphone,
OK?
As we get fancier, we might step up to this,
which is a pistol grip shock mount.
So the microphone is actually mounted on a set
of elastics, which allow the microphone to sway in that cage
so that any sort of movement of the microphone--
if you move it, it doesn't add noise into it.
Because a microphone, if you tap it--
I really want to do it, but I won't do it to everyone that's walking online.
But if you tap it, it will actually send sound into--
or turn that into sound just in the same way
that sound waves are sort of pressure.
They're sort of moving on the diaphragm.
Any sort of physical jostling will be transformed into sound.
So the shock mount becomes important for that.
OK.
This also is equipped with a Zeppelin, OK?
This is what you may see sort of on a film set or something like that.
This reduces the wind noise that might be coming over the microphone.
I think we've all been outside or seen a recording where someone's been outside
and it sounds like there's this whooshing wind that's going over it.
And that's literally just wind blowing over the microphone diaphragm
and causing it to vibrate at some sort of bass level.
And then you can go even further and you can
add this WindScreen, which is sometimes called
a Dead Cat, which further reduces the amount of wind that
strikes the diaphragm.
OK.
So what does this sound like though?
So this is a boom mic.
So right here is the shotgun mic in the pistol grip.
It's actually on a extensible pull, which is called a boom
pull, that you hold over your head.
And you can point it at different sources.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day.
It's so nice to hear this again and again."
IAN SEXTON: I know.
I know.
We should have maybe chose different pages.
These were all recorded at exactly the same time.
So this is one reading.
This is one reading with different microphone inputs
that were recorded and tracked.
So Dan is not reading this differently.
It is the exact same reading for each one of these microphone recordings, OK?
So just to be clear about that.
But what did you hear in this that's different?
AUDIENCE: I think-- I don't know if I picked this up before.
But how he turned the pages basically.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
OK.
So you actually heard a little bit more of his physical activity close
to his body.
OK, that's really interesting.
And there might be a very good reason for that, which we'll see in a moment.
What else did you hear?
AUDIENCE: There was very little room sound on there.
And the presence, the [INAUDIBLE] sounded a lot more natural than--
the lav sounded very EQ'ed for the top end.
But that one had a clarity that just didn't sound like EQ.
It sounded very natural.
And then in the bottom end, it didn't quite
have the warmth of the proximity of the handheld.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
Right.
So again, a much different frequency response.
But you did say that there was less room tone.
Did anyone pick up on any sort of ambience in the microphone
or any sort of noise that they might have heard in comparison
to, say, the lav or even the handheld?
AUDIENCE: It seemed like you could hear a little bit.
I don't know.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
If we go back and listen to these again, what
you'll find in this shotgun microphone is
that there is a little bit of ambience more so than in the lav,
I think, and more so than in the handheld, but much
less than the internal mic, right?
OK.
And so this is the compromise of the boom microphone,
whereas if we were filming a narrative scene,
we wouldn't want to be able to see the lav because that sort of ruins
the suspension of disbelief, right?
Microphones in front of the person's face-- again, we're doing that.
We're reducing our suspension of disbelief.
But the boom microphone is, for the most part--
except for the one moment where I dip it in the top--
out of frame.
OK?
DAN COFFEY: And, Ian, you're saying boom microphone and shotgun microphone.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So I'm sorry.
Sorry.
So it's a shotgun microphone on a boom pole.
So I sort of conflate the two in my everyday
just because of jargon essentially.
But this is essentially a hypercardioid shotgun a microphone in a boom pole.
We'll talk a little bit about what that hypercardioid means,
but that's essentially saying that it's directional.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
And I think that's a common thing to hear too.
It's not just-- you know?
IAN SEXTON: But to be clear-- so this gives you
this benefit of having a microphone be as proximal as possible while
also being out of frame.
OK?
But in doing so, it does pick up a little bit more
of the sort of ambient space than a microphone that
is sort of right here or right here.
AUDIENCE: That's due to proximity?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
It's proximity, and it's also the way the pickup patterns are shaped.
And we'll look at and explain what a pickup pattern is in a minute.
But this is the sort of compromise that you
make to keep your microphones out of shot and out
of frame is that you're willing to accept a little bit of ambience,
but not a ton.
Yes, a question.
AUDIENCE: How-- can shot selection also potentially configure
into that as well there?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So if you have a very wide shot, you are not
going to be able to get a boom as close as you could
if you had a very tight shot, right?
Because the frame is tighter, so you can get the boom in closer.
But if you have a very wide shot where you can see everything,
you've got to pull the boom back, which means
the shotgun mic will be further away.
But as you get wider and wider and wider, maybe
then you can actually hide a lav more easily, right?
So there's this sort of trade between what
is the appropriate microphone for a given situation.
All right?
DAN COFFEY: And another benefit maybe to the shotgun microphone on the boom
pole is that it's the only one that is actually being hand operated
by somebody in our set up here.
So if you're actually having a conversation between two people,
whoever your boom operator is can swing that back and forth
between the two people.
IAN SEXTON: But not even that, right?
We've dealt with video for this last assignment,
and we had our subjects who are now moving in space, right?
So the lav is awesome because it stays on my body and moves with me.
But if I don't want to see this lav, then I
need a boom mic, which means I can then have an operator, a boom operator, who
will move with your subject or be able to pan the boom between two
different subjects.
OK?
So the other mic that we have is a large diaphragm mic,
which is sort of an interesting mic.
And you can actually see this sort of large--
the diaphragm in the microphone through the mesh.
And this is an interesting microphone.
It's a condenser microphone, and it's often used in studio settings.
All right?
Because it tends to be fairly delicate.
And let's listen to what this sounds like.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa,
in an old stuffy house on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day."
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So what did you hear with that?
AUDIENCE: Nice sound.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
It was very sort of clean maybe.
AUDIENCE: It was balanced.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So balanced due to-- what do you mean by balanced?
It sounded--
AUDIENCE: To me, it sounded the most natural, sounded the most full.
And it didn't sound too much bass and much treble.
It sounded well.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
DAN COFFEY: So maybe the most accurate sound reproduction
of all the options maybe?
AUDIENCE: That's [INAUDIBLE] using that.
Yep.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And so the large diaphragms are good for picking up bass sounds and things
like that and give you sort of a more robust frequency response
to get a better match to the timber of someone's voice.
So yeah.
Absolutely.
I think that's a good assessment.
AUDIENCE: Oh.
Can you just explain the pop shield on that as well?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So what is being referred to is this pop shield,
which is this circular mesh that's hanging in front of the microphone.
This serves two purposes.
So when you are speaking and you expel air often
through pops and P's and purposes, it will actually strike the diaphragm
and will sound much like a pop.
It'll be like you'll hear the breath of air strike the microphone.
And so what this does is sort of reduces that
pop by putting a interference screen in the way of it.
It also is very helpful for people who have not used microphones a lot
and tend to get too close or vary their distance in a strange way,
that you can put this shield there, and that's as close
as they can get to the microphone.
OK?
So it's effective for a couple of different uses.
But essentially, it's to minimize the breathiness and the popping
that you get in with certain speakers and their enunciation.
All right.
Oop.
Nope.
Nope, not again.
DAN COFFEY: I can do it live if you'd like.
[LAUGHTER]
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So we just looked at five sort of different physical types
of microphones.
But we should really express that the physical shape of a microphone
does not necessarily define its pickup pattern, OK?
And what a pickup pattern is is how sensitive a microphone
is in a specific direction.
OK?
So there are a few different pickup patterns.
There is an omnidirectional pickup pattern,
which, as the "omni" sort of suggests, is a large sphere around the diaphragm
and really picks up sounds from all directions, OK?
All right?
And then you get into cardioid, hypercardioid,
and this shotgun, which is like a super hypercardioid, which essentially
is taking that full sphere pickup pattern
and making it more and more directional so
that it's less sensitive to audio that comes from the side of it or behind it.
So you can see there's a little bit of pickup here on the hypercardioids
right behind it and much more sensitive to audio that
comes from directly in front of it.
OK?
So that shotgun microphone was a hypercardioid mic on a boom pole
that was very sensitive to the subject in front of it.
And I think someone noticed right away that they
were able to hear the sound of the book turning more with that mic than
with the other mics.
And that's because that microphone was probably pointed a little bit down
onto Dan's chest and actually maybe was angled a little bit low in that moment
and was pointed directly at the book.
And so it was much more sensitive to the thing that
was happening down here on Dan than it is
to the AC vents that are up above or the sound of a camera
right behind it or something happening a little bit to the side.
OK.
So these pickup patterns are sort of drawn in this way.
This is an omnidirectional pickup pattern.
It just suggests that everywhere around the microphone is sort of sensitive.
And then you get into this heart shape, which
is where they get their name of cardioid, which
is suggesting that there is a directionality to the microphone,
that it is more directional.
OK?
This is a hypercardioid.
And you'll notice that by increasing the directionality,
it actually introduces some sensitivity almost directly behind the microphone.
So if this is our microphone, it's very sensitive over here,
but now it's introduced a little bit of sensitivity right behind it.
OK?
So you do need to be aware of that because if the back of your microphone
is pointed at a large AC duct or something like that,
you may introduce a little bit of noise through that.
And just getting a little bit off axis from that might be your best choice.
OK.
So microphone proximity essentially is the key
to reproducing good sound, all right?
They pick up audio better when they're proximal to the source.
So directional microphones should have the source
placed in their pickup pattern.
All right?
And so I do want to say that a handheld microphone can
have an omnidirectional pickup pattern, or it
could have a cardioid pickup pattern.
The lav that I'm wearing is omnidirectional today, right?
Yeah.
But also, in some ways, it could have a cardioid pickup pattern.
DAN COFFEY: And if you look closely, Ian's lav
is oriented the opposite direction of my lav.
But there's no difference on the actual--
if you're listening to this recording, there's no difference in sound quality.
IAN SEXTON: And the orientation is sort of the capsule is--
this top part, mine's pointed straight down.
But it doesn't matter because it's omnidirectional.
DAN COFFEY: Oh, sorry.
I thought it was pointing up.
Mine is pointing down too.
[LAUGHS]
IAN SEXTON: Right?
But it wouldn't matter.
If it was pointed up, it would have this sort of same pickup
as it does inverted.
OK?
So to listen to Dan read this one more time.
DAN COFFEY: The last time.
IAN SEXTON: No, I think there's more.
What we're going to see here is this is the shotgun microphone.
And we're going to listen to the directionality of it.
And you'll be able to see it move from a top view and from a front view.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house in the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him because he isn't very fun.
This story is about me because I'm very fun.
This is the story of my very special day.
My very special day started out like every other day.
I woke up--"
IAN SEXTON: So what did you hear there?
AUDIENCE: The sound sounded a little bit more direct over the microphone,
[INAUDIBLE].
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So there was a couple of moments where the microphone panned
off access, right?
So the access to the microphone sort of threw it to the subject,
and it panned off axis, and the sort of audio levels dropped, right?
Dan got quieter, the sort of sound of his voice changed a little bit.
Maybe we're getting less frequency response from the microphone.
We're picking up certain frequencies better than others, OK?
So directionality is really, really important.
All right?
If you have a hand-held microphone--
I'm sure maybe we've all gone to a talk where someone
has a hand-held microphone, and they're sort
of gesturing wildly with it while they're talking,
and you can't hear what they're saying.
But then if you bring it right here, all of a sudden,
they're sort of loud in the room again.
OK?
So proximity is really important.
And it's not just proximity, but also understanding the pickup
pattern or the polar pattern of the microphone
and using that to your advantage.
Because the boom when it turned off axis wasn't really
that much further away from Dan, right?
It just was pointed the wrong way.
OK?
So it's not just proximity, but also the type of pickup pattern.
All right?
Are there any questions from our online audience or in class audience
on pickup patterns and/or microphones more generally?
All right.
OK.
So now that we sort of have a handle on the type of microphones that exist,
let's talk about how we're going to manage our workflow of recording audio.
So there's this idea of gain stages, which
is that signal flows from a source and is modified at various stages
and reaches its destination.
And so in this sort of rudimentary diagram are our sources.
A microphone where the sound is picked up by some pick up pattern.
And it travels through the microphone to a preamp, which
is in a mixer or a recorder, which then records some sound,
and then it goes maybe into post-production
and is layered in some editing and then is eventually
played back in a room or something.
OK?
And the important thing to know is that if at any of these stages,
you do something really destructive to your audio,
it flows down the signal flow and cascades into the next stages, OK?
So if you record poor sound at your microphone,
that's going to continue all the way down to playback.
If you record excellent sound here, and your preamp is really awful,
like you have a really expensive microphone and a really
sort of cheap recorder, and it's doing damage to your sort of audio sound,
all of that money that you spent here on getting
a really nice microphone with great frequency response
and sounds awesome sort of maybe gets degraded here,
and that continues all the way through.
OK?
If when you're recording, your gain is up way too much and something is
clipping or over modulating, you cannot bring that back later, OK?
So garbage in, garbage out, right?
But great stuff in, you can get great stuff out at the end.
All right?
So do realize that you need to be conscious of the signal flow
as you begin to string these things together
and you're thinking about your playback.
And even playback.
If you-- I mean, someone here must have blown out speakers at some point
by turning something up way too loud.
OK.
I've done it.
But that's essentially-- I probably had a decently
resolved signal all the way through to that point,
and then I over modulated my playback system
and ended up destroying some speakers.
Maybe.
Maybe that.
OK.
So when we think about this, there are a couple different types of audio signal,
all right?
So there's mic level and line level for predominantly, OK?
And so the signal coming off a microphone
is really, really low voltage.
It's a tiny little diaphragm that's moving and making
just a little bit of voltage irregularities in a very small circuit.
All right?
So that must be boosted before you can use it to power a large speaker
or something like that, or you can hear it in your headphones.
So that gets boosted by something called a preamp.
And they're responsible for bringing the microphone signal up
to line level signal.
And line level signal is the level of voltage
that you transmit over audio cables.
So the audio cable coming out of my Mac computer
is a line level signal so that you can send audio over an 8 inch cable
into the speakers that exists in this room and into zoom
and send it out to the internet.
OK?
So the quality of the preamp can have a very strong effect
on the quality of the audio recorded.
You have an excellent microphone, you put it into a garbage preamp,
then maybe you have some problems.
If you have an excellent microphone and it goes into an excellent preamp,
you've maintained the sort of fidelity of the audio
that you've recorded in that step.
OK?
And so there's--
I mean, if you get onto some audio boards or something like that,
there's a huge amount of discussion about which equipment
has best preamps and things like that.
But I think for as a general rule of thumb,
often you can equate this to cost, right?
Cheaper gear has sort of weaker preamps or less sort
of well engineered preamps.
I don't want to say weaker.
And more expensive gear, as you get into sort
of the upper end of studio recording or field recording or sort of audio file
experience is going to have more fidelity in its preamps, all right?
Cleaner sound.
And I think this is sort of it, that in any system, there's noise.
And so moving through these different systems,
if you introduce noise at any one of these points, it's then in your signal
and you can't get it out.
OK?
So just to finish this, line level is a higher voltage
and allows the signal to be transported over longer distances.
OK?
So here are a couple images from--
well, they're both from mixers, OK?
And this is two XLR inputs.
And there's these little switches on the bottom where you can actually switch--
you can pad the input to be either a mic input or a line input.
So you can tell this mixer what you're feeding it,
and it will sort of respond appropriately.
There's also this little symbol here, which
is 48 volts, which is called phantom power.
OK?
I said earlier that condenser microphones need power
in order to function.
A lot of mixers or recorders will allow you to send power
over the cable that connects them rather than using a battery in the microphone.
OK?
So by flicking that switch or pressing this button up here,
you'll enable phantom power on your inputs, which
means that you can then power the microphone
using just the mixer or recorder you have.
Which is sort of nice because it's less things to keep track of.
Your batteries and your mixer, or maybe that's plugged into the wall,
you don't have to worry about a battery running out
mid-recording or mid-session or something like that.
All right?
OK.
So digital audio.
That's a little bit about the signal flow,
but let's take a look at what makes up digital audio.
All right?
So the first thing to consider is that digital audio
is a set of discrete samples of an analog signal.
The sound coming out of my voice is a continuous tone, right?
But there's only a finite number of bits and sort
of a finite number of hard drive space or something like that
or resources in a computer, so it's going to sample.
But it's going to sample at an incredibly fast or high amount,
many thousands of times per second.
And so each of these discrete samples makes up a sample rate, OK?
And low sample rates have decreased fidelity to the audio source,
while increased sample rates have higher fidelity.
OK?
And you can just put this in your back pocket.
It's the same way we talk about sort of--
well, I don't want to say that it's like ISOs.
That's sort of not quite the right analogy.
So increasing your sample rates will give you higher fidelity.
And we can sort of-- or I have a couple of images.
We'll take a look at why this might be true.
So here is some sort of audio wave form, and it's
being sampled at some amount per time.
And that's pretty big.
But we could do even better, and we could sample at a much finer amount.
And so by sampling it at a much finer amount,
we actually get better fidelity to this curve.
All right?
And I'll show you what I mean in just a second.
So again, the first sample rate, it's less samples per second.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, if this is time going this way.
And this is more samples per second.
OK?
So what does this look like?
Well, if you have a curve of audio with time going this way,
and you're making samples like this, if you have only five samples here,
you're really drawing a really rudimentary pyramid that only roughly
matches the shape of this curve.
OK?
Whereas if we're sampling many times per second,
we're able to get better fidelity to that curve that
is sort of the real world.
Does it make sense?
OK.
So the more samples that you have, the more closely
you can get your audio signal to match a continuous curve
in a digital system that does not allow you to map a continuous function.
OK?
So sample rate is the number of discrete samples over time.
Right?
There's another-- what's that?
DAN COFFEY: And just to be clear, measuring per second.
IAN SEXTON: Per second.
Yeah, actually.
Thousands of times per second.
OK.
Oops.
I'm going the wrong way.
There's one other sort of concept in digital audio
that we need to be aware of, and that is the granularity of each sample.
OK?
So these are two images which have the same sample rate, OK?
But they have-- each sample can only in this scene
be either 0, 1, or 2 for its height, which gives you
this sort of rough pyramid shape, which sort of matches this parabola here,
but there's not a lot of fidelity there.
Whereas if we increase the granularity of each discrete sample,
we can actually for each sample rate get better fidelity
of that curve over time.
OK?
So bit depth this is sort of-- you can think of it
as the granularity of each discrete sample.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I just have a question of clarity.
The curve, basically, is that in correlation to the acoustic properties
of a sound wave?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Essentially, yeah.
It's sort of a visual representation of a sound wave.
And so what we're doing is trying to recreate this sound wave
curve using a digital system, which only has sort of finite amount of precision,
which is the exact right way to say it.
And then by increasing our sample rate, we increase our precision.
By increasing our bit depth, we increase our precision.
So we can have a very high sample rate with a very low bit depth
and get mediocre fidelity.
Or we could have a very high bit depth and a low sample rate
and get mediocre fidelity.
Or we could have high sample rate and high bit depth
and get really awesome fidelity.
So some sort of common sample rates and bit depths are here.
So see, these are at 44.1 kilohertz, which is 44,100 samples per second.
Let that sink in for a hot second.
That's an incredible amount, right?
So pro video, we tend to record at 48 kilohertz, which
is 48,000 samples per second.
A sample in digital audio is 148 thousandth of a second.
AUDIENCE: That's a fast shutter speed.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah, right?
That's exactly it.
So when we think back to sort of sort of frames per second,
they're 124th of a second.
It's not even on the same chart, really.
They're so much longer.
OK?
So audio is sampling incredibly rapidly.
The nice thing is that audio tends to be much smaller in its data size
than video so that you can get away with this high sample rate and still
not over crank your sort of storage or anything like that.
OK?
And so 24-bit audio is 2 to the 24th, which is six million different values.
Or 16-bit is 2 to the 16th, which is--
I actually can't do this math.
But it's some number less, number of values.
And so if you think about this, if we had a bit depth of two,
and we had a sort of a gradation from black to white,
it would be either white or it would be black.
But if we had a bit depth of 24, then that gradation
would have six million shades of gray in between white and black.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: Right?
So that's what I mean about fidelity, that there's
more granularity in the sample, and it can be more precise
and actually ends up being more accurate to the sound that you're recording.
DAN COFFEY: And this is like--
I'm going to take us on a tangent for a second.
IAN SEXTON: Hooray.
DAN COFFEY: But this is kind of like why true audio files prefer
old analog audio, and especially records, because when
you recorded the sound-- and I'm probably
going to mess up this explanation.
But it was actually taking the impression from the sound wave
and writing it directly on the wax of a disk.
So it was a perfect copy of the sound, as much
as the microphone itself could pick up.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
DAN COFFEY: There was no digital conversion
where you are worrying about bit depth or sample rate.
It was just a perfect impression of the sound wave.
So as you play it back, you get the full sound.
There's not this kind of digital approximation.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
And then so you have to ask yourself questions about things that you hear,
like they were digitized at a microphone,
then maybe they were put onto a cassette, and then re-digitized.
You can go down the photocopy of photocopy hole very quickly.
OK.
So this is sort of sample rates and bit depths,
which comprise our audio file, OK?
And so there's some common file formats.
We have this little grid here for you, which has got
WAV's, AIFF's, MP3's, AC's, and WMA's.
And so all of these have a little bit of compression on them or not.
OK?
So the waves and the AIFF's have zero compression.
So they're a lossless audio format.
What you put into that file will be what you
get out of it when you make that file.
MP3's on the other hand, which have maybe fallen out of favor,
have high compression.
And they actually throw away audio data so that you're
degrading the signal in some way.
AUDIENCE: Like a JPEG?
IAN SEXTON: Like a JPEG, right?
If you think about it that way, for sure.
AUDIENCE: Oh, wow.
IAN SEXTON: Yep.
And the same with the AC's and the WMA's.
So when you're recording audio, and you have a recorder,
and you have a choice of what file type to choose,
you're going to want to go with a lossless compression file type.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: Well, you increase your size, right?
If you're going to record four days of audio, then maybe
you actually need a little bit of compression.
Or if you want 10 million songs, maybe you're going to store MP3's, right?
DAN COFFEY: And as space gets cheaper and we
kind of progress in this digital age-- like video
is a thing that takes up so much more space than audio.
So audio is almost trivial at this point because its space is so cheap.
IAN SEXTON: It really is.
And I think if you are doing sort of audio and video work,
your video storage is going to eclipse your audio storage
in a heartbeat in your first shoot.
AUDIENCE: The first video clip.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
I think all the audio on my drive at home
that I edit off is smaller than probably one of my first video project
that's on there.
OK.
So we're going to get into a little bit of how
we understand the recording of audio.
So these are VU meters or volume unit meters, OK?
And what they do is measure the signal that's being recorded at a source.
OK?
So there's two types.
There's analog and digital.
Analog tends to go up to--
or to be mixed at 0.
You see that these are green up to about 3.
And then they start to get yellow, and then what?
Now you're way over modulating, OK?
With digital, you see that we get minus 3, and then we're at 0,
and you're over modulating.
OK?
So there is actually a different standard for recording analog audio
and recording digital audio.
All right?
So we're going to focus on digital because I think pretty much
now if you're diving into recording with analog recorders,
then you sort of have a sophistication that--
or have done a little bit more research.
Yeah, Conner.
AUDIENCE: What is over modulating?
IAN SEXTON: So over modulating is within digital audio
that you've reached the max of your dynamic range
and no more data can be captured.
It's essentially clipping in sort of photography parlance, OK?
And I'll show you-- we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.
OK.
So like I said, you can record analog to 0, but digital to minus 12 DB.
And what this does, if we go back to this image,
is if you record to minus 12 DB, there's some headroom
up here for you to boost or play with the signal later.
Or if there's a loud sound, it won't automatically strike 0 and clip.
OK?
All right.
OK.
So let's look at some levels bouncing, all right?
So these levels are on a digital scale, and they're pretty good.
They're bouncing up around minus 12, minus 18.
But now these are bouncing really low.
And so we haven't talked about recording low levels.
And we go up to super high, and you can see it starts to clip.
OK?
So your good levels are sort of bouncing in this wonderful green area.
If it gets too low, there's actually a problem
which I'll show you in just a second where you have to then boost it later
and you introduce a lot of noise to your recording.
Whereas if you record too high, you're losing data,
you over modulate, and you get distortion, which then you
can't get out of the recording.
OK?
So the two extremes of levels are sort of
there's different problems associated with them,
but they will be trouble for you if you're trying to record that way.
OK.
So here we go.
Dan again.
DAN COFFEY: Yes!
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So this is going to be sort of normal levels recorded with the lavalier mic
that Dan is wearing.
And if we listen to this--
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny."
IAN SEXTON: Sounds equivalent to what we were
listening to before in that first [INAUDIBLE]
through all the microphones.
DAN COFFEY: "--the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence.
But this story isn't going to be about him."
IAN SEXTON: So the levels were sort of bouncing around minus 18,
minus 12, which is--
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
Negative 20 to negative 12 was the target range.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah, it's your target range because that gives you
a robust recording with some headroom to move it up or move it down
or to control maybe a loud sound.
Maybe part of this is Dan's talking, and then someone bangs a pot near him.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
I go from talking to yelling.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
Exactly.
So now let's listen to this if we record it low,
and you sort of hear what it sounds like.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa--
IAN SEXTON: So the response and the timber of his voice
hasn't changed a lot.
It's just really quiet.
Right?
AUDIENCE: There's no room noise.
IAN SEXTON: There's no room notice at all
because we've depressed the sensitivity of the microphone,
that it's not picking up that sort of really quiet ambient noise.
OK?
OK.
For those of you online, this will be loud probably.
So just--
AUDIENCE: Take your headphones out.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Take your headphones out or reduce your volume a little bit.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello.
My name is Marlon Bundo, and I am a bunny.
I live with my mom, grandma, and grandpa in an old stuffy house on the grounds
of the US Naval Observatory.
That's because my grandpa is the vice president.
His name is Mike Pence."
IAN SEXTON: So not only did introduce a ton of ambient room noise
that we did not hear on the lavalier before in any of the recordings,
but there's also this gnarly sound to Dan's voice, right?
This sort of-- it's specifically what Connor was asking about,
which is this over modulation, and it's begun to clip and distort.
OK?
The sensitivity of the microphone was so high
that it was unable to capture the audio in a controlled manner.
Things start to clip, the timber breaks down, and everything gets totally off--
DAN COFFEY: Information is lost.
IAN SEXTON: Information is lost, right?
It actually ends up corrupting other parts of the audio.
And so you can't take that out of an audio signal.
Because you never captured the audio to begin with,
you can't pull over modulation out of a recording.
Does that make sense?
Because you basically did not capture that information,
there's no way to reproduce it later.
So a big thanks to Andrew Markham for all his help today.
But he made us this graphic.
We're going to talk a little bit about signal to noise ratio.
And so I said earlier that in any system--
electrical system or otherwise-- that there's some base level of noise, OK?
And we have seen this come into play when
we've looked at ISO and photography that there
is some noise in electrical system.
And as you boost the values of the system,
that noise becomes more prevalent, and you can see it as noise or grain
in your photographic image.
OK?
So what this diagram is that there is some frequency that's
playing along the bottom.
This is sort of your dynamic range of levels, and this red area at the bottom
is the noise that's in the system.
And you may have heard this if you've ever had a speaker that's turned way up
but there's no actual audio playing through it.
You hear sort of a hiss, right?
And that is the sort of base level noise that's in that system
that you're actually just sort of listening to at that moment.
OK.
So what we have are some levels, and they were recorded.
If this is minus 90 and this is 0, this feels a little bit low, right?
This is probably down at that minus 60 or something like that,
which we were saying earlier is not sort of an appropriate level
to record at because it introduces a problem.
OK?
And so that problem is that later, after you've recorded this really, really
quiet audio, when you want to boost it up to a level suitable for playback
in some situation, you boost it.
But in doing so, you bring sort of the levels up into the range
that we say is acceptable, but you bring this noise floor up with it.
AUDIENCE: Oh my gosh.
IAN SEXTON: Right?
Because all you're doing is taking that whole signal and boosting it,
which means the noise floor comes up with the audio that you care about.
Which is why that we could hear in that over modulated clip,
we could hear the room noise and the noise of the sort of recording system
much more prevalently than in any of the other situations
because we had brought the noise floor up with it.
So this is the danger of recording levels that are too low.
It's that when you go to post produce them,
later, you end up having to bring up the noise floor
and you introduce "hiss" or the ambience of the room comes to the forefront.
And it sounds like the internal mic--
the first one that we listened to, which was
really awful now that we've heard Dan talk
through all of these other microphones.
OK.
So as an example, this is an example of audio
recorded that is sort of bridging through a good range of decibels.
It's actually maybe getting a little bit hot.
Right there, it actually clips a little bit.
So maybe we would adjust that.
But that the noise floor is down at the bottom.
And so if I wanted to take this and adjust it a little bit,
maybe I wanted to make it a little bit louder
and I was OK with those elements clipping,
I'm not going to bring the noise floor up that much.
Just a little bit.
Or if I want to take the signal and actually depress it down
a little bit because it's maybe too hot, I'm
actually going to depress the noise floor at this point a little bit.
It's not going to go that much further down because it's
sort of inherent noise in the system.
But I'm definitely not going to bring it up by dropping down the levels.
OK?
So you need to be very careful when you're recording and striking
a good range of levels is really important.
And so there's a trap, right?
Because we're used to putting on headphones
and sort of listening to something.
And it sounds good, it sounds loud, right?
That's us recording at a loud level, right?
But the problem is in most recorders, the headphone volume
is independent of the record levels.
So we could be in--
oops-- this situation where we're recording really low levels,
but we had the headphone volume turned all the way up,
and it sounds really good.
It sounds loud.
We're like, OK, good.
We're getting good, loud levels.
This will be great.
And you get into post-production, and you're
left with something that's way down here because you actually
recorded a signal different than what you were monitoring.
DAN COFFEY: And it's especially true if you're in the room doing the recording
because the sound of the room is all around you.
So when you hear it in the headphones, it's less obvious to you.
But when you go to a space that is different acoustically
and has a different noise footprint, it really stands out, that noise floor.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
So-- no, we're not doing it again.
DAN COFFEY: "Hello."
IAN SEXTON: Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
So monitoring the levels, looking at the view meters,
and visually assessing where the levels of your audio are
becomes the most important thing.
The headphones are really helpful because they
can tell you about audio quality.
If there's a crackle because the cable is loose or something like that,
or there is some weird "hiss" that's in the audio,
or you can hear the sound of an AC duct above you,
that's something that you use the headphones for.
It's about the quality.
The actual recording levels, you use the visual indicator of the VU meters
as your reference material, and you mix to minus 12.
You had a question, [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: Oh, you answered it.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
All right.
So over modulation means you throw information away
and you can't get it back.
Here's a view of audio wave forms, which you
may be familiar with if you've done any editing.
This audio is recorded reasonably well.
We see peaks, we see valleys.
Nothing is sort of over modulating or clipping.
Here you can see that it actually is clipping.
It's truncated across the top.
It has gotten up to the top of the dynamic range
and thrown information away because it just can't record anymore.
There's no more room for audio to be recorded.
No more room for that data.
So it clips it and throws it away.
And then when you bring it down, you've thrown parts
of the frequency of Dan's voice away.
And that will never come back into your audio.
Even if you bring the levels down so it gets quieter,
you can't add that information back in.
OK?
So these are the two sort of extremes of recording audio,
and they're the two pitfalls that's going to happen to you at some point.
We have all recorded over modulated audio
because we didn't check the levels or we were listening on headphones
and not looking.
And we've all recorded too low for the same reasons.
So it will happen, but you can guard against it.
All right.
So environmental tone.
So in a situation where you're recording audio,
especially in a situation where you're recording audio for video,
it's not enough just to get the dialogue of the person speaking
throughout the several clips or in any given moment.
What you also need to do is record the space that you're in.
All right?
So let's all take a moment.
And for those of you online, if you pull your earphones out for a second
and just sit quietly and listen to the space that you're in
and listen to how loud it actually is.
[AMBIENT NOISE]
This room particularly is incredibly loud.
There's a giant air handler up in the back,
and it is vibrating this whole room.
But so in your location, maybe the window's open
and there's some children playing outside or something like that,
or there's traffic noise, or there's wind rustling in some leaves.
Every location has an ambient tone to it, OK?
So when you're recording in a location, what you want to do
is record 30 to 60 seconds of environmental tone.
It's often called room tone.
I'm trying not to call it that because we're not always in a room
when we do this.
Sometimes we're outside.
It's getting ambient.
So environmental tone or ambient noise.
But recording that allows you to, say, take two
takes where I was saying something--
or Dan and I are having conversations.
Hi, how are you?
DAN COFFEY: I'm well, thank you.
IAN SEXTON: OK, that's take one.
We're going to do it again.
Hi, how are you?
DAN COFFEY: I'm great today.
IAN SEXTON: Oh, so I like that one better, right?
But I liked my delivery from the first one, and I liked his second delivery,
and I'm going to put them together.
But they're temporarily out of sync in reality.
We shot them at different times, which means that the ambience of the space
may have changed.
It may be different, OK?
It, in fact, is different.
So when you butt them up together, there will be a just a slight audio hiccup.
And so if you take this environmental tone that you've recorded, embed it
down underneath, you can hide that little hiccup
because you have a continuous space tone underneath your recording.
OK?
So it's something that's often overlooked.
And I think when people are shooting a lot,
they tend to rush through this step.
But this step will make your audio 1,000 times better in post-production.
All right?
OK.
So a little bit about audio hardware.
This is not exhaustive by any means, but just a few things
that you may encounter along the way.
There's different kinds of cables and connectors.
On this side here is an XLR cable, which comes as a three pin connector.
And then this side is a quarter inch TRS, which is tip ringed sleeve.
OK?
DAN COFFEY: This is a gendered cable.
So This is a female end of an XLR cable.
The male end has prongs that stick out.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
That would then fit into that cable.
OK.
This is the same kind of cable.
I should have switched the gender on this one.
That would have been good.
But this is an 1/8 inch tapering sleeve connector, which
is the same thing you might find in your aux cable for your car or something
like that.
OK?
DSLR's, for the most part, accept 1/8 inch inputs for their audio, OK?
So if you have a microphone, you may have
one that mounts on your camera that has an 1/8 inch
connector that goes into that DSLR.
Or in this case, what we've done is taken a two channel mixer.
So we can put two microphones into this, we can mix it here,
just the specific levels, and then feed the output right into the DSLR.
OK?
So again, this is getting into that idea that there are stages of gain.
There's a gain stage at the mixer, but there's also a gain stage at the DSLR.
The DSLR is expecting some kind of signal in.
And if it was boosted--
expected it like a really quiet signal, it maybe
boosted way up, which would over modulate.
So you need to be careful and check each of these stages.
OK?
So this is the idea of internal recording versus external recording.
When you record with an internal microphone on a video camera,
the audio and video is synced.
You pull one file down, it's got some audio on it, and it's got video on it.
And as I talk, I have lip sync.
If I clap my hands, the sound matches up to when I clap my hands.
If you record externally, say, on a Zoom recorder or something
like that, then all of a sudden it's not synced with the audio.
There are two independent files that get recorded.
One camera file and one audio file on two separate recorders.
All right?
So in order to synchronize these, we get really old school and we
use a slate, which is that--
where is it?
DAN COFFEY: I think it's in the back.
IAN SEXTON: It's in the back.
Which essentially is a board that you can write on with a little stick
that you can clap.
And you point it at the camera.
And as the sticks close, when they finally close,
that's where this sound gets made.
So at this video point here where the play head is
is where these clapper sticks have closed.
And then on the external audio that I recorded,
this is the point where the sticks closed.
So you can hear it and see it.
All right?
And all you need to do now is align this peak with the moment when it closes.
And all of the audio for those clips will be in sync thereafter.
OK?
This is a manual process.
It takes time.
All right?
OK.
There are modern approaches.
There's PluralEyes and Woowave DreamSync.
And even in Premier, it has built in audio synchronization
between different audio and video tracks.
One of the things that you can do is record a piece of scratch audio
or use a scratch mic-- use the internal microphone of your camera
to get synced audio that then can be matched
through the processing of your editing software to the external audio
that you recorded as well.
AUDIENCE: That is so cool.
IAN SEXTON: All right?
So there's no reason ever to turn off an internal microphone on a camera.
Just let it record audio because it's really small.
It'll sound like garbage, but you're never going to use it.
You're going to use the audio that you recorded
on your external audio recorder and just match them using that sound.
So this is what one of those audio recorders might look like.
It's a Zoom recorder.
It can take four inputs, but it also has this sort
of stereo pair of microphones.
So you can actually just point it at things and record it that way.
DAN COFFEY: And you're saying "Zoom," which is the brand of recorder.
But any external recorder.
There are many brands of recorders.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
There's TASCAM, and there's lots and lots of different recorders.
This is just the one we had in the office, so I took a picture of it.
OK?
Another little piece of software that's sort of interesting that it's actually
really fun when you start to get into more sound design
is picking up one of these phone recorders.
And so when you do a voice memo or something on your phone,
you have very little control over it.
You start the recording and stop the recording
and you can name it whatever you want.
That's about it.
So this gives you some level indication.
It allows you to increase the gain or decrease the gain,
choose a bit rate and a sample rate.
So again, getting a little bit more focused
and considerate about how we're approaching our audio,
but still using something that most people have in their pocket.
OK?
All right.
Look at that.
It is 19 o'clock, and it's time for a break.
So we'll take a quick five minute break.
And then we'll come back, and we're going
to deal a little bit with audio post-production and dive
into the concepts of sound design a little more generally.
And we'll see you in five minutes.
All right.
Welcome back.
So let's talk a little bit about audio post-production.
So sound in editing.
When we are sort of capturing audio and video
and putting shots together to make a sequence,
we'll probably capture some dialogue with it, maybe some sort of bass sound
effects that are happening on screen.
But when we watch movies, the sound design is incredibly immersive, right?
We hear people's footsteps as they walk.
We hear all different kinds of elements that
may not be picked up on the microphone that's being used in the scene
to record the audio or the dialogue in a given scene.
All right?
As I walk around, you probably are having a hard time
hearing my footsteps.
But if I were to make a video of this, I would
be able to add in some kind of footsteps underneath that
to increase the immersion of the space.
All right?
These kinds of things are called Foley, which
is what is happening here on the screen where
these guys are stepping on rocks to make the sound of someone walking on gravel.
There is ADR, which is this idea of automatic dialogue replacement where
you actually could record someone saying a line in another time
or in another space and then insert that into your film later.
So if the microphone is over modulated, and we
get poor audio recording for this lecture,
maybe I'll go into a sound booth and I'll record the lecture again,
and they'll just match it to my sort of--
no.
DAN COFFEY: Realistically, because we have the luxury of it,
you come back to this exact space because the noise print is the same.
IAN SEXTON: Exactly.
And then there's further sound design like things like music,
et cetera, and other sort of sound elements.
So the lifecycle of an audio in a project starts with recording.
You get through picture editing and rough audio place holders.
Maybe you actually drop a track of music in that you like,
and that's what you're editing to.
Maybe there's some sort of sound elements
that you grabbed off the internet or something, and they're place holders.
But eventually, you get to picture lock.
And then you're done making your edits.
There's no more changes that you're going
to make to the sequence of your shots in any way.
That's called picture lock.
And from there, you're going to go in, and you're
going to take your bass dialogue, and you're going to begin to mix it,
you're going to lay in your ambient room tones underneath,
and you're going to add your sound effects, music, and other elements.
OK?
And when that's done, essentially, you can export it as your finished product.
And you have created a much more immersive soundscape
than you would have if you just had the dialogue, right?
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
And you have picture lock for usually bigger projects.
Because what happens is you get your editor, and you get to a point
where you say, OK, nothing is going to change time wise for my movie
or whatever it is I'm making.
And so then you can send a copy of it to your sound design
team, who's going to do all the audio editing and finessing and whatnot.
And you could send the picture to your coloring team, who's
going to take it and do all the coloring and color correction
and that kind of thing.
So they can work at the same time.
And at the end, you can put them back together.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And so if you're sort of a single person shop,
it's maybe less important to achieve picture lock.
You can work on these things sort of piecemeal,
and you can go back in because you're not
sort of conforming it to other copies that exist in the world.
OK?
So audio layers that exist.
There's music, ambience and atmospheric.
We talked about environmental tone, sound effects, and dialogue,
essentially.
All right?
So we're going to watch a short clip here from a film.
And let's just go for it.
So if we could dim the lights for a second.
I won't preface this too much.
- [PANTING]
- Steady yourself!
[YELLING]
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
- Little help?
Help!
- Mike, you good?
- [GRUNTS]
- Are these ladders going to take two?
- Yeah.
I'll get a rope.
I'll belay you.
OK?
- Just stay right where you are, mate.
- I can't pull myself up!
- I'm going to come out to you.
- [GRUNTS] OK.
- Good, Beck.
You're OK.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoa, whoa whoa.
- Tie me in, Scott.
Tie me in.
- One sec.
- Come and get me!
- On Belay?
- Got it.
On belay.
- Let's go.
I'm coming out to you, Beck.
Here I come, mate.
- [WHIMPERS] [GRUNTS]
- (ECHOING) Nice and easy.
You're tied in, mate.
- I can't feel my hands.
- You're looking good.
- Grab me.
- Hey, Beck.
Beck, Beck.
- Grab me!
- Stay right where you are, mate.
- I can't pull myself up.
I can't pull myself up!
- I got you.
[GRUNTING]
You OK?
- There's no guarantee to the summit.
I get it.
But to get killed because I'm waiting in line like I'm in freaking Wal-Mart!
IAN SEXTON: Obviously, this is probably not the film that got shipped, right?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
IAN SEXTON: What is the audio that we hear in this scene?
AUDIENCE: Sounds like a voiceover.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So it's just the dialogue, right?
Where really there's not a lot of anything going on in there.
There was one moment where there was some weird effect that was added.
Did you catch that?
AUDIENCE: In the cavern?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
When the camera was down in the chasm below,
they added some sort of reverb and echo and sort of actually
dropped the levels down of the audio in the space
to make it seem like our perspective was further away.
It changed our perspective using audio cues,
decreasing the intensity or perceived loudness
and then adding some reverb to suggest a position or place or an environment.
OK?
So audio actually has a--
what's that?
AUDIENCE: I totally thought that you guys had recorded
(LAUGHING) the dialogue for a minute.
IAN SEXTON: Oh.
That we had recorded it?
And it was just like--
OK.
Yeah.
[LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: So you guys didn't do that?
IAN SEXTON: No.
This is the actual dialogue from the scene.
OK?
But let's look at this.
And what are some things that are missing?
AUDIENCE: The wind.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So there's no wind, right?
So if we're going to do sound design on this scene,
one of the things that we're going to want to do
is figure out how to record wind.
What does that sound like?
How do we do that?
What are some other things?
AUDIENCE: There's no sound of them crossing
the ladder and no sound of the snow crunching, that kind of stuff.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So some sort of-- their physical presence in the environment.
The sound of their boots on the ladder and the sound of their boots
on the snow.
OK, excellent.
What else?
What other sounds could you think that we could add in?
Go ahead.
Sorry.
AUDIENCE: Apart from the chasm reverb, it was so dry and in your face.
There was no sense of distance or walls or reflections of any type at all.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
So it's not mixed.
Everything's recorded at pretty much the same levels.
And there's no sort of proximity or understanding
of-- we're looking at a character over here,
and the person that's on the ladder should be maybe be a bit quieter.
DAN COFFEY: And it feels very fake as you watch it.
Because there's, I mean, nothing to bring you into the scene.
But also, if you watch, there's a lot of particular-- the snow in the air
as it was playing back.
And so in reality, do you think we're listening to the mics
that they had in the moment?
Or do you think we're listening to some ADR, that automated dialogue recording?
This is probably retracted stuff that was recorded
later that's been layered over this.
Ralph thought that we actually recorded this and dropped it in.
And that's not the case.
IAN SEXTON: But someone did.
DAN COFFEY: Somebody did.
Yeah.
But it's not convincing in isolation.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So I mean, on top of this, there's all these sort of mountaineering elements.
There's the carabiners, and the ropes, and the lines.
There's this whole mountain collapses quietly in the background.
DAN COFFEY: You didn't realize why he fell.
IAN SEXTON: Right?
And so the immersion of this scene is just totally shattered for us.
It feels fake.
I don't understand what's happening.
And I do not believe any of this, right?
That sort of willful suspension of disbelief has been totally shattered.
All right.
[RUMBLING]
[SQUEAKING]
[RUMBLING]
- Steady yourself!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
- Little help?
Help!
- Mike, you good?
[GRUNTS]
- Are these ladders going to take two?
- Yeah.
I'll get a rope.
I'll belay you.
OK?
- Just stay right where you are, mate.
- I can't pull myself up!
- I'm going to come out to you.
- [GRUNTS] OK.
- Good, Beck.
You're OK.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
- Tie me in, Scott.
Tie me in.
- One sec.
- Come and get me!
- On belay?
- Got it.
On belay.
- Let's go.
I'm coming out to you, Beck.
Here I come, mate.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
- [WHIMPERS] [GRUNTS]
- Nice and easy.
You're tied in, mate.
- I can't feel my hands.
- You're looking good.
- Grab me.
- Beck, Beck, Beck.
- Grab me!
- Stay right where you are, mate.
- I can't pull myself up.
I can't pull myself up!
- I got you.
[GRUNTING]
- You OK?
- [GRUNTS] There's no guarantee to the summit.
I get it.
But to get killed because I'm waiting in line like I'm in freaking Wal-Mart!
IAN SEXTON: So same scene, but totally different, right?
So what did you notice that they added in?
AUDIENCE: Suspenseful music.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So there's some music underneath it.
Sounded like a helicopter to start with, and then when we're down the chasm,
it got really sort of like--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] heartbeat, kind of.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's some sort of repetition, right?
What else did you hear?
DAN COFFEY: If you think about the categories you had earlier, the music.
How about the ambience and atmosphere?
What's kind of sounds do we hear for that category?
AUDIENCE: When the mountain crashed, the ladder, ropes clanking.
Everything that was supposed to, everything we thought,
had a noise this time, which definitely made it feel real.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
The wind, the snow kind of swishing, footsteps.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And that's a good way to say it.
Everything that we saw on screen had audio associated with it.
AUDIENCE: I would have never noticed the volume shift between characters
with who's closest to the screen and who's further away.
When he was hugging the ladder and he was close to the camera, he was louder.
And the guy who was on top of the ladder [INAUDIBLE] was quieter,
I was like, I get it.
It makes so much sense.
Things I'd never pay attention to.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
Right.
So again, playing with our understanding of proximity based off of loudness.
As we perceive the world, things that are quieter
tend to be further away than things that are noisier if they're
of the sort of same approximate volume.
Right.
So everything that is on screen.
But so it's sort of wild.
How did they do this?
And what do they use to make these sounds?
It's sort of--
I don't know how I would approach this.
I would need the sound of a carabiner.
In my mind, when I watch these films, I just sort of assume
that this audio was recorded on location.
This is actually unfolding in front of me.
But in reality, there is this sort of entire process
that happens behind the scenes, which is this idea of sound design,
but also of Foley artists, who are responsible for being able to record
sounds and then substitute them in.
So the sound of wind at the top of this mountain, probably someone
didn't climb up to the top of the mountain to record that.
AUDIENCE: It's too expensive.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And probably dangerous and maybe not all that fun except
if you're really into it, and probably really hard.
But someone figured out an allegory to that sound.
And they recorded that, and they're able to use that
in with the visuals to give us that perception
that that is that sound of that visual.
So I believe-- so this is a Foley stage.
And on this stage, you can see it's just filled seemingly with junk.
It's like hoarder's garage, right?
But all of these objects in here have different purposes
and make different sounds.
They have different types of material in these square bins on the ground
that they can walk on to make different sounds and different effects.
So a few resources that are available to you online.
These links are posted in the slides.
Freesound.org is an old favorite of mine.
You can go and get all kinds of different sound effects
that you can begin to layer and experiment with.
All right?
And I think for the last part of class, what I'd like to do
is maybe do a quick demo in Shotcut.
Do you want to demo the recording software first?
And then maybe if we are--
DAN COFFEY: I feel like this will be pretty relevant.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Let's do that.
Actually, if you do that--
DAN COFFEY: Open it up here.
So what I'm going to do is demo the app that Ian had up earlier.
What is it called?
Sound-- there we go.
Voice Recorder Pro.
IAN SEXTON: Voice Recorder Pro.
DAN COFFEY: All right.
So this may come in handy in the future.
But as Ian said, as you go out and try to record sound,
one thing you typically have with you is your phone.
And as we learned earlier, proximity is one of the biggest influences as far
as recording high quality audio.
So if you have an option to have your camera in the back of the room
to capture, let's say, an event or this lecture or whatever,
and you don't have a microphone with you,
you could take your phone out, put it up near the speaker, and hit record.
And you'd have much better sound than you
would from a microphone in the back of the room.
Similarly, if you wanted to record sound effects for an assignment or anything
else that might come your way, you might want more control
than just whatever your phone's built in recording app has.
So I thought I would just demo what this app looks like.
So I've just opened the main screen here.
And if I just hit the Record button, we get a bunch of options that come up.
And so as we learned earlier, there are different recording formats
we can choose from.
MP3 was an option.
AAC was an option.
Does anybody remember what a lossless format was?
AUDIENCE: WMA.
DAN COFFEY: WMA?
AUDIENCE: Or WAV.
DAN COFFEY: WAV.
Yeah.
A good, old WAV file.
The classic WAV file.
So I'm going to pick that.
How about a sample rate?
What should we set our settings to?
We can go pretty low here, 24,000.
We can also go pretty high.
Does anybody remember what the typical pro video--
AUDIENCE: 48,000.
DAN COFFEY: 48,000 samples per second.
Bit depth?
AUDIENCE: 24 is fine.
16 is less.
DAN COFFEY: Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of like how much do we want to reproduce that sound wave?
How close do we want to be?
And the trade of being space.
So if I have a phone that's got gigabytes and gigabytes of space,
maybe I'll turn this up if I really care about the quality of the recording.
But a good ballpark place to start is going
to be our 24 bits at 48,000 samples per second.
Audio channel.
We can do mono or stereo.
We didn't really cover that.
That has to do with how it plays back in the channel layout for the given audio
track.
But most microphones with a single element are mono sources.
So I'm just going to choose mono here.
It gives me a file size estimate right below that.
It's got some fanciness with some silence detection,
which we're not going to worry about.
I'm not going to bother with a sound category.
But what I can do, up here at the very top, there's this kind of bar chart
that climbs up.
I'm going to click on that, and that's going to pop up our VU meter here.
And if I just tap this, it cycles through.
Here's a wave form representation in real time of me talking.
Here is an actual key check.
So if I sang you a song, you could see how off I am with my pitch.
Here's a old school analog VU meter.
And I'm going to just leave it on this digital version here.
And so I can now take my input gain knob--
if I slide it back and forth here.
And so unity, which is the kind of point that there's no amplification being
added or subtracted, is in the middle.
And if I lower down the signal, it is subtracting amplification.
And if I go above, it's adding amplification.
And you can see I'm now getting up in the red levels of my VU meter here.
IAN SEXTON: So what are the problems?
If he drops the input gain down, what is likely
going to happen to our audio file when we get all the way back to playback?
AUDIENCE: The noise floor is going to be right in the regular audio.
So when it boosts it, it's going to suck.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Right?
So it's recording depressed down near the noise floor.
And then when we boost it up to play it back,
it's going to have a lot of noise in it.
Conversely, when we go the other way, what's going to happen to it?
AUDIENCE: You going to lose data.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
We're going to lose data, it's going to over modulate,
and it's going to be sort of corrupted and awful sounding.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
But this is-- hands down, I'm leagues ahead of the built in voice recorder
because that's going to apply some automatic gating and automatic gain
just to get a reasonable level.
Whereas here, that's not being overridden for me.
So the benefit is that I now can kind of choose what the level is,
and it's not going to fluctuate.
We're not going to hear that noise floor kind of automatically raise up and get
crunched down.
So one benefit to this.
My phone has multiple microphones in it.
With the connector to put it on the TV, I can actually choose between them.
But if your phone has multiple microphones,
you can choose which one you want to use.
I would stick with the bottom microphone.
Here's the position.
I'm sorry.
So I have bottom front or back on this phone.
And if I have an external device with a microphone on it,
for even higher quality recording, I could choose that from the source.
But right now, I don't have an additional microphone plugged in.
And then audio monitor.
If I'm wearing headphones, I could use headphones.
In this case, I'm plugged into an HDMI cable.
So the option is HDMI cable.
But we talked about audio monitoring.
This is where you would choose how to listen to your audio playback.
IAN SEXTON: It's one thing I didn't research
that I think it might be interesting to look
at what sort of microphones you could attach to this
and use this as a recorder.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
IAN SEXTON: That'd be sort of interesting to look at the market
if there's some interesting things.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I know there's definitely lavs that you can plug [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
That's sort of-- I didn't do any research on that today before class.
AUDIENCE: I've actually got a really good little zoom
one that plugs into my phone.
And the reason I mention it, the only thing that I found
is if you use one of those, you have to put your phone in airplane mode
because the transmitter functions transmit noise.
The noise you hear ends up coming through.
So if you're recording with your phone on an external,
it's got to be in airplane mode.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
Or if it vibrates or something like that,
it'll all come through in your audio recording.
Yeah.
DAN COFFEY: That's really interesting.
But almost definitely, the built in microphones
are getting better and better these days.
But any bigger element microphone you can put onto your phone
is certainly going to sound better.
All right.
And so I'm going to set my levels here and bring it down a little bit.
Check, one, two.
So I'm a little bit hotter than the negative 12.
I might bring this down a little bit.
But maybe if I'm recording a sound effect, I want to kind of juice level
up a little bit.
I can see that I'm applying negative gain from my [INAUDIBLE] position here.
So we'll set, say the level's good here.
I'm not getting up to 0.
All right.
So if I want to record now, I hit Check.
Brings me back to my settings.
This all looks good.
And then I hit the Record button.
Check, one, two.
It brings that level back, but it no longer says Level Check.
I can see the levels bouncing.
Check, one, two.
Check, check, check.
And then if I stop that, it processes it for a second, and I can just hit play.
DAN COFFEY [RECORDING]: Check, one, two.
It brings that level back, but it no longer says Level Check.
I can see the levels bouncing.
Check, one, two.
Check, check.
DAN COFFEY: Right?
That sounds pretty clean.
And I know I'm using the bottom microphone.
So if I was going to mic up Ian, I would hold the phone kind
of up to his face with the microphone pointing in his direction,
because as we saw, direction matters unless you
have an omnidirectional element.
And I don't actually know what the element is in this phone.
IAN SEXTON: No.
It's small enough that it might be directional.
DAN COFFEY: And you can see there's a wealth of options
here as far as how to get the file off of the phone.
You can save it to Dropbox.
You can email it to yourself.
Send it by SMS.
So many options to actually dump the files.
But this app is free by default. You can pay to turn off the ads
and probably get some more advanced features.
But if you're looking for an app to get started with,
we would recommend though the one from Ian's slide.
So take a look back.
Anything else we should demo with this while we've got it?
IAN SEXTON: No.
I think that's it.
It's sort of fun to experiment with.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
If I go back, I can rename it.
It tells me it's a [? WAV ?] format.
You can probably attach a photo to give you an idea of what it was.
So I'll take a picture of me here.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
DAN COFFEY: And I can use that.
And now I remember exactly what file this was.
The one I recorded during lecture.
IAN SEXTON: [LAUGHS] Wow.
That's actually sort of handy, right?
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
Well, if you're--
IAN SEXTON: --record a different object that you're--
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
Let's say you're recording a wealth of sound effects
for an assignment or something else that might come your way.
Might be handy to remember what was what.
AUDIENCE: Very nice.
IAN SEXTON: All right.
So I'm going to take just a few minutes here and dive in to Shotcut
with our remaining time.
So what we're going to do today or in this moment
is we're going to actually--
let me find-- we are going to do a little bit of sound design on this clip
here.
So there's no audio associated with this clip.
AUDIENCE: Is that Sculley?
IAN SEXTON: It was Sculley, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
That's a good pick up.
OK.
And we're going to build our bit of sound design for this clip.
We only have a few minutes left, so it's going to be a little bit rough.
But if we play this again, and let's sort of look through this
and identify what are the sounds that might be in this space.
All right.
There's Sculley with a computer.
She was typing.
She closes it.
Aaron walks by with some papers.
There's a phone.
It gets hung up.
There's some paper that gets pushed.
The door opens.
A door closes.
AUDIENCE: Rustling papers.
IAN SEXTON: Some rustling papers.
Right.
Someone is walking, so there's some kind of footsteps, et cetera.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: Exactly.
So let's quickly do this.
We're going to add a video track.
And I can drop this in here.
So now on our timeline, we have this video track.
We could scrub through it if we want to.
And so let's identify a couple of things that we want to deal with first.
So in my mind, I think the first thing I want to do
is identify the very particular sounds of the scene and work towards those.
So I want to record the door closing.
That's a very specific moment in time.
It's a very specific sound.
And so I'm going to focus on those elements
before I get into the overall ambience of the space.
So aligning your sound elements sort of first to specific items
is maybe a good way to work through it so
that you're not distracted by other elements
and you can sort of hone in and focus on everything.
So if we come out and we look at the door closing,
and we can scrub through this with the left right arrow keys.
So right here, at 16, it looks like 16 seconds, the door closes.
OK?
So first things first, I have over here a "household door close."
Let's listen to this.
[DOOR SHUTS]
OK.
So there's a sound of a door closing.
OK.
[DOOR SLAMS]
But there's the sound of that, which is sort of a louder slam, right?
So I think what I want to do is I'm going to take that sound,
and we'll use that, because it sounds like he sort of shoves
that paper saying that-- and maybe he's closing the door a little bit
aggressively, right?
So I quickly add an audio track.
OK.
And I'm going to append to the current track.
Now I want to overwrite the clip onto the--
oops.
Wrong track.
Under that.
This one here.
OK.
So we add that track in, or that clip in.
So now as we watch this--
[DOOR SLAMS]
Oh, we're late.
We're way late, right?
OK.
So we can do this.
So let's find the point where we want this where the door actually closes.
So that's probably right here.
[DOOR SLAMS]
OK.
So roughed in there.
We probably could move that a frame or two,
but we'll call that good just to sort of keep moving a little bit,
try to build up some soundscape.
So we'll add another audio track.
And I think one of the other things that I
saw that happened was the hanging up of this telephone here.
So this gentleman the background hangs up a phone right there.
So we can sort of scrub back here, find it.
We'll select this audio track so that--
all right.
And then in here, of some sounds that we have found, we have a "phone set down,
rotary."
[CLATTERING]
OK.
[TYPING SOUND]
So it's really interesting.
The resources that I posted on the slide earlier
with the freesound.org and a lot of the other resources
have lots of sounds that are available that people have recorded.
There's a whole contingent of people that
really love to record sounds and release them for use in projects like this.
So you can find all kinds of different sounds available to you.
The fact that someone has defined this as a rotary phone being hung up--
so someone else has probably done a wall phone.
So you can get very, very specific.
But if we overwrite this one in here.
And let's sort of watch this and see if we got the timing right.
[TYPING SOUND]
No, we're late again.
[LAUGHS]
[TYPING SOUND]
OK.
That's maybe--
AUDIENCE: That sounds like a keyboard.
IAN SEXTON: Oh, is that the keyboard sound?
AUDIENCE: It sounds like a keyboard.
IAN SEXTON: We do have a keyboard sound in here.
[CLATTERING]
Oh, yeah.
You're right.
That was totally a keyboard sound.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: All right.
Limitations of my ability here.
So let's do that, and let's do "household phones sit down,"
and we'll write that in there.
[CLATTERING]
OK.
Not bad, right?
[CLATTERING]
OK.
And then we come through, and we've got this door slam sort of over here.
[DOOR SLAMS]
All right.
We're getting somewhere.
We're getting some stuff laid out there.
So let's return to the beginning.
Oops.
My short cut.
I got sloppy hands.
All right.
And we've got this person walking.
And I think we should introduce some footsteps to that.
So one of the things that we have in here
are "fully footsteps of high heels, rug carpet."
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
All right.
[LAUGHS] So I have no idea if this is timed out correctly, but we'll try it.
Maybe this is what it sounds like.
So I'll add another audio track.
And you'll notice what I'm doing is I'm sort of building audio track layers,
OK?
So as I go through, I'm not trying to put lots of things on the same track.
I probably could combine these two sharp elements
because they're so temporally distant.
But if I'm going to put the [INAUDIBLE]---- his walking,
I'm not going to put it on the same track as something that is sort
of a door closing.
So beginning to organize yourself almost top down is a nice way to do it.
I tend to sort of put my music low, and then ambience, and then specific
ambient soundtracks, and then getting into specific sound effects, and then
dialogue closer to the top because it's probably
what I would manipulate the most.
OK.
So let's take this, and we'll go in from the very beginning.
And let's put the play head right at the start.
Does it go any further?
Yeah.
And let's write this onto this track.
OK.
And let's watch and see what happens.
So he's off screen.
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
[CLATTERING]
All right.
And we ran out of audio, right?
We sort of ran out of clip.
[DOOR SLAMS]
But it's surprisingly accurate.
AUDIENCE: I know.
IAN SEXTON: OK?
That's sort of amazing.
I mean, I didn't do it.
DAN COFFEY: But if it wasn't, you could layer in--
IAN SEXTON: Right.
So one of the things that we can do-- so right now,
we've got these steps coming in, but it's really loud.
It's the loudest thing in our scene.
So there's a couple of things that we want to do.
We want to now begin to play with filtering the sounds in some ways.
So if we come over and we sort of select our clip,
and we come over to the filter section here, we can come in here.
And maybe we search for "gain," which is the volume,
and we add that to our clip.
And now what we have is this sort of level adjustment.
So we can bring the level way down.
And when we play this you almost can't hear it, so we'll bring it back up.
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
So it's much more quiet.
The other thing is too if these were sort of mistimed,
in Shotcut, you can go into the Properties tab,
and you can change the speed at which it plays back.
So you can sort of extend the time of this.
There's a little trick when you start to push and pull temporally on audio,
they do shift in pitch.
So you do need to be careful with that.
If you move it too much, you'll change the actual sound overall.
It's sometimes better just to rerecord the sound as you go forward
to match sort of the synchronization.
But so to wave our hands at sort of the real nitty gritty,
let's sort of assume that--
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
--we're sort of happy with the timing on this.
OK?
The audio level is good.
It's not too hot, but it's sort of mixing in there.
There's not a lot of other sounds, so it's really dominant.
DAN COFFEY: We're hearing it in isolation, which is tough, right?
IAN SEXTON: Right.
DAN COFFEY: As you start to mix your levels together--
IAN SEXTON: Exactly.
So maybe as we start to layer stuff, we'll come back to this
and maybe raise it up or what have you.
But sort of when we were talking about perspective, one of the things
that we talked about was sounds being quieter when they're further away.
And so maybe what we're going to do is actually ramp his audio up
a little bit as he comes in the screen.
Right?
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
So if we go back to filters--
and I'm going to do a sort of rough version of this if we can go--
there's a fade in audio which we can add.
OK.
Did I add it?
No, I did not.
Fade in audio.
Ah!
I see what I'm doing.
Double clicking it and clicking the minus button at the same time.
So this has a duration.
It's sort of defaulting to one second, and that's fade out audio.
So let's-- here we go.
Awesome.
[LAUGHTER]
Fade in audio.
OK.
It has a duration, so let's maybe ramp this up a little bit to,
let's say, two seconds and see what that sounds like.
There's no reason not to try.
Sort of just the value.
[FOOTSTEPS FADING IN]
So I don't know how effective that is, but we could play with that.
The other thing is you--
yeah, we'll see.
Start laying a few more sounds in here.
So we have basic sort of footsteps.
And I'm going to sort of cheat this.
And we can copy this, and I think we can just paste this on the end.
But I don't know.
[DISTORTED CLATTERING]
Ooh.
Scrubbing.
So we can add this audio in here.
I'm going to actually, for that one, take that fade out.
OK.
So what we've done is sort of continued our footsteps at the same pace.
[CLATTERING]
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
That was the phone hanging up.
[DOOR SLAMS]
And he goes into this room, right?
But the audio is still continuing of him walking.
So that's no good.
[DISTORTED DOOR SLAMMING]
So maybe when this door closes, that audio cuts out, and we're done there.
And maybe for this clip, when the door closes, we'll add a audio fade out.
Let's make it half a second because it's really quick.
All right.
12 frames.
So if we listen to this--
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
[DOOR SLAMS]
OK.
We no longer hear him walking.
OK.
All right.
So we've got a character who's walking.
We've got a couple action items.
There's a door and something else.
But let's really quickly before we run completely out of time
add an audio track down here.
And over here, there's this sort of "ambiance, office."
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
Just people murmuring in the background.
So let's go ahead and add this in and see if we can get to a place.
All right.
So we add this in.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
[MUFFLED FOOTSTEPS]
[CLATTERING]
All right.
That's way late.
We must have moved that.
Yeah, that's totally late.
So you can turn snap off too.
If you're getting frustrated with how easy
it is to-- how not slippy things are.
Come on.
[CLATTERING]
OK.
So we've got a little bit of ambiance.
There's some office murmur in there.
OK.
AUDIENCE: More and more convincing.
IAN SEXTON: Getting more and more convincing, right?
And we could do something really simple like add gain to this.
And it would allow us to sort of increase the office murmuring.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
Or decrease it--
[DOOR SLAMS]
--to the level that we want it to be at, OK?
And so I think we'll leave it right here as sort of a neutral point.
And maybe I'll grab this clip, and I'll bring it back to the end of my video
because we don't need it sort of extending out into nowhere.
Just sort of wasted time.
OK.
So a couple of other things that we have here just to sort of
add a few other things in really quickly.
We have an audio track.
This is actually a good one because it's really loud.
[PHONE RINGS]
Right?
So we're not going to play that whole thing.
But maybe we add it in here.
Oops.
Wrong track.
Selected.
But we add it in here.
And I know it's really loud because I could see the levels bouncing here,
and it was up around 0.
So I'm just going to right off the bat add a gain to it.
Oops.
This is sort of the hard thing.
Selecting your clips and stuff is important with Shotcut.
OK.
And I'm going to drop this gain sort of way down.
And it's nice actually.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
[PHONE RINGS]
OK.
I mean, That's still way too loud.
[PHONE RINGS]
AUDIENCE: Should that get progressively louder as he's walking?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
You could begin to play with that.
You could begin to sort of cut this up and adjust level.
Maybe he walks by it.
So it's quiet, it gets loud, and it gets quiet again when he goes in the office.
OK.
But right off the bat, I mean, we haven't done really a whole lot,
and this is really roughly placed.
But--
[PHONE RINGS]
--it's much more believable and much more immersive at this point.
[PHONE RINGS]
OK?
AUDIENCE: I can't believe they'll do this for every scene in a movie.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And for every sound you hear, everything you see on screen.
It's wild.
DAN COFFEY: But also how fun would that be for your job?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
DAN COFFEY: That would be so fun.
IAN SEXTON: Right?
It would be really amazing.
So you could then export this just as you would any other video from Shotcut.
But this is essentially how you would begin to develop this.
And you'll have to go and record some of your own sounds,
or maybe you're going to search through some of these resources
to find sounds that are already recorded.
And you begin to build the soundscapes.
DAN COFFEY: And in the slides, the link that has exclamation points
after it from Adobe is a library of thousands of sounds
that you can download and have for free courtesy of Adobe.
So I highly recommend if you're going to do a sound design for something,
check that link out.
IAN SEXTON: Right.
So hopefully this will be helpful.
The next assignment will be released on Monday, I believe,
just as it would be for a lecture.
But we're a little early, so do look for that.
And I think that's pretty much concludes our lecture for today.
So if there are any other questions, we can take them offline.
And I'll be happy to answer them for you.
Thank you all very much.