Today, we’ll be taking a look
at how to make your voice sound better,
using Audacity.
We’ll take a look at how to properly record your audio,
apply a few effects,
and export your audio for use in Final Cut Pro,
or whatever else you use to edit videos.
Hey guys, whats up.
My name is Serge,
and welcome back to my channel.
Audacity is a very powerful
open source audio editing software,
that has some great effects
you might not have in your video editing software,
such as Final Cut Pro.
And the best part of it all,
is it’s completely free.
You can download Audacity from their website,
which I’ll link in the video description below.
Let’s open up Audacity,
and first take a look at how to record your audio.
You have two options here.
You can either record your audio right in Audacity,
or you can import your camera audio file.
If you want to know how to do that,
I got you covered.
First thing we need to do
is connect our microphone,
and set the audio levels.
For all my voiceovers,
I use a Blue Yeti microphone,
and for the price, this thing is awesome.
Next, if at all possible, eliminate any background noise,
such as fans, air conditioners,
or anything else you might hear in the background.
Audacity does have a great noise removal tool,
but this can make your voice sound a bit tinny,
so only use this as a last resort.
In Audacity, from this dropdown menu,
select your microphone.
Click anywhere in this Audio Monitoring panel,
and start talking at your normal volume.
Use the gain adjustment on your mic,
or this gain slider,
and adjust the levels,
so the majority of the audio is around negative twelve decibels.
This will give you a lot of headroom,
so if you get excited and a bit loud,
your audio won’t clip.
If you have this set too high,
and your audio clips,
it’ll sound like this.
Setting the input levels lower,
will prevent this from happening.
Hit the record button,
and record your voiceover.
When done, click the stop button to stop recording.
After recording,
first thing we want to do
is apply en equalizer to our clip.
Press Command A to select your entire clip,
and from the Menu Bar, select Effect,
and Equalization.
Now, this is very objective,
but what I find works best for me,
is bringing up the high and the low frequencies.
To bring up the high frequencies,
click on the line around 4000 hertz
and add a control point.
Add another control point around 5000 hertz.
Click on the second control point,
and drag this up to about 9 decibels.
To bring up the low frequencies,
add a control points at about five hundred
and one hundred hertz.
Drag up the last control point to around 9 to 10 decibels.
You can preview your audio
to see what it’s going to sound like,
by clicking this preview button.
Play around with these settings to match your voice.
Once you’re happy with the sound, click OK.
Next step, is to Amplify our audio.
Once again, from the menu bar select Effect, a
nd this time, select Amplify.
This is going to want to bring up
the peaks of your audio to 0 decibels.
This is what we want for now, so let’s click OK.
This effect will bring up our volume as much as possible,
without clipping any part of the track.
Next thing we want to do,
is level out our audio,
so there isn’t so much difference between
the loud and the soft parts.
For this we’ll use compressor.
From the Menu Bar select Effect,
and Compressor.
There’s a few adjustments we need to make here.
First up is the Threshold slider.
This tells Audacity the level above which
to start compressing noise.
Set this to about negative 12 decibels.
Only the parts of your audio
louder than 12 decibels will get compressed.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Noise Floor.
This limits the quiet background sounds
from being effected by this effect,
and prevents you
from unnecessarily amplifying these noises.
Set this to around 50 dB.
The ratio slider sets the compression ratio.
For most voiceovers,
a 2 to 1 or a 3 to 1 ratio works best.
The next two sliders
set how fast the compressor kicks in and out.
Bring these all the way down.
And last, is the make up gain to 0dB checkbox.
Selecting this will amplify your entire waveform after compression,
to bring the peaks back up to zero.
All these combined,
will compress your louder passages,
while at the same time amplifying the softer passages,
for a more consistent audio levels.
The last step,
and this should always be done last,
is normalizing your audio for final output.
From the menu bar select Effect,
and Normalize.
If your voice will be the only audio in your mix,
set this value to about -1.
If there will be other audio in your project,
such as sound effects or background music,
set this number to negative 3.
Hit OK.
So this is what the original audio sounded like,
and this is the same audio after all these effects.
Last thing we need to do
is export our audio for use in Final Cut Pro.
From the menu bar select File,
and Export Audio.
Give your track a name,
choose the file type,
and select the save destination.
Hit save.
This exported file
is now ready to be imported and used in your video project.
I did a video a few weeks ago
about round tripping audio from Final Cut Pro,
into Audacity, and back into Final Cut Pro.
If you haven’t seen it yet,
check it out.
If you enjoyed this video
make sure to hit the like button,
and check out the rest of my channel
for more Audacity, and Final Cut Pro tutorials.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.