- What's up everybody.
Peter McKinnon here and today,
Whew!
We're talking about sound effects.
Audio and how editing them together will make your films
and your YouTube videos
and just basically everything so much better.
(motivating drum music)
I'm gonna start by saying this.
Sound is so important.
Audio is so important.
We process audio before we process video.
That's actually how it works.
It's funny if you think about it
'cause we can watch a low res video on YouTube,
on the internet,
somewhere,
and you can get through it.
You can watch a video that's slightly out of focus,
maybe a little bit fuzzy,
maybe some shaky camera and you can
for the most part get through it.
But if you try to listen to something
or watch a video that has bad audio
or it's crackling or it's muffled,
or there's lots of audio pops and mistakes,
you can't get through it.
You turn it off.
You're like "Nah I can't even I can't hear this.
Just forget it,
just turn it off.
Nope.
No.
It's so hard to get through something
that sounds terrible where the audio
is just too much wind.
(whooshing)
I can't deal with that.
It's so hard to get through these things.
And why is that?
It's because audio is so important.
It plays a huge role in telling that story.
It plays a huge role in like adding
that extra oomph to your footage to just round it out,
to make it whole,
and make it just as best as it can be.
So today we're going to look at some techniques.
How to apply sound effects.
How to make sound effects.
How to record your own sound effects.
How to kind of tweak sound design in this small little edit
to kind of give you guys a little bit of an idea
as to how powerful it is and how much it adds
to like an overall piece.
When you're shooting video
and shooting anything video related this can always help.
And it's funny too because audio
is not the most exciting thing.
It's not.
Like you don't wake up and go,
"Oooh I've got a new Lav mic today - so excited."
It's exciting getting new gear but I'll be honest,
if it's audio gear I'm kinda like,
"Oh it's 'cause I have to.
I guess I'll buy it.
I guess I'll buy the mics.
I guess I'll upgrade my Rode mic."
That's never as exciting as,
"Oooh!
New lens today.
Ahhh!"
Never that kind of a level for me.
Maybe it's because I'm not an audio engineer
and it's something that I just kind of maybe
struggle with even myself.
Self-admitted.
It's never been as exciting
as getting new camera or something else like that.
So...
And because it's so easily overlooked,
this is why it's so important because chances are
if I'm overlooking it and dismissing it
and not excited about it,
there's other people out there who feel the same as me
who are doing the same thing.
This video is hopefully going to open your eyes a little bit
to that and you'll walk away with some new skills
that you can apply today.
Okay so I'm going to roll an edit in second here
and it's important to say
that this is essentially an example
of how you can use audio and sound design
to enrich your edit.
And then we're going to go into where I got these sounds,
how I got them,
how I use them in Premier Pro.
How you can get them and use them as well.
We'll hop into the computer
and take a look a little more in depth
as to how this works and some other films I've used this on
and some examples like that.
And so with that being said it is time for some B-Roll.
Woo.
(melodic pop music with nature sounds)
(birds chirping)
(twigs crunching)
(water crashing)
(water trickling)
(birds chirping)
(exaggerated whoosh from skateboard)
(skateboard slams on the ground)
(upbeat electronic music)
(skateboard hitting the ground)
(water rushing)
Okay so there you have it.
Most of the sounds in that edit
that you saw are completely fake.
I shot a lot of that at 120 frames a second
which doesn't record audio
so I actually have to build the atmosphere myself.
So city ambience,
sirens,
police sirens (siren wails)
that kind of thing.
People walking,
horns,
cars, (car horn beeps)
just air like an atmospheric kind of air sound
to feel like you're outdoors.
I put sound effects in when the skateboard lands
or fake waterfalls and birds
and air moving through trees and trees themselves
so when you mix all of these things together
(birds chirping)
(water running)
(nature sounds)
(twigs crunching)
(waterfall rushing)
(water trickling)
(birds singing)
(sirens)
(whooshing air from skateboard)
(skateboard slams to the ground)
(jackhammer and police siren)
You've basically created,
you've designed like an environment,
an audio rich environment that accompanies the music
that all works together to make your film better,
to tell a better story.
Now what's nice about this is you can get really creative
when it comes to sound design.
You don't have to use specific sounds that are meant--
like example my friend ollies off the stair set
and lands but it's in 120 frames a second
so I don't have any audio of him landing
but I want a nice good impact
of that skateboard hitting the ground.
I might search all these different sites
for skateboard sounds or try to find it myself.
I might come up short,
I might not get it.
So that's when it's fun to be creative
and find other sounds that you can
actually use to replicate that
or even make it more impactful.
So the sound of my friend Jesse actually hitting the ground
with the skateboard when he lands from doing that set
is actually a sound of jail doors being slammed shut
and it sounds like this:
(jail doors slam)
So then I overlaid that sound
with him landing his skateboard
and then you get this:
(jail doors slam mimicking skateboard hitting the ground)
But then you throw the music on top of it
with a couple of ambient sounds of outside city life
and some sirens and you get this:
(city sounds with sirens and skateboard hitting the ground)
So you can see how we took something
that has nothing to do with skateboarding
or what actually was filmed yesterday
and we made it work for us.
That's an example on how you can just be creative
with noises and pick different things
that are completely unrelated to the shot
that still work and help round it out.
That's what I love so much about doing sound design
for my edits because it's almost now at this point
just as much fun as editing the footage itself.
I'll probably spend more time editing the sound
in an edit like Alpine Views or what you just saw
than I'll actually spend editing the footage
that I shot for that.
Now where do I get my sound?
I've told you guys before,
I use a website called epidemicsound.com.
The link's below,
it's in the description,
it's right on the top line so you can just click it.
Not only do they offer music for your YouTube subscription,
if you haven't seen the video
that I'm referring to I'll annotate it here,
but not only do they offer subscriptions
and you can find thousands and thousands of songs
that are all okay to use for YouTube videos
where you're not going to get flagged
or anything like that.
They have a huge library of sound effects.
So I probably pull from their sound effect library
just as much or more than their actual music tracks.
I sift through all the sounds so much on a daily basis
to try to find the right thing.
Every sound that you heard from this mix came
from Epidemic Sound.
Every sound that you heard
from that Alpine Views video came from Epidemic Sound.
All you gotta do is go up to the window,
search in what you're looking for,
"police siren",
hit enter and you're going to see the results come up.
You scroll you listen you preview,
you download it.
I download a ton,
I've got hundreds saved into a folder
and now I just pull from those
so if I'm doing an edit tomorrow lets say,
and I shoot some stuff,
chances are I have my swoosh sounds,
I have my police sirens,
I have my forest,
my beach,
walking,
running,
just different basic sound effects
that I've kind of used from Epidemic Sounds
to create my own local library on my computer
so that I can reference at any time.
So Epidemic Sound is great for that.
They're not paying me to say this.
They didn't even sponsor this video,
I'm just a huge fan of their platform.
They have great people working there.
So the link is below,
you can sign up.
I highly recommend that you do it.
Give it a trial or whatever.
It's really really cost effective
for what you're getting back okay.
So not only are you getting the whole music library
you're getting the whole sound effect library.
That is a huge huge resource for me
when it comes to editing sound and sound design.
Now if you don't wanna download sound effects
and you're like I just wanna create my own,
you can do that.
You can just go out and record the sounds separately.
Sometimes depending where I am
if I'm walking through the forest,
if I'm somewhere where I notice the audio
is really really good,
if I'm in a restaurant,
if I'm downtown,
it doesn't matter.
Wherever you are,
you can just hit record
and let it roll a little bit of the ambient sound
wherever you are or the room tone of a restaurant
that you're in so that you can use it later.
Just like we talked about for B-Roll in stockpiling
that footage so that maybe down the line you
might have something to use if you're struggling
with an edit and you're like,
"Oh I have a motorcycle clip
of this guy ripping down the street that I never used.
The same thing applies for audio.
So if I'm at a baseball game
and you want to hear the bats cracking,
you can record a bit of audio even on your cell phone.
You can just pull it out,
record a little bit of that room tone.
Something is better than nothing.
Now for this specifically you wanna get
a little more high tech
and a little more advanced
you can buy something called an H4n field recorder.
Now these field recorders are awesome.
You can do a whole lot of stuff with them.
You can plug two different Lav mics into them.
You can record audio through it.
You can record audio with it.
Very versatile thing to have as a film maker.
So I bring it with me in case I ever need
to run an interview with two mics
but at the same time I bring it with me
to record room tone and record the environment around me.
So yesterday we were hiking through these waterfalls,
I took it out,
I put my little windsock on it,
a dead cat and I think this one's called a Chewbacca.
And then I just walked around
and recorded audio of the stream.
I recorded audio of these waterfalls.
I recorded audio of the forest
and just the ambient atmosphere
that I was in so that I had true sounds
from the footage itself that was way higher quality
than what my mic would have picked up from the camera.
Another interesting way to play with sound and sound design
is to match the audio to the camera movement.
Okay for example,
the spin transition.
If it had just been the spin transition like this,
it looks cool but there's just,
it's missing something.
You would know.
You would watch that edit through and be like,
"That was cool."
But because I put that swoosh in there (swooshing)
Sometimes I do my own sound effects.
But because I put that in there,
it just completely changed it.
Now listen:
(emphatic swooshing)
That looks and sounds way more complete.
So matching your sound
to what's happening on screen is a big win.
Same thing as when he ollies off that stair set.
I drop the music,
have the siren in the background
and I put a sound effect
of like bullet time or slow motion,
this is what the sound effect sounds like:
(bullet flying through air in slow motion)
So I threw that over top of the footage.
(sirens with slow motion bullet flying through air)
Kind of accentuates the fact
that everything has just slowed down.
You can visually see that it's slowed down
but because I've given you that audio now
to also listen to,
it just enhances,
it just rounds the thing out,
it just makes it more rich,
it makes it worth rewinding
and watching again versus just nothing.
So matching sound effects to screen action,
be it that it's something that amplifies that screen action,
or makes it more impactful.
You can look through your footage and say,
"Okay now what do I have here that I can use
to really amplify with some sound effects.
What can I use sound wise
that's gonna really make this footage stand out
and look a lot better just based off the fact
that I've enriched it with sound?"
And when you're doing interviews
or something that's not as exciting as building sound
around a really fun edit with great footage
and you're just doing some talking head stuff,
it's still just as important to get room tone
and to get good clean audio.
Because if you didn't have good audio like I said,
we process that first.
Example:
This mic that I have like right in front of my face here,
was pointed a little bit to the right.
I'll move it right now.
(mic echoing)
If my mic was pointed that way
for the whole explanation you can still hear it
but it doesn't sound nearly as good
as when it's pointed right at me.
So you can see how just the smallest detail
when it comes to audio can ruin an entire experience
of a video or a film.
So that's it for me today guys.
I hope you enjoyed this video on audio
and sound design and sound effects.
I had a blast making it
because it's something that I'm passionate about.
It's a really fun topic
and it's also a really really important topic.
So check out that site.
I hope you guys got some insight.
I hope you're inspired to get out there
and shoot your footage but record your audio
with just as much passion as you are for the video aspect
because it's just gonna pay off in the end.
So enough of that.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you got something out of this video.
Hit that like button.
(snaps)
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Thank you again very much and,
and I'll see you in the next video.
(mellow electronic music)