Hey guys, my name is Dylan, and today we’re going to go over a few simple steps in post
that you can take to have better voice audio in your videos, so you or your talents voice
will go from this, to sounding something like this.
So before we start, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve put the settings that we’re
about to go over in the description below to make it so these steps are simpler. The
tools we’re going to use may seem confusing, but just follow the steps we take, and you’ll
have better voice audio every time. You can even save the different settings for later
use, which we’ll talk about in the end.
First thing I’m going to do, since my audio is a stereo track, is change the pan mode
to ‘dialogue’. This will bring my voice a little more front and center and not sound
so all encompassing.
The next thing we’ll do is add 2 Channel EQs to our audio. A Channel EQ is going to
allow us to shape the sound of our audio whether that be for individual channels or the audio
as a whole. This is usually a good first step to take. Press this button to open it, and
we’re going to click analyzer so we can see our audio waveform. The first channel
eq, we’re going to use as a way to buffer out the rough parts of our audio. Essentially
we’re going to go through our audio frequencies to find specific frequencies that sound like
trash and stand out above other frequencies. This process is called EQ sweeping and it
can also be used to find specific frequencies that you want to boost. What you’re going
to want to do is take one of these 4 frequency bells up here, despite being different colors
it doesn’t actually matter which one, we’ll head down to this bottom value and click and
drag up with our mouse or trackpad to narrow up the bandwidth up a tad. We’ll raise it
up this up, play our track and sweep back and forth till we find a frequency that just
sounds off. (You hear how this frequency stands out and just sounds bad? We’ll remove this
from our track by cutting it out. So lower this to about -12 or so. The narrower this
colored zone is, the more you can get away with lowering these. If you try and lower
a range with a wide bandwidth, you’re just going to be cutting a lot of your audio and
it’ll be pretty noticeable and distracting. Let’s sweep again to check for more frequencies.
Here’s another one, so we’ll do the same. Do this as many times as you need to) I forgot
to mention, if you need to quickly replay the audio, press forward slash on your keyboard
and your audio will play again from the beginning.
Add another Channel EQ to our audio, and we’ll use this one to shape our audio as a whole.
We’ll first add a low pass filter and a high pass filter which will get rid of any
audio frequencies that are too high or too low which usually aren’t found in the human
voice. Just click these here and drag out a tad. You don’t want them to start overlapping
with your voice though. Then what I do is usually raise the low frequencies of my voice
a bit to add some richness and fullness that’s soothing to hear. Generally this will be from
100-200. Don’t want to raise it too much, because that’ll cause some rumbling in your
speakers, but just enough to where you think it sounds good. Something that a voice track
may also benefit from is adding a slight raise to our high frequencies. These slight raises
we did to our low and high frequencies are called shelving filters. We have the low shelf
here, and the high shelf here.
Since we’re on the topic of Channel EQ, something you can do to help your voice track
pop out more if you have a music track playing simultaneously, is to add a channel EQ to
your music, bring up both of your EQ windows, press analyzer and lower the frequencies in
your music EQ that’s clashing with the frequencies of your voice. So here, my voice is generally
the loudest in this frequency range, and this frequency range. So we’ll take two frequency
bells on our music’s eq, and lower the volume for those ranges to give our talent’s voice
more room.
The next step I usually take, and you can skip this step if you need to, is add Crumplepop
echo remover to get rid of the echo in your audio. It’s probably wise of me to mention
that this video is sponsored by Crumplepop..just kidding. It’s just a good plug in. I’ll
just drag it on, click this button, and adjust the strength and release of the effect till
I find something that works for the voice audio track. Now there is a way you can try
and take out the echo in the compressor which is the tool we’re about to use next, but
it’s a lot of trial and error, and I usually don’t have time for that. Skip this step
if you need to.
Next up, is adding the Compressor. The compressor will help us to bring the quieter parts of
our audio to a more even level, it’ll also help to lower the parts of our audio that
are way too loud after those parts have gone over a certain point, and it’ll help us
to raise the overall volume of our audio to where we’d like.
Think of the compressor like those trampoline things that have you strapped in with wires.
You’re the audio track. Those wires keep you elevated so you don’t sink too low into
the trampoline. They allow you to shoot up high, but they keep a limit on how high you
can bounce. They also limit how low you go down. You don’t sink all the way into the
trampoline. If the operators tighten those cables, you’ll raise up off the trampoline
higher from the start and you’ll higher, but still stay in a certain range.
It’s important to note that the values I’m going to mention are beneficial for voice
audio. If you’re using the compressor for musical instruments or something like that,
the values aren’t going to be the same. I’m not going to go in depth on what each
of these does because that would take too long, maybe I’ll make a video on that in
the future, but we’ll start out by zeroing out the compressor. This is basically setting
it to neutral. These steps that I’m mentioning I saw in an article about the compressor and
it has worked great for me ever since. So, I’ll leave a link in the description below.
-zero out compressor -0 threshhold. And all you’ll do is slide
up or down with your mouse or trackpad. These dials are kind of confusing to use at first.
- 1:1 ratio - about 10ms on Attack
-and 30ms on release
Now the compressor is zeroed out.
Look at your input gain and play your audio. About where does your talent’s voice fall.
You’ll take that amount, so here it’s about -12dB, and we’ll lower the threshold
about 6 to 12 db less than that number. So we’ll do about -20. This is the point where
the compressor will start kicking in. Next we’ll set the ratio either from 2:1-4:1.
We’ll set the attack from 1 to 5ms. And we’ll set the release from 10-30ms.
Generally, the compressor should be reducing 3 to 10db of gain, so look on this meter,
and check to make sure it’s staying in this zone.
Next, we’re going to throw a limiter on there. This’ll be used to even up the volume
of our audio even more and give it a boost without clipping it. The first thing we’ll
do is set the mode to ‘legacy mode’, change the lookahead to about 4ms and the release
to about 10ms. We want to increase the gain until we see the input meter start to kick
in and reduce our volume about 3-5dB. But since 0dB is too loud since we’ll be adding
music and possibly other forms of sound design, we’ll lower our output level till our levels
peak around -6 on the output meter.
Let’s toggle on and off our audio effects to see what we’ve done. That made a pretty
huge difference.
Finally, we’re going to click this save presets button to make sure that everytime
I record audio with the same mic, in the same room, and with the same talent, I know I have
all the effects in one preset that will make it sound perfect. If you have a new subject,
mic, or are in a different room, you may need to adjust these settings to fit that scenario.
And that wraps it up! If this video helped you out in any way, do me a huge favor and
press the thumbs up button, leave a comment below, and make sure to subscribe if you want
to continue improving as a filmmaker and editor. Have a great day!