Archive for May, 2010

Yesterday we talked about an important audio tool that is easy to acquire and essential for a lot of sound editing: room tone.

Now let’s take a look at another situation. You’re out shooting in the snow, and you have a protective cover around your camera. You are just looking to get the shot – you don’t have a microphone connected and you are just using the internal mic. Afterwards, you get into your editing software and look at the footage. The video looks great, but the audio is – as expected – lacking. Since you had that protective cover on and were just using the internal microphone, you got sub-par audio.

The thing to remember is audio is a very important part of the experience the viewer has when watching your film or documentary. You can show footage of a carnival, but what is a carnival without the sounds that come with it? I’m talking about the screams, laughter, noises the rides make – all of it.

In this situation, you would have learned something important about ambient noise. For the user to full embrace the experience of being out there on that snowy hillside, they need to hear the soft breeze and the even softer sound of the snow falling. They need to hear a high quality recording of that, as well. This is what is known as ambient noise, and it can make a world of difference.

There are two routes you can do with ambient noise in terms of procuring it. If you think of it, of course, you can make your own, but sometimes a smarter idea is to get some ambient noise from another source.

Tags: audio