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.

Recording Your Own Ambient Noise

One obvious path is to record some ambient noise of your own when you are on location. This is sort of the same idea as room tone – you need to remember to actually record it, and record it without any blemishes or unusable qualities. For example, having your actors talking in the background about how the shoot went will probably take away from your carnival atmosphere.

Yes, there are some pluses to this method. Your ambient noise will be unique, and it will be recorded with the same equipment as the rest of the audio. However, I think that in many cases, recording your own ambient noise may be the wrong desicion.

Using Canned Ambient Noise

The term “canned” isn’t a very good one to use here. If you find good canned ambient noise, it’s very effective.

Take the example of the carnival. The ambient noise of the carnival may be a little sad when you choose to record it. There may not be laughing people in the background, or tilt a whirl sounds. In short, it may suck.

However, when you find a recorded piece of carnival ambience, if its good, then the person who is recording has taken the care to get great carnival ambience sounds. Maybe they even recorded some sounds separately and put them together to get something that’s really great.

The point is, using canned ambience could be a really effective way to give an extra boost to your image. It could make your carnival scene more exciting, or your outdoor shots have more impact. It can really boost up your production values with little or no cost to you.

What’s a good place to get ambient noise? Be careful – there are a lot of leftover sites from the 90′s with crappy siren and explosion wavs that will obviously make your film look stupid. Try a site like The Freesound Project – they have great, high quality sounds that are unique and fit a wide variety of situations.

Ambient Noise and Dialogue Scenes

Although ambient noise can play an important role in just shots of environments, it can play a very important role in dialogue scenes where there needs to be ambient noise.

Take the classic example of the restaurant scene. You are filming two actors talking to each other, with a restaurant chatting away in the background.

When you cut this scene, you don’t want a great cut to be ruined by background chatter that doesn’t cut together gracefully. Instead, you just tell your extras to look like they are talking while keeping quiet, and add the general chatter in post, allowing you to edit dialogue worry free.

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Although ambient noise is something a lot of filmmakers may overlook in the post process, planning for it and getting it are two efforts that will yield some added production values to your films.