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Many of you not only edit video but shoot video as well, or at least have some
say in the production of the video that you'll be editing.
So in this chapter, I want to give you some tips for shooting video and even if
you don't shoot video and don't work in the production side of things, I think
these tips might still help you as an editor. For example, in this movie, we are going to
look at using Ambient Audio or Capturing Ambient Audio in the field.
A lot of times, as we'll see in this example, let's just go ahead and play this
example, and notice the audio of the different clip.
We are going to see three different clips. Listen closely to the different
audio in the clips. (Audio Playing)
So you'll notice that we are actually using the audio from the camera,
very little noise here. Then when we go to the wider shot, we have
a lot more noise and hmm, and then it gets quiet again, as we get closer.
Now, such wild jumps in audio are one of the many telltale signs of an
amateur video production. Audio is a big giveaway of the professionalism
of any production. So what we want to do is, when you are shooting
video, you want to capture what they call Ambient Audio.
In another words, the audio of the environment just gets several minutes of the
audio of where you are shooting. Sometimes if you can't capture that audio,
you'll need to do some sound design and actually create some synthetic audio from
scratch. So I have this ambient office audio clip.
This is basically just audio noise of an office. I am going to add this to my Timeline here,
and you'll notice that even though the audio changes with every clip here,
this ambient office audio clip is the same throughout. That gives the whole
shot a sense of continuity and therefore, professionalism.
So now let's listen to it with the ambient office audio clip.
(Audio Playing) So that's a lot more continuous.
We could go in here with the Audio Mixer. Go into the Window menu and open that up here,
Window>Audio Mixer, and we could balance these.
I might want to turn down the original audio a little bit, and also turn down the
ambient office audio. We don't want that too loud.
Try that one more time. Just some subtle noise in the background.
You could see as she shuffles her arms around, we are still getting some of
the audio from her clothes shuffling, makes it sound more realistic, but this
continual audio tone adds a great deal of professionalism to the whole video production.
Now, as I mentioned, these tips can help you, as an editor, even if you don't
work in production, because if they didn't record audio for whatever reason, if
you are dealing with film, they don't have audio, or if the audio wasn't that
good, maybe they didn't get this ambient environmental audio that we are talking about here, you
can construct it by using sound design. You can get audio loop samples, that type
of thing, or you can go and record similar audio tone of a similar environment
and then put that into your Timeline as well. So, you might have to fake it, but it's this
concept of providing continual audio from shot to shot that really adds the professionalism.