Check out these helpful tips on how you can get clean, clear, and professional audio in all of your film and video projects.
In this video tutorial by The Film Look, we dive into some quick tips and tricks for working with audio on all types of film and video projects. As we learn in the video, working with audio can be a fun challenge to dive into, but one commonly overlooked aspect is the quality control of your final mixes.
Let’s look at five quick tips to ensure the best possible audio mixes for your projects.
1. Listen on the Best Speakers Possible
This is great advice for a couple of reasons. One, the better your speaker setup, the more information you’ll actually hear. You might pick up things like dynamic range, small pops, or other nuances that you won’t get through your laptop speakers.
The second reason is that you want to know for sure what your audio is going to sound like on all kinds of setups, so you need to listen from the very lowest to the very highest levels of quality.
2. Invest in Headphones
If you talk to any audio engineer — film, video, or music — they will tell you that getting a quality set of headphones is an absolute must. As with the speakers, if you’re not using professional-grade equipment to review your audio, you’re losing valuable information. The guys in the video have some great recommendations, but if you’re looking for some more options, check out this list over at Shutterstock.
3. Check on Different Devices
For optimal results, you can’t just trust your export parameters. You need to do the field research yourself. This is the best way to make sure your audio sounds good across all media and a range of devices. Check them all.
4. Find a Happy Medium
That being said, once you do check all your media, devices, and variables, you may find that your audio is low-quality on some and high-quality on others. If you can make it perfect, great, but often you’ll have to find a happy medium and make the best of it.
5. Volume Referencing
This is a crucial trick for modern digital filmmaking. Volume-reference your project’s audio against the ideal medium you’re creating it for. For example, matching your audio output to Netflix or YouTube will give you the best empirical data if you hope to stream primarily through these services.