Sound design 101: How to achieve amazing audio in film

Sound design is the art of elevating your content beyond its digital elements. Learn how to use sound to impact your video’s viewing experience.

We’ll cover: how to integrate SFX into your video, how to enhance your video with awesome sound design, how to create moods with audio filters, syncing audio with video in Premiere Pro.

Ready to get started? Let’s go.

Today we’re going to learn how using SFX can bring your video content or your films to a whole other level. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: [scene]

Here are some of the benefits of using sound effects. Number one: immerse your audience into your video. Two: helps with your pacing. Three: creates a whole world through just sound. Four: raises the production value for relatively low price.

Let’s start talking about how to immerse your audience into your video or film. The main point of a video is to bring your audience along for the ride. What better way than to engage as many of the five senses as possible? Sound is one of the most sensitive senses we have. As filmmakers, we want to use that to our advantage and add as many relevant sounds as possible to bring your film or your video to life in the ears of your audience.

For example, you’re filming a scene in a coffee shop with somebody typing on a computer and you want to isolate a specific character within that scene. So here’s a great example of when you can use a keyboard typing sound effect.

Let’s move on to how it helps you with your pacing. A great way to tell if your visual storytelling is on point is if you can play your film with just the audio and you feel immersed in the story. It’s like being told the story as a child and you just let your visual imagination run wild. Once the audio is on point, pair it with some epic visuals and you have a powerful piece of content right there.

Creates a whole world through just sound. Imagine this: someone is telling you a story from their last trip. First without sound effects. Then with sound effects. Which version of the story gets your attention more? Exactly. the version with the sound effects is so much more compelling and keeps your attention for a lot longer. This is kind of like the filmmaking adage show don’t tell except it’s make heard don’t tell.

Raises the production value for a low price. There are so many ways to level up your videos to make it look like a million bucks when in reality it costs you 50 bucks to produce. Sound effects are one of the best ways to do that. Let’s say, for example, you only have enough budget for two actors for a dialogue scene at a party. But your script requires at least 10 background actors. Well, with some creativity and access to the right sound effects, you can make a two-person party seem like ten through sound. Just film the dialogue scene between the two actors in frame and use a party chatter or crowd sound effects like this one on the Artlist library. Use this to make the party seem more real.

So that’s it. I hope you enjoyed learning the various uses of sound effects in your videos or films. To learn more about the importance of audio for your videos, check out the other classes on this course. Thanks so much for watching.

Today I’m going to quickly show you how to synchronize audio and video inside of Premiere Pro in just a couple of clicks and some solutions to some common problems. The whole reason why you’d want to do this, to begin with, though, is because you have your video and your audio being recorded separately like I do here. My video camera is recording my video, but it doesn’t have this microphone attached to it. It doesn’t connect very well. So I’m recording this audio separately, directly into my computer. And inside of Premiere Pro, this is what that would look like: if your camera video layer’s here, you have your camera scratch track here, that doesn’t sound nearly as good. And then you have your nice clean microphone audio here. And the difference between those is pretty clear. So let’s quickly take a listen to what just the camera audio sounds like. And then this is what the nice clean microphone audio sounds like. It’s pretty obvious why you’d want to use this layer here. But in Premiere Pro, when you bring this in, you’re not going to have it nicely set up like this. You’re probably going to have something a little bit more like this.

These aren’t going to be synched up nicely. They’re going to be kind of offset here. You just kind of slap it down. It’s like I don’t quite know where it goes. Premiere actually has an automatic function that you can use to just line these up and Premiere will just do all the work for you. It’s really great as you literally just highlight everything that you want to synchronize together. Right-click and click synchronize. Then you just want to make sure that you’ve highlighted the audio section here. You don’t want clip start or clip end. Like the name suggests, you found a way to either start or end your clips at exactly the same time. Which means that you found a way to remotely trigger them to start or end at the same time. So you probably don’t need this tutorial. So if you have the situation where you’re randomly trying to figure out where do these synchronize choose audio, then we only have one option here. Don’t worry about track channel click, OK. And then Premiere Pro will do all the work for you lining these up. I’m going to bring these way far apart here so you can see that Premiere Pro is actually doing all that work. Right-click, synchronize, audio. OK. And there you go. It lines it up perfectly.

Now, here’s the nice thing, too. You actually don’t need to do this with just two layers here. You can have as many audio track layers as you want. Let’s say, for example, I have one, two, three, four different audio track layers. These are duplicates. It doesn’t really matter. It will work even if you have multiple different audio sources that you’re trying to sync together. Just highlight all of these. Right-click and synchronize is available. There you go. But here’s the thing, though. You might come into the situation where, say, for example, you highlight these right-click and synchronize is greyed out and you’re not actually able to select it. There’s two main reasons why that could happen.

The first is that you have two audio layers on the same track. You need them to be on separate tracks. You can see here that if we have these on the same track and I highlight these three, synchronize is available. If I highlight these three, synchronize is available. But as soon as I highlight two things that are on the same track layer, synchronize becomes unavailable. This can be easily fixed by simply moving one of those to a new separate track. Now, all of a sudden, synchronize is available.

The other thing is that this can be caused by something as simple as just a cut in your audio. So it’s just double check here that before that happened, synchronize is available. But as soon as I make a cut here and there’s multiple audio layers here, technically on the same track now, synchronize becomes unavailable. So the solution to that is either move these two again, separate tracks, or just remove the cut in between them so that you have only one audio layer per track. Then you can synchronize.

The second reason why you might not be able to synchronize is because you have no track layers targeted. So targeting is in this section here. This left section here is for source patching, insert, and overwrites. Don’t worry about that for the moment. It’s this right section here that’s responsible for trace targeting. If we have no audio or video layers that are targeted, if we highlight all these right-click synchronize is unavailable. And as soon as we target anything that’s on the same track as something that we want to be synchronizing, you can highlight these and you can see that synchronize becomes available.

Now, if you target something that’s not on a layer that you’re trying to synchronize. So Audio track five, we don’t have anything there that we’re trying to synchronize. You can see that synchronize is still unavailable. So you want to make sure that you have at least one thing, even if it’s just a video layer, that you’re also including in the synchronization, you need to have at least one layer targeted that you’re actually including in the synchronization process. So if you find that, synchronize for you is greyed out, check those two things. Is every single audio layer on a separate audio track, including small cuts in between them? And you have at least one track that are targeted that you’re including in the synchronization.

But now you’re in the situation where you have two different audio tracks and if you play them at the same time. It doesn’t sound the greatest you want just this audio layer here, so one way that you could deal with that is you could highlight just this audio layer here by holding alt or option and clicking. Then you can right-click and disable this track so you only hear the nice clean audio. The other option that you have is you can just literally drag this over top and completely replace that layer. That’s actually my preferred method. But you run into this problem here where then let’s say you wanted to move this audio and video track pair around here and oh, no, they don’t move together. They’re completely separated.

The easy solution to fix that is to simply highlight both of them. Right-click and then link them together. Now, you might come to the situation where the very first time you try to do that, you highlight them and right click and it says unlink. This just means that at least one of those audio or video layers is linked to something else. Just click unlink and then do it again and you’ll be able to link them up so that now they’ll work together as a single unit. Any time you move one around, the other will follow.

If you’re running into a situation, though, where this isn’t working, you might simply have the linked selection button here turned off. If this is white, doesn’t matter if you have a linked selection, they’ll act independently. But if you have a linked pair like this and this linked selection is blue, then it will respect that and you can move them around as a pair. Awesome. So that’s how you synchronize audio and video in Premiere. And some solutions to some common problems.

But there is one more thing I want to leave you with, and that’s that if you are doing this on a regular basis, you’ll end up with a lot of different materials here. And I won’t just look like that. You’ll have a lot here. But then you also have that same situation repeated a bunch of times. So if that’s you, how do you synchronize all these different sections together quickly and easily? Instead of just like highlighting, right, clicking sync. There’s a better way. And what you can do is you can go up to edit and then down to keyboard shortcuts. So from here, you can search for synchronize. And you’ll notice here that I have a keyboard shortcut for synchronizing my audio. I’ll get rid of that for a moment because this is likely what you’ll have. Just click underneath the shortcut here, beside the synchronized label here. And then you can actually key in what keyboard shortcut you want this to be assigned to. So for me, I like “Alt and S,” soon as I click that, Alt S is now the keyboard shortcut for synchronizing my audio and video. Click, OK. And now any time that we want to synchronize our audio and our video together, it’s literally as simple as highlighting, hitting our keyboard shortcut, and enter. And so synchronizing audio and video is literally just this quick.

And guys, that’s just been a quick tutorial in how you synchronize audio inside of Premiere Pro. That’s it for me. Thanks so much for watching. I can’t wait to see you in the next video. Bye.

Good audio and sound design make a huge difference in the professional quality of your video. Unfortunately, it can be tricky to recognize when your audio isn’t sounding so great. Today, we’re focusing on setting up the audio side and recording the voice-over.

So first, let’s take a look at how to record audio properly and then make it sound great. Before we even start recording, there are a few things we want to take into account with setting up the actual microphone. The first is your distance to the mic. If you’re too close, you’ll end up with blown-out audio, which will be pretty much impossible to correct in post. A good starting point is to make this sign with your hands, staying this distance from the mic and making adjustments as needed.

Tip number two, invest in a pop filter. A pop filter is a useful but inexpensive investment. It gets rid of the explosive ‘puh’ sound that comes with any word. Starting with the letter P, the filter doesn’t go right up against the mic. It needs some space to dissipate the ‘puh’ sound you make.

Now we can move from the physical to the digital world and actually start recording. Audacity can be downloaded from AudacityTeam.org. The reason we’re using this software over any other is because it’s free. Once you’ve downloaded the software and installed it onto your computer, open it up. If your mic is plugged in correctly, you should see levels bouncing when you make noise. In edit preferences, check that the device is using the microphone to record.

To start recording, click this red button. Now we have the audio captured. Let’s listen back to it. This is an example of voiceover recording in Audacity. This sounds fine, but there are some things we can do to make it even better. Having good-sounding audio is even more important if you don’t have a face cam because your voice will be the only thing your audience hears from you. We’re lucky enough to be recording in a quiet room here, but you might not be in a location that’s free from background noise and fuzz. Let’s see what we can do to fix that background noise interference and really add a level of professionalism to the sound.

First, find a spot in your video where you aren’t talking. The longer, the better. Highlight it. Then come up to effects, noise reduction. Click Get Noise profile. Audacity will analyze the space for noise. Now highlight everything with control A. And go back to the noise reduction effect. Adjusting the settings will depend how much noise you need to filter out. Click OK. Audacity will reduce the noise in your audio based on the section you highlighted earlier.

Compressing audio is another really good thing to consider. Once again, press control A and select all. Come up to effects, Compressor. The threshold determines how much of the audio will be compressed. The ratio controls how much compression will be applied. Notice how after I hear OK, the waveform is much more evenly distributed.

The last thing to make sure of is that no part of your audio goes above zero decibels. Highlight your audio and select the limiter effect. I’ll limit it to negative point one decibels, right below zero.

This is an example of voiceover recording in audacity. This is an example of voiceover recording in Audacity. Now that we have the finished audio file, let’s go to file export as WAV. We really hope this video helps you improve your audio. Join us for more tips and tricks on creating a successful YouTube channel.

As filmmakers, we’re always thinking about the visual. But we should start thinking about the audio as well and how it can tell our story. Let’s talk about that.

Two basic, but powerful audio effects that will help you spice up your videos are the low pass and high pass filters. High pass is when you cut out all the low frequencies from your audio. And then you get this effect. You can use the high pass filter to create an effect of sound coming out of different audio devices like a phone, radio, or headphones. But it can also be used in a way that can help you convey a certain feeling or mood.

We use this effect in our Christmas commercial, where our actor is daydreaming while listening to music, and when she takes off her headphones, the high pass filter kicks in and the audience is thrown back to reality with our actor.

The second audio effect is the low pass filter, which cuts out all the high frequencies to get this effect. This effect can be used to emulate the sound of music playing from afar or an underwater effect, or maybe to increase the feeling of someone in a state of shock. You can try using the low pass filter for different sound effects. That can create some interesting sounds that you didn’t expect to get. Like this sound turning into this.

That’s it. Get creative and apply those filters to your sound to drive your story forward and create some impactful scenes. Till the next one. Stay creative.

Hi everybody, this is Liran from Artlist, and welcome back to our channel. Why not talk about sound design? And teach you guys how to take your videos with it to the next level.

As you can see, there is a ton of sound design we did hear. This is the video without sound design, just with the music. Pretty cool, but it can get a lot better than that. All you need to do is add some sound design. Now, I want to show you how it looks and how it sounds with only sound design. The video works both ways, either only with sound effects or only with music. Combine these two together and you get a really, really cool video.

So let’s go a little bit into depth on what we did here. Don’t use one sound effect. Always try to stack the layer on top of each other with different sounds. They could be similar, but they don’t have to be the same sound. So I’ll give you an example. Let’s put these layers on solo. These layers are actually for the first scene you saw of the astronaut, so check this out. So you can see we have four different layers. Each layer gives it more depth, so let’s separate those four layers.

So you can hear people talking on the radio communication. This is another sound. Now, this is an intro impact, starts the whole film. It’s very big, it’s very long. This is another layer of atmosphere where you hear the astronaut breathing. Now at space from this distance, you probably won’t hear the astronaut breathing, you need to be in his helmet, but this is the beauty of sound design. This gives you the depth of the scene. It puts the audience invested into that scene.

And the fifth and final sound for this specific shot. This little shot. Five layers of sound. Another impact. So here’s that sound. So these two impacts together and together with the breathing and the radio communication, and you’ve got yourself a great sound design for a small shop. I want you to notice this little transition we did with the girl. You don’t see the punch, but you hear it to emphasize this cut. You have three different sounds to give you the impact. And with the car, you’re starting to hear it before it comes in. So this is how it looks and this is how it sounds.

So we have three different sounds for the car. And this main sound is the one that will help the transition. You can see it starting to go in with the hit that we don’t see. OK, so this gives the impact of the transition. And when you add the rest of the sounds for the car, you get a really great transition using only sound design.

In this case, where you see the pool ball getting hit and we transition into the police scene, so we wanted to create something a lot more powerful when seeing this specific shot. It’s a close-up and we wanted to give that a lot of power. So obviously that’s not the sound that you hear when you’re hitting a pool ball. You have three different impacts. You can hear this one with the riser, which gives you more tension and more power to the scene, and it actually gives you a nice transition to that specific shot. So this is the riser with the impact. You have the impact itself, so we have a riser with an impact. You have another impact. OK, you can hear it without the first one. Let’s solve that.

OK, so you have a really low pass, really heavy based impact and you have another impact. So these are three different impacts like we’ve said. This one is with the riser as well. OK, even sounds a bit metal sounding. So you have three different impacts with risers for just one short hit with a billiard stick on a billiard ball. So to transition those two shots, you also have the gun loading, which obviously the dude in the specific visual didn’t do, but it makes sense when you see them coming into the room. So this is how it sounds. And of course, you have these two sounds for the police coming in. One is the police sirens and the radio communication. So we don’t actually see the sirens. You don’t see any radio communication but it’s there to tell a better story, a more convincing story. Exploding strawberries. How the hell does that sound? Nobody knows, except the sound designer.

This is his job to figure out how to bring to life this visual. When we approached this specific shot, we knew we wanted something that would give texture because you see a lot of texture in the visuals and maybe like something wet or mushy alongside that. So what we did was taking, we took two sounds. One is a man chewing and the other is bones breaking. So for the man’s chewing, we took that and put low pass filters on it. That gave us that mushy sound. And for the texture we used, the bones breaking. Again, used a low pass filter on it, and that gave us some more texture. So if I’ll put those two together, we’ll get a great sound for exploding strawberries.

Now, this is how it sounds with the low pass. Everything on it. Now you’ve got to hear this solo. This is the man chewing. Amazing. This is with the low pass. Now, what happens when you take out the low pass? Sounds like this definitely worse than what we wanted, so the low pass here helped us achieve that mushy wetness sound. You can always play with the low pass or the high pass or the EQ to get different sounds from your already existing sound effects. Can get really creative with it.

Now for the texture, we did the bones breaking. I want to show you how it sounds without the low pass first. Terrible. Definitely wouldn’t fit this specific and this beautiful visual. So again, all you need to do is take the low pass filter. And now you can check it out. So put these two together. The man chewing and the bones breaking with the low pass, you’ll get great texture and great wetness and mushy sounds. Add your impacts and your wishes. Sounds like sweet strawberries falling apart in slow motion.

Another quick example for a great use of low pass, we had this great shot of a manta ray doing a 360 flip underwater. What we did here, we took some existing water sounds. And we’ve put the low pass filter on it to make those water sounds feel underwater. Well, basically the low pass does is it cuts all the high frequencies in the sound. So this is without the low pass and this is with the low pass. So you can take any sound again, put a low pass filter on it, play with it, get creative with it, you can get really great results when you cut out all the high frequencies.

Same, by the way, with high pass, you can achieve that effect pretty easily with the EQ or just type in right here low pass and you have it right there. Pretty simple. And here’s some few extra tips for you guys.

So let’s say I need a riser, but I don’t have one. I only have impacts. Well, there’s a very, very simple solution for that. You can reverse the impact and it will turn into a riser. So let’s take this, for example. So I had an impact here, and all I wanted is maybe a transition to this beautiful manta ray doing a 360. So all I need to do is right-click on the sound, go to speed and duration, reverse speed. And I’ve got myself a riser. Now you can get even more creative with that. Just take any sound. Put some reverse on it. See how it sounds. Maybe it sounds cool and can fit something else, and maybe it can give you some more creative ideas on your on your specific sound design. And my two last tips can differentiate you from the pro sound designers to the amateur sound designers and these are the panning, the left and right panning, and the equalizer.

So let’s talk a little bit about the panning. So I have these bird sounds. OK, great. Now the birds are crossing the frame from left to right now to give the scene even more power, you can create panning that comes from the left and goes to the right. Now, all the big sound designs and movies use that all the time. You see somebody on the right side of the screen talking you’re probably going to hear him more on the right side of the speakers. Now, obviously, if you hear this on a mobile phone without earphones, you’ll have trouble hearing the power of the panning. So put on your headphones. Let’s give that small example with the birds. OK. All you need to do to enter the panning is right-click on these small effects box. You have the panner. You click on pan and you get the panning.

Now the panning works. When you go upwards, it’s the left side and when you go downwards, it’s the right side. So if our birds are moving from left to right, we want our sound to move from left to right. So all they need to do is create keyframes. Give our sound take our sound to the left side and move it while the birds are crossing to the right, and this is how it sounds.

OK, now let’s take another example with the panner. So we have our car scene right and our car is on the right. So we can take that specific sound in our car. We have three different sounds, remember? One, two, three. Let’s check it. Great. Now, they’re all in the middle, centered. If I’ll take the panner and I’ll take this. Let’s open that, and we want the car sound to be a bit on the right. And we will take this downwards. Let’s hear that. OK, now you can hear it harder on the right, we can take it even more to the extreme. Like this. And when you add another sound from the different layers that we have, let’s take this one. Now you get more depth because this sound is in the middle. Give it a nice panning like that. So we’ll have it starting in the middle and go and switch in to the right. And maybe the third layer we’re just going to keep it as it is. Centered. And this is how it sounds. It gives it even more depth.

OK, so you hear the car entering on the right, and then you hear the sound balancing into the center. Now you can probably imagine when you have different things crossing your frame from left to right. Playing with the panning can be super, super powerful, and always take your sound design to the next level.

And our last tip, as I said, is using the equalizer. We’ve touched a little bit when we’ve talked about low pass and high pass, but with the equalizer, you get all the range of frequencies in the sound. So let’s take this shot of the whiskey pouring into the glass. This is how it sounds without any equalizer on it. Pretty regular. Now, all you need to do is write in the effects panel EQ and parametric equalizer. You drop it on here. You have on the Effects Control Panel, a small edit button, and now you can see the waveforms on the equalizer. Now the middle ones are the mids, the left are the lows and the rights are the highs.

When we’re talking about frequencies and you can play with those different frequencies. So this specific shot, you have mostly the mids and we can just take it down if we want. It will sound a lot more hollow because we took all the mid frequencies and we took them down. We lowered them. OK, so this is with the equalizer. This is without the equalizer.

So these are my two tips for you guys that can take your sound design to the next level and differentiate you from the amateur sound designers to the pro ones. And that’s how you can use sound design to elevate your videos, and I’ll see you in the next video. Till then, stay creative.