Learn Digital Video Editing

Sometimes when you’re putting together a scene you’ll notice drastic changes in the background sound, or even worse, clearly audible noises. This can be very distracting to the viewer. Luckily it’s fairly easy to fix by piecing in other audio clips.

This sample clip contains a shot with some unwanted background noise, the same clip again with the noise removed, and then the final clip with the room sound added. You may need to turn your speakers up a bit to catch the difference on the last two.

I’m using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 for the example today, but this type of audio editing is possible in many programs. As long as you can separate the audio track from the video track, you’ll be able to pull this off.

A Problem Clip

During “raw 06.avi” something gets bumped and causes a noise. We must fix this catastrophe!

A Flawed Solution

Your first instinct might be to simply delete the audio track from the problem clip, thus deleting the audio problem. What seems like a good idea, however, poses another problem. Your location isn’t silent! It’s almost guaranteed that there is some sort of background sound or “room sound” in your shot. If the audio suddenly drops out completely, your viewer will hear the difference.

Here is the same piece of video with the audio from the noisy clip completely removed.

A Clean Edit

Here is the piece again with the room sound added. In this case I didn’t actually shoot any extra footage for the room sound, I simply took it from a part of the clip “saw 03.avi” in which I wasn’t speaking. The background sound from this shot matches perfectly with the other clips, creating an audio edit that will go unnoticed.

On future shoots you want to get some footage specifically for using as room sound. Once you’re done all of your takes, let the camera roll for about a minute. This will provide you enough extra audio that you should be able to repair any minor problems.