Improve Your Videos With Sound Design | Premiere Pro Tutorial Video Breakdown
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Improve Your Videos With Sound Design | Premiere Pro Tutorial Video Breakdown
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Sound design is incredibly important, and I thought it'd be cool to show you some sound design that I did for an old YouTube video of ours. So, here's a part of the edit with just music and then here's the same thing with both music and sound effects.
I would argue that overall sound in a video you make is equally as important as the visuals you show, so I'll show you behind the scenes of the sound design layout that I created for the video. Let's jump in.
All right, I have Premiere open and this is a project I worked on a few years ago for our YouTube channel. Back then it was just our YouTube channel trailer and you can see that this line here is all footage. We have a music track, and then all of this below was the sound design that I did. This is just dozens and dozens of different sound effects. They have a ton of fades on them, some are split up and made really short, some are louder than others. I've used the pen tool to change the volume of them throughout each clip.
Beyond that, I have time stretch a lot of the clips so that some are slower and some are sped up to give a different sound. And ultimately, the purpose of all of these is to create an atmosphere that helps tell the story of what you're seeing on screen.
A lot of people overlook sound design, and I would argue that it's equally as important to what you're showing on screen because the human brain can pick up visually what's going on a lot quicker if it can also associate a sound with that visual.
So, I'll play you a little bit of this with just the music, and then we'll add in the sound effects, and you can get the idea of exactly what's happening with the sound design and how much better it makes the edit.
And now, without the music, here is just the sound effects. And then, now let's play it back with the sound design on to give you the comparison.
So, as you may have heard, it is subtle, but there were some wind sounds, a helicopter, birds chirping, some atmosphere, there was water sound, stream sounds, and a few other subtle uh sounds.
So, let's dive in a little bit and I'll show you what is going on here on this clip, for example. I time ramp it so it goes a little quicker, and when that happens, I have a whoosh sound effect, or a swoosh sound effect I should say. Under that is a ambient swell sound effect that sort of builds over time. I have another whoosh sound effect that follows it, and then a fourth track that's layered of spring birds.
And the reason for the long swell effect here that sort of builds over time is during these four clips, each one was edited to zoom out just a little bit, and this swell long effect helps those four clips build over time, if that makes sense. It gives you the feeling that with the animation that's happening, with the clips zooming out, it helps the overall feel feel like it's building. And then there's a quick time ramp between the end of the clip to the beginning of the next clip, and that's where another swish sound happens.
Then, I switch all of the sound design to one that says Arctic wind. There's crowd noise, and that's because it's sort of a downtown location. I have also construction ambience, which obviously this is in a construction site, But again, it doesn't really matter the exact type of sound effect you're using because when they're blended and there's music, as long as it has the general uh sort of vibe of the atmosphere or the location, you should be good to go.
As you can see, I've also used quite a few of the same swish sounds. I believe the middle one was stretched to be a little slower, so the effect is a little lower in frequency. And then I've even duplicated the crowd noise and offset it a bit to make it seem a little more layered, and that sounds like this.
Next, we have the plane noise or a helicopter noise. Everything else is sort of the same, just duplicated and either faded at certain points, or lower in volume, or higher in volume. Some of them again may have a slight time change, so it might be a little slower, a little faster, and that sounds like this.
Then, if we go further on here, we have some traffic sound effects, and also a boat horn that sort of ties in because again, you see the ocean and it's a familiar noise [Music]. And then here, I've added in some city traffic sound effects that has some sounds of a streetcar, the compressed air being released towards the end. And once again, if we play it with the song, it sort of blends in all together.
At the end here, I've added a bass boom sound effect, and it sort of ends right as I let go of this lantern. And that was timed as well, so that it ends exactly when the song ends, and it just sort of adds a little bit of I guess oomph to the end of the song, and to end the sequence.
Overall, I would say are these sound effects needed? Absolutely not. Do they add to a better feel in the edit? Yes, they do 100%. I would highly recommend incorporating sound effects. Could the sound design in this video be better? Absolutely. Of course, it takes a lot of time to do sound design, especially good sound design, because you're constantly searching for different sound effects and ambient sounds, and often it takes more time to do the sound design than your actual visual edit.
So at a certain point, you sort of call it an arrive at an edit that you're happy with. And of course, every single person who edits and does sound design is going to do it a little bit differently. They're going to have their own approaches, they're going to have their go-to sound effects. And I would highly suggest you build up your own sound effects library over time. You could create your own Foley, which is essentially sound effects that you record with your own microphone, and then use those as sound effects in your edits. Or beyond that, you could get a subscription to a web website like epidemic sound. A lot of the stuff we use, especially all our music, is from epidemic sound. I would highly recommend them. This is not a sponsored video by them, but their music and sound effects quality is very high, so they tend to be our go-to.
But in any case, the point of this video is, once you're done your edit and you've added music, don't end there. Definitely spend some extra time adding in some sound effects, because it does make a huge difference.
Okay, that's it for this video. I hope that helped show how important sound design is in your videos. Like I said at the beginning, it's equally as important as the visuals, so make sure you're not overlooking the sound part of your edits because sound design can bring it to the next level.
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