Post Production Sound

Even in a free program like Movie Maker or iMovie you have the ability to control generally three separate sound tracks at a single time. The main sound from your camcorder loads in automatically and then you have a separate track for sound effects that can hold a whole wave file and another track for music that can hold a whole wave file. So, you can work with the sound from your camera plus sound from several other sources such as the portable recorders that might give better individual dialog.

You can generally mix all these tracks and usually can save your mix moves automatically in editing software.

You can checkerboard audio snippets which allows you to cover dialog from several actors using several sound sources as long as they are speaking at the same time.

In some instances if your individual sound sources work perfectly in the mix you can then remove the main camera sound track and replace that with other clips and snippets or length if what is call room tone or sound fill.

Every room has a tone and you should record several minutes of this. This is then put, for example, where the camera track was and it gives continuity to the new dialog tracks because you no longer hear dead tone between the speakers.

This can then be blended and rendered into a new cloned copy from which you can now extra the wave file track by importing the new composited film into the editing suit and continue working with this added two more tracks of sound.

The problem with doing things this way, of course, is that if you make a mistake and get something too hot and it gets lost in another sound you have to back one or more steps and remix some of the other tracks.

This is why working with a full blown audio mixing suit that can also import video is better, but this is going to cost you some money.

You can go from something as little at Magic Mix Movie Editor or Magic Mix Music Studio, both at $60 each to has high as $700 for Cubase Studio 6.

These products allow you to work with more track, add effects, edit the audio while monitoring you video for synchronization. You can then render a finshed audio track that you can then import back into your video software for the finishing touches.