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Making a Memory
Part 2: Creating a Soundtrack
The soundtrack of the movie is, in many ways, more important than the video. While eye's can wonder, a great soundtrack can always grab and hold attention. This is why it's generally best practise to edit the audio first, and then edit the video to the soundtrack.
Our video editing software doesn't really cut the grade with audio, so we'll be using another powerful, Open Source application to put together our soundtrack. The Audacity audio editor. Download the latest installer from here and install and open it.
Cleaning up recorded audio
First we'll clean up those wav's we saved earlier in VirtualDub. Here's one of my clips I saved earlier:
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I'm going to use it to set the scene. The video will concentrate on recent stuff of my son, from his second birthday onward. So the hip hip hoorays from his party are the perfect sentimentality to start the clip. Plus they'll match my music (more on that in a minute). We need to clean up this clip. Lets open it in Audacity. On the audacity interface you'll see a graphical representation of the audio.
I've gotta get rid of the the dead air in the middle with me telling my son to blow and my girlfriend and sister chatting.
First to locate it. Hit the space bar or the play button and listen to the clip while watching the progress on the graph. Notice when the dead begins and ends. Highlight this section and press delete to remove it.
Now zoom in on the action by pressing ctrl+1 or selcting the magnifying glass and left clicking on the graph. If you zoom in far enough where the audio was deleted you'll be able to see the change over. Clean it up by selecting the end of the first bit and going to Effects-Fade Out, then selcting the beginning of the second bit and going to Effects-Fade In.
Now zoom back out by pressing Ctrl+3 or selecting the magnifying glass and right clicking on the image. Select a second or two at the beggining of the clip and apply a fade in effect. Select a second or two at the end of the clip and apply a fade out effect.
Finally (and you'll most probably have to do this for all your captured audio), select the whole clip and go to Effects-Equalization. Here you'll create an equalization graph. The left side of the graph represents low frequency bass sounds, and the right side represents high frequency treble sounds. Just click on a part of the grapgh and drag it up to make it louder and down to make it softer (like in the animation below). Click on preview to see how your clip sounds with the equalization by clicking on preview. Use the trial and error method until you are happy with it. You'll probably want something like the graph below, which adds some bass to the tinny sound which is usually produced by the low end mics in most digital still cameras.
Once you're done, go to File-Export as WAV and save it in the audio folder of your scratch disk. Here's what the clip sounds like now:
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You'll want to do some cleaning on all your clips.
Preparing the music
The music you choose for your project sets the tempo of the whole movie. So choose something that convey's the energy and feeling you wish to portray. For a project like this one, we want a short, quick song. I have chosen to use Song 2 by Blur.
Song 2 is a short song, only 2 minutes in length, but we want this clip to be shorter, only around 90 seconds long, as short clips are more likely to hold a person's attention and be smaller in size. So lets edit out part of the song. Open the song in Audacity. As you can see from the graph below, it is very easy to break down the parts of song visually.
We'll be removing the first chorus and verse. We'll need to synch this well so the viewer won't even know that the song has been shortened (unless they know it ofcourse). How we do this is by selecting everything from the beggining of the second chorus to the end. Press Ctrl+X to cut the audio.
Go to Project-New Stereo Track to create a second track and hit Ctrl+V to paste the cut audio on the second track. Now use the Time Shift Tool ↔ shift the cut audio into line with beggining of the second chorus. Use the magnifying glass or Ctrl+1 to zoom right in and choose a cut point (a point where the two audio tracks perfectly synch up). Use the Time Shift Tool to perfectly synch the audio at the cut point as in the animation below. Then select and delete all audio outside the cut point, being careful to maintain the synch.
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We're going to save this one as an mp3, so go to File - Export as mp3. Give the file a name and fill in the id3 tags.
Putting together the soundtrack
Now, we're going to create our soundtrack. So open the music track you just created.
We're going to add three sound clips. A small clip of my son banging pots is going to be synched to the beat at the start, then the "Hip Hip Hooray" clip we fixed up earlier will be synched to finish on the first WooHoo of Song2 and at the end of the song a short clip of my son laughing will see it out.
To add the sound clip, go to Project - Import Audio (Ctrl+I).
We'll be beggining the pots first and then bringing the song into the beat of it, so we'll use the Time Shift tool to drag the song over so it's first beat is synched with the last beat of sound clip. We're going to continue the pots till the melody comes in, but as you can see on the animation below, the first three beats keep better beat than the last ones. However, Song 2 uses a 2/4 beat, so we'll only need to of those. We'll use the first two as those are the best. Highlight these two beats and press Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard. Before we can paste we've got to make sure they are in the right spot, so place the cursor at the end of the clip. Then press Ctrl+V to paiste the two beats. Press the right arrow key on your keyboard to move the cursor to the end of what you just paisted and press Ctrl+V again. Continue pressing the right arrow and Ctrl+V until the pots have made it to the melody (8 more times). The pots may not remain in synch, so go undo it to where they were added and increase and decrease your selection as necessary. With a little trial and error they'll end up in synch. Finally we need to create a smooth ending, so select the last four pot beats and apply a fade-out effect. Finish up by exporting the file as an mp3 and opening it on it's own to make it easier to add the hip hip hoorays.
Press Ctrl+I and import the hip hip hoorays to a new track. Use the Time Shift tool to drag the audio so the cheer starts avout the same time as the first WooHoos. Export it as an mp3 and open it in a new window.
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Press Ctrl+I and import the last clip. Use the Time Shift tool to drag it to the end, highlight the last few seconds and faade it out. Finally export it as an mp3 to the scratch directory.