Monday, June 23, 2008

How to Edit Sound Effects for a Sound Effect Library

By SFXsource

Once you have recorded a large amount of material intended to be used as sound effects, the next step in creating a sound effect library is to edit this raw audio. You will need an audio editing software that will allow you to cut, fade in/out, normalize, and eq your tracks. There are many professional digital audio workstations (DAWs) out there for purchase and also several useful freewares easily found on the internet.

First import all of your raw .wav recordings into the software of your choice. Try to import 40 or so for efficiency, though you may attack one at a time, and solo each track for editing which mutes all tracks except the one with which you are working. Now you are ready to edit your sounds and then bounce them into completed sound effects. The following points will assist the quality and efficiency of your work.

1. Use normalization on each recorded sample first. Normalization increases the amplitude of each .wav file, in other works amps the volume as loud as can be.

2. Next, cut out unwanted frequencies that degrade the quality of your sound by using eqs. For instance, an unwanted air conditioning sound may be interfering with a bird chirp. To get rid of the unwanted AC simply apply a high pass filter around 2,000 Hz which will kill the AC noise but preserve the higher frequencies of the bird chirp.

3. When your sound is normalized and cleaned up with eq find a clean beginning point to the sound and either create a fade-out or more desirably let the natural reverb ring out for 1-2 seconds.

4. Bounce your sound down to a 48k 24bit .wav file for video editing. 48k 24bit are high quality files that are valued by sound effect libraries and licensees who pay good money to use sound effects in their productions.

5. In order to increase your amount of products make as many versions of each recording as possible. For example, if a recording has a cat meowing 25 times, make sound effects with one meow, two meows, 5 meows, 8 meows etc. while changing up the combination of meows. This process will easily give you 50 or more sound effects from one sequence of cat meows.

6. You can further increase your number of effects by using pitch shift or other filters on each sound sample. For instance, the sound of a stream can be pitch shifted up to make it sound lighter and less tumultuous and pitch shifted down to make it sound larger and deeper.

With some prior knowledge of audio editing, one can follow the above tips to take raw audio recordings and create professional quality sound effects that can be licensed for profit to media creators.

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