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Best Way To Perform Cuts ?
I’m a beginner and I see tons of info on everything besides making perfect cuts. I’m having a lot of trouble with this at the moment and there doesn’t seem to be much info on it. My problem is not really when to cut but how. Here are a few problems I’m running into:
1. A lot of my work is conversations aka bites and I have to cut from one bite from a celebrity to another interview with a celebrity that is talking. My question is, how do you go from one person to the next making it sound clean? I prefer not to use any dissolves on the video. Do you put the audio dissolve in the middle, beginning, or end of the cut?
2. Background noise – one method I was trying was to remove the audio below the end of the first video clip and putting a fade on it, and then cutting out some of the audio on the next cut and putting an audio fade in on it, but then you lost the noisy background noise and it just doesn’t sound right. I prefer not to use sound effects on these cuts as well.
Are there any tutorials on this matter?
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7 Replies
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I usually find that a very short dissolve centred on the vision cut works best. A 1 frame dissolve is useful for de-clicking (as having cutting points based on video frames means that you haven’t got the option to cut sound on zero crossing points), but quite often 2 or 4 frames are a bit smoother.
It sometimes helps to keyframe the audio track (rubber banding) to drop the background noise level by a few decibels on the end of the outgoing speech before the dissolve and/or doing the same to the start of the incoming piece to drop the background noise a little and bring the track up just as the speech starts.
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On the interview noise: well, you use a 3-4 frame audio crossfade (+0) a the head/tail of a soundbite – giving a little fade in/out. This can be any of the thre types – as long as it doesn’t screw with how tightly cut it is.
On room noise/tone: The idea is to record people in nearly perfect/clean environments where it’s imperceptible. You also should record extra ‘silence’, known as room tone – about 30 seconds worth) in any room. This room tone allows you to hide the sound cutting in and out. It also allows you to add other speakers and make it sound like they’re in that room (along with a good reverb.)
Soundtrack Pro has ‘better’ tools for this stuff (including taking an ambient noise print (room tone) and adding it to a clip.
Best,
Jeff G
Apple Master Trainer | Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC | Adobe Cert. Instructor
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unfortunately I work with material very similar to this so the sound is always going to be bad.
https://www.accesshollywood.com/valkyrie-uk-premiere_video_954601
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Any videos out there describing this?
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I can’t think of any tutorials/videos specifically on this, but I’m sure it must be covered somewhere.
The issue of clicks when cutting sound away from a zero crossing point came up in my technical training back in the day, and using fast dissolves was something I picked up from a couple of editors when I was an assistant.
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I thought using cross dissolves was a sign of amateur editing?
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Not necessarily – not dealing with the clicks that come from cutting where the audio waveform isn’t on a zero would be “amateur” and sometimes just chucking on a 1 frame dissolve is a quick and easy way of dealing with the issue when you’re on a deadline. But whether it’s appropriate kind of depends on what the job is.
When the programme is going to a full sound dub the editor doesn’t have to worry (because the dubbing mixer will deal with it), but I do a reasonable amount of editing that gets shown in some way without having a sound dub, e.g., web stuff where there’s no room in the budget for a separate sound dub, so I do it all in the edit.
(I don’t do that much of this these days but when I was cutting sports we’d sometimes get quite tight – closest I ever got was finishing the cut 25 seconds before it went on air and when you’re in that situation you don’t have time to do a beautiful sound mix.)
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