Advice & inspiration

Multimedia Tip: Editing and converting audio files

During my reporting trip to Honduras, I made my first attempt at a documentary audio slide show. In the production phases, I came across several troublesome areas while editing my audio. Therefore, I wanted to pass along my trials and tribulations to hopefully help others who may come across similar issues.

Back in March, I preached about the importance of clean audio. The post resulted from my frustration while listening to a St. Pete Times’ slide show, “A Look Back.” At the time, the audio was extremely poor quality. However, within a day of my post, the problem was fixed. Now that I have been spending a lot of time editing audio, I’m pretty sure I know why they had this problem (which I also saw in this SSND 2009 entry, “Redemption Through Art at Beach High”).

When you edit audio in Audacity, the default sample rate is 48000 Hz. When you finish editing and export it to a .mp3 file, you might not even realize that this file is incompatible with Soundslides, which only accepts 44.1khz or 22.05khz. Surprisingly, even when you import it to Soundslides, the audio sounds find which can be very misleading. Only when you upload your files to the Internet does the distortion occur, and then even in only select browsers. Therefore, it is extremely important to pay close attention to these settings during the production phase. Check out this Soundslides forum to learn more about this issue and see screen shots of Audacity’s project window.

Currently, the optimal device to record audio is the Marantz PMD660, as noted by MediaStorm’s gear kit. However, it currently sells for nearly $500, so many times it is hard to justify the cost when you can capture audio with your video camera.

In my instance, I used my Canon HV30 video camera with a Rode VideoMic to capture the audio.

The only downside is that you then need a video editing software to initially capture the audio since it is synced to video. I use Final Cut Pro 6 for video editing, so I did my initial audio edits there before exporting it out to Audacity.

Interestingly enough, FCP only allows you to export an AIFF or OMF, neither of which work in Soundslides. This is where Audacity comes in. As a free, open-source software, Audacity is the leader for quality, yet affordable, audio editing. After working in both, I am actually more impressed with Audacity’s audio filters than those in Final Cut Pro.

Once I brought my audio into Audacity, I cleaned up a couple of sound bytes and exported my file to an .mp3. This is where I realized my mistake by not changing the sample rate. Otherwise, I was pretty satisfied with my audio quality and very excited that I was able to bypass buying the Marantz.

Other options for editing audio are Adobe Soundbooth, Adobe Audition (PC-based), or Pro Tools. I used Pro Tools to edit audio for Rich Beckman’s multimedia classes at UNC, and I used Adobe Audition to edit audio at The Roanoke Times. I now only use Audacity since I am a student again, but regardless it goes down as my favorite software. I would actually caution users against using Pro Tools, simply because it requires a separate hardware device to open the software and is expensive for basic editing purposes.

If you are inclined to add music to your project, you can get royalty-free music from one of these five resources, or be creative and use GarageBand to make your own. No matter what, make sure to take each music track and blend it appropriately into your narration/nat sound track so that it isn’t overwhelming to the user.

Open Society Institute multimedia producer Pam Chen promotes the use of unique music, as noted in #6 of AP producer Matt Ford’s “Top 10 Takeaways from Multimedia Immersion ‘09.” Just as an example, check out the audio from this holiday greeting that she created on her own.

I am sure there are many other ways to edit and convert audio files for use in multimedia presentations, but those listed above have worked for me thus far and ones that I can expand upon. I would love to hear if there is anybody out there who has had success using a different technique and/or software!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Soundslides now facilitates video conversion
• Rich Beckman discusses multimedia in recent videos, podcast
• 20 educational (and free!) multimedia resources

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