Posted by: RaveN
Date posted: May 09 2003
User Rating: 4 out of 5.0 | Number of views: 1853
Number of comments: 0 |
Description: |
There
are several principles you have to obey in order to get clear sounding high
quality sound effects. Make sure you have alot of time and are well rested once
you start working meticulously on your hard and software settings. Getting your
equipment to produce noise free recordings and find appropriate sound motives
are the hardest part. Once you got everything setup correctly (write down all
settings!) you can work efficiently.
This signal has been recorded too silent. Alot
of noise will appear when the volume is being increased (which has to be
done). |
You
should start with checking your audio equipment. You should use an allround
condenser microphone (i.e. AKG C 1000, Audio Technica 4033, Neuman U98).
You need to get a wind shield / plosive protection as well. You can also
make a tentative one using a stocking and a coat hanger (yep, you heard
right). You should make sure your cables and plucks are fully functional.
Once this is done you have to minimize static noise. Therefore test your
mixer settings (mute all analog inputs that you're not recording from) and
make some test recordings to balance the mic input level/analog input level
proportion. Do all your recordings in 44khz, 16bit and always store the
original recordings (i.e. once you got several ones recorded, burn them
on CD or make dat backups). After you made a backup of the original sound
open the work version of the sound and start optimizing it. Mute areas that
are supposed to be silent but contain static noise. Make sure you don't
cut off vital signal data and listen to the area that you selected before
you mute it. |
There
will arise hard ends where you muted the noise. Remove those hard ends by
fading in/out respecitvely. After that adapt the volume of the whole sound
by i.e. normalizing to the peak (=amplify the sound til the highest peak
reaches 0db). Now you have a good sound for your archive (you also should
store this one). Now you can play around with the sound and start seriously
working with it. Don't change the sampling rate or bitrate of your sound
unless you have completely finished the work on it (to keep up good filter/effect
quality). Also keep in mind to first convert the sample rate and after that
the bitrate if you have to (i.e. for Half-Life).
This part
is the most work intensive one. You will spend alot of time solving hard
and software problems when you are doing soundeffects engineering. Don't
let a problem discourage you as there always is a solution. Just post
your requests on the BBS or email me directly. |
Perfect recorded signal: the waveform takes
more than half of the wave window vertically and the signal peaks don't
touch the vertical window borders which avoids clipping. |
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