Editing Sound.

We’re in a series of postings relating to editing sound.

Previously.

See the previous postings on  cleaning audio, selecting an audio editor, and a couple of basic audio editing principles.  We have also looked at the interface to a popular audio editor, Amadeus Pro, and at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. We looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.  Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors, and then at the difference between audio editors and digital audio workstations.

Sound formats.

Today, we look at a few popular audio formats and compare them.

Uncompressed.

If you want your sound to be as close as possible to the original sound captured in the real world, wav and aiff are two very popular choices. The problem is that these uncompressed sound formats can lead to very large files.

But wav and aiff are important for capturing sound in a “lossless” way, meaning that the digital media contains all the information that is captured by the recording equipment. They serve as very good archival formats for permanent recordings that might later be edited and used in a variety of other formats.

By the way, wav, which is short for Waveform Audio Format, is a Microsoft standard. And aiff stands for Audio Interchange File Format and it was developed by Apple.

Compressed.

Perhaps the most popular compressed sound format is mp3. It is used heavily on the Internet. It is a proprietary format owned by the Motion Picture Experts Group, and its full name is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is highly compressed in that an audio recording in wav format might be reduced by 80 or 90% when converted to mp3.

This sort of transformation is called “lossy”, in that information is removed during the conversion process. But what is removed is for the most part not missed by the human ear. The idea is to remove frequencies not heard by people and to remove soft sounds that are drowned out by other, louder sounds.

The end result is good enough for high quality music.

A competitor of mp3 is wma, which stands for Windows Media Audio, and is also proprietary. And yes, Apple promotes mp3.

More later…

Lately, we’ve been looking at the process of editing and cleaning sound.  See the previous postings: cleaning and editing software.

My experience is largely with voice, and so please don’t look here for advice on editing music…

Today we look at a couple of goals to keep in mind when editing sound: Consistency and Continuity.

Consistency.

One of the main problems with weaving together sections of audio that were recorded at different times is that the background noise, the volume of sound, and overall fullness of a voice will vary.

This happens even when you try your best to recreate the same recording environment.  It can be even worse if you change locations or microphones or the software being used to clean and record.

So, try to clean the sound thoroughly so that background noise is not an issue.  Level the sound over the entire final clip.

The hardest one is giving the voice the same depth or richness.  The best way to achieve this is to use a good microphone, record in a place without too many reflective surfaces, and always have the microphone at the same distance.  In other words, try to keep a constant fullness in the voice – since it is very hard to fix later.

Continuity.

Another key problem when putting voice fragments together is making sure the edit points are not audible. The best way to avoid this problem is to use a good editing program.

Also, when making your initial recordings, choose logical places to stop.  Don’t stop in the middle of a paragraph.  Try to get to the end of a section or chapter.  This way, any subtle but sudden changes in the sound are unlikely to be noticed.

More next time…

Recording voice for web postings.

I teach Introduction to 3D Animation at my university and record my desktop and my voice for each class session.  I post them so students can review them later.  (See wordsbybuzz.com and 3dbybuzz.com.) I also write fiction on the side and like to read and record my stories.  (See lheureux.co and buzzlheureux.com.)

The problem of cleaning audio.

In both cases, I find myself trying to clean audio.  Since I’m far from an audio expert, I’ve searched around for easy to use plugins that do a good job of removing noise without giving my voice a hollow sound – and without me having to futz around with the settings forever and manipulate audio parameters I don’t understand.

Three great products.

Here are three great out-of-the-box audio cleaning plugins that work with such applications as Bias’s Peak, Steinberg’s Wavelab (my favorite), Amadeus Pro (see the Apple App store), and Sound Studio Pro (see the Apple App store).  (Please note that I use Macs and that not all of these plugins work with all of these applications.)

Bias Soundsoap.

See the Bias site for details on Soundsoap.  It comes in multiple versions, from very cheap to not so cheap.  It comes with a lot of different audio editors, and even their very cheap “SE” product works great.  Bias’s Peak Express, by the way, is a great deal in a professional quality audio editor.

Sonnox DeNoiser.

See Sonnox for details on their DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive, but comes with Wavelab Elements, a very good deal in a high end wave editor.

Izotope RX 2 DeNoiser.

See Izotope for details on RX DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive.

More on this next time…

This blog is dedicated (most of the time) to advanced web, semantic web, Web 2.0/3.0, and web media technology.

Last time.

In the last posting we took a look at the wide spectrum of media and communications technology that more and more of us are expected to use to facilitate our professional interactions.  Today, we take a closer look at a tool that I use.  It’s not a web development tool, but it’s key to my main teaching website, wordsbybuzz.

Desktop and audio capture.

It’s called Camtasia, and it’s used to create screen capture videos.  They’ve had a Windows product for quite a while, but a couple of years ago, they released a Mac product.  I jumped on it.

As I teach my introduction to 3D animation class, I use Camtasia to capture everything I do on my Macbook Pro, including running Autodesk Maya, the animation package I use as a teaching tool.  At the same time, Camtasia records my voice.

Quality.

You can do basic editing with Camtasia as well, and add transition effects.  You can insert text, as well as icons that direct the viewer to various objects in the screen capture.

Camtasia produces beautiful video.  Even the small fonts on Maya’s (extremely) complex interface come out crisp.  Camtasia offers a wide variety of format and compression choices for the video and audio.  I render Quicktime movies with Camtasia, and then post them on my website.

Essential to teaching software technology.

A tool like this is essential to the teaching of complex software tools, whether they are programming tools or media applications. It allows me to make a permanent record of my lectures. Students can look at them at their leisure, as they struggle to build their projects for my animation course.

The best part is that this all-in-one application is very cheap, between $100 and $150, depending on the current deal they are offering.

A rapidly growing prosumer marketplace.

Camtasia is part of an exploding market of “prosumer” video, audio, vector and raster image, and animation applications, as well as affordable, high quality cameras, microphones, and other equipment.

One nice thing about Camtasia is that it is actually very simple to use – unlike a lot of prosumer apps, which are often versions of highly complex professional level products that, quite frankly, haven’t had enough of their capabilities removed to make them easily usable.

Camtasia was clearly built from the ground up with regular folks in mind.

Other vendors of media applications are beginning to provide powerful applications that are not intimidating and can be learned in a reasonable amount of time. This is particularly true of audio editing apps.

If you have any interest in diving into media applications of any sort, I would be more than happy to point you toward the applications I use. I work mostly of Macs, but I have a number of Windows apps as well.

More later…

In fact, direct training in the use of modern media applications isn’t just a practical consideration. In order to develop a firm understanding of the direction of modern computing and to gain insight into the problems that need to be solved by future developers of media applications, computing students need to be exposed to the breadth of media management applications.

Today, we take a look at another extreme challenge presented to teachers of modern computing.

Computing – specifically, media management – touches everything.

Computer Science departments in universities are sometimes in Engineering schools, or sometimes in Arts and Sciences.  A growing phenomena is that Computer Science is not just a department within a school, but is a school of its own with a name like the School of Information.

This underscores the extreme variety in what is considered to be in the domain of modern computing, including the creation of formal mathematical models with little or no immediate basis in the real world, the development of algorithms for performing complex computational tasks, the construction of novel software applications, the study of human interactions with computers, the development of standards for specifying medical information, the application of modern software technology to crisis management, etc., etc.

The point is that computer science graduates might find themselves working in virtually any area of human endeavor.

Interestingly, the domain of media management, including image, video, sound, and 3D modeling and animation management, is a perfect example of this.  It is, in fact, everywhere.

So, what to do?

The answer, I think, is that media management needs to taught in a highly collaborative fashion, with faculty members drawn from across most domains of study.  The collaboration shouldn’t be superficial, as is often the case, with students choosing isolated courses from multiple departments and counting them toward a roll-your-own major.  This leaves students with no idea as to how varying disciplines are woven together in the real world.  Faculty members, for instance, from fine arts and computer science need to plan and co-teach courses that look at the border between art and programming.

We’ve looked at modern media applications in previous postings of this blog.  They represent a critical core of the new world of end-user software.

The management of advanced media technology, something that a wide class of technical and nontechnical professionals must master, presents a difficult dilemma for both students and instructors.  Professionals need to be able to create, edit, store, search, and reuse photographic images, video, music, voice and sound effects tracks, 2D and 3D models, web pages, diagrams, mathematical information, and formatted documents with embedded media.  They need to use advanced media applications to get the job done – but they also need abstract knowledge about media management, so that they can continue to stay current, know how to find the right application for a given task, and know the limits of the software they use.

Animation presents a great example of this dilemma.

I’m a computer science prof and teach an introductory 3D animation course.  Building an animation project is a complicated process and the applications that animators use are almost unbelievably complex.  They have vast interfaces that take years to master.  It is difficult to perform even simple tasks without being taught keystroke by keystroke how to get the job done.

It is also hard to apply skills learned in one application to a similar application.  Two 3D animation applications, even if they are considered to be close cousins in terms of their functionality and with respect to how they should be used, typically present their own unique learning challenges.

Most instructors don’t want to deliver courses that leave students empty handed, feeling like their heads are full of fancy ideas but they have nothing tangible to show for their trouble.  Indeed, it is very hard to teach concepts independently of teaching students how to use a specific animation application, to teach general principles and not have a class degenerate into a here’s-how-to-use-application-X session.

This explains why professional books on animation (as well as other books about media mega-apps) are so painfully prescriptive and why they are rarely used as primary university and college textbooks.

One way of getting the teaching/learning job done.

What I find myself doing is teaching from the bottom-up.  First, I get the students intrigued by suggesting something that would be fun or useful to build, like a  snowman.  Second, we do it with Maya, the animation application which is very much an industry standard and what I use as a teaching tool.  This second step, especially later in the class as we do more difficult and detailed things, can be very tedious.  (Sometimes I do it wrong the first time or two!)  Then third, we step back and address the general concept that underlies this fun or useful thing.  In the case of our snowman, it’s the basics of creating solids, such as spheres, out of flat polygon shapes.  This “geodesic dome” approach is a key component of most modeling and animation applications.

More on this later…