Sound effects and music
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Video may be thought of as primarily a visual medium, but the role of sound in your movies is often no less important than that of the images on the screen.
Feature film and television productions include numerous types of audio, beginning with the dialog and other sounds created during live action. In your movies, that raw soundtrack is brought in along with the video during Capture mode. It appears in the Movie Window Timeline view on the original audio track below the video track. Original audio may also appear on the overlay audio track.
Most commercial productions also require sound effects – slamming doors, crashing cars, barking dogs, etc. – and incidental music, which may consist of music created especially for the production, songs taken from recordings, or both. Voice-overs and other customized audio are also often needed.
You can use all these types of add-on sound in your own movies:
· A good starter set of effects in wav format is installed with Studio, and others are available from many sources.
· The Background music tool automatically creates a music track of any desired duration in a variety of styles.
· You can drop mp3 files from the Album onto the Timeline or import audio or MP3 tracks from a CD with the CD audio tool.
· The Voice-over tool lets you add narration or commentary as you preview your edited video.
Audio, whatever its type, is added to your production as clips in the Movie Window. These can be moved around, trimmed and edited in much the same way as video clips and still images.
Once a sound clip is part of your movie, you can modify it with fades and other volume adjustments. An easy way to use fades and cross-fades is to add transitions to your audio clips.
You can adjust the positioning of your clips within a stereo or surround mix, and even change that positioning arbitrarily within the clip. You can also apply Studio’s audio effects, including noise reduction and reverb among others.
Availability: Surround sound is supported in Studio Ultimate only.
A “surround” mix goes beyond the two channels of stereo to provide a theater-style enveloping sound field for your DVD productions. Studio lets you set the apparent position of each audio track independently within the mix, and to “pan” the track (reposition it, whether smoothly or abruptly) in any desired direction as often as necessary over the course of your movie.
To preview surround sound while editing in Studio, you need a sound card that supports 5.1 channel output.
Note: Even if you cannot hear your surround mix when previewing, it will still appear on your DVDs, but a surround preview allows more accurate mixing.
A surround soundtrack can be output to the DVD in either of two forms:
· In Dolby Digital 5.1 format, each of the six surround channels is stored discretely on the
disc and will be routed directly to the corresponding speaker when played back on a full 5.1 surround playback system.
· In Dolby Digital 2.0 format, the surround mix is encoded onto two channels. When your DVD is played back on systems with a Pro Logic or Pro Logic 2 decoder, and a 5.1 or better speaker layout, the original surround information is recreated. On other systems, the encoded soundtrack will be heard as conventional stereo.
Studio lets you output your movie soundtrack as an audio file in wav (PCM), mp3 or mp2 format. Simply open the File tab in Make Movie mode as usual and select Audio as your file type. Several presets are available, with some typical settings for standard file types. The Custom preset lets you configure the type and settings of the output file as desired.
Soundtrack file output presets