Equalizing Audio

  So over the last few days I have been editing some videos. This isn’t something completely new to me as I have been doing this for a while(not so subtle youtube plug, check me out at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnRDX7wjYY-D8EmRQXwWPPQ), but I have been recently trying to figure out sound design. My god is it hard to do sound design and EQ and audio levels and all sorts of stuff. It can either be bad hardware, not having enough stuff to block out background noise, weird stuff on the software side with EQ, audio tracks and such not really cooperating with what you want to do. It’s downright crazy! A big example right now is not making audio sound like absolute crap when you do slow-mo. Now fortunately, the editing software I use has a pretty good automatic filter for doing that stuff, but manually adjusting it is hard. I think certain audio clips from my upcoming video are now just permanently burned into my head because of the sheer number of times I was listening to them. The worst part was sometimes it didn’t even feel like the audio was changing. I would do sweeping adjustments to my EQ curves and then feel like I was gaslighting myself to the absolute max with how subtle the changes were. It’s a very insane process, but highkey there was certainly something fun about it. I also have to give some credit to the absolute wealth of tutorials there are on the internet. Most of my issues come from it being the first time, which means that any and all tutorials just gave me more knowledge on what to do when the time came. Though, to go on a slightly different, but still related tangent, I genuinely have no idea how well any of the stuff I just learned will stick. A lot of it was just duct tape fixes and solutions that I just lifted from random youtube videos and just put onto the video until it sounded right. This isn’t to say I found bad videos, no like I said all of the videos I watched were very well made and informative. It was just the nature of me using them that makes it a little interesting to see how well I can apply them past just these projects. Of course, I could always just find them again, but that certainly wouldn’t be as efficient. Regardless of anything, the fun most certainly did come from actually hearing the differences in the end. I kept some raw audio clips for comparison’s sake and the magic that software EQ has is amazing. My balancing jobs could use a little work, but it doesn’t change the difference that I felt in my ears.


The other part is definitely audio. For these projects we had a bit of a jank setup that I kinda threw together in a short amount of time, but it sounds pretty good for what we had. The only thing is that even after shutting off like the majority of the active fans around the room, I think it was my house’s AC or something, but we could still hear a consistent blowing of air noise throughout the entire clip. Personally it doesn’t bother me that much, but I know some people are absolutely rabid when dissecting audio in video. Something I realized is that having a good audio recording setup definitely makes balancing the audio on the other end much easier. The summary is that really I just need to spend more time making both sides much better. 


How has your experience with audio been? I’m sure that my problems aren’t the most unique, but it was my first time so it kinda became a big deal for me. If you can relate I would love to hear more about your experiences and maybe if there are any guides/resources that you have used I would love to read them. Until then, that’s all you’ll be hearing from me until tomorrow when I come back in with another post!

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