Work with audio: Deal with bad audio - HitFilm Express Tutorial

- [Instructor] So when it comes to dealing with problematic audio in HitFilm Express, it is somewhat limited, but I wanna start off the conversation by talking about what you might hear, which is a little pop in between the harsh cuts that are occurring in our audio track when we cut from one sentence to another, which are separate cuts. So, for instance, if I start to play back around the edit point here between two of Lindsey's thoughts which we've cut up and spliced together, it might not sound so natural. So let me just move my play head, just gonna press the - [Lindsey] I've lived my whole life on the beach. Going to the beach for the sunset or the sunrise, is kinda a vital part of my day. That's my. - [Instructor] So there are a couple different problems going on here. If we go to the first cut. One is that, in some ways we can hear from one cut to another. A way that we can smooth that up is by actually using what's known as an audio transition or an audio cross fade in order to kinda smooth out the transition from one audio source to the other. How I'm gonna do that is actually head up to the view menu, and under Workspaces itself I'm gonna go to audio. So if you're in a Windows version of HitFilm Express you'll see that there isn't a view menu. But if you look close to the top of the interface you'll see that there's actually a grid up here towards the top. And this is your gateway to the various workspaces that we accessed through the view menu on my Mac. This is just gonna give me a much better layout for working with audio, which will be over the next couple movies. And over on the right hand side, we should see an effects tab. If we don't, we can always just go here to this little grid, make sure effects are showing. And under effects is a category here for audio. Now I have a few extra audio effects that you'll see listed here. This is just because I have an extra pack I want to show you So HitFilm Express offers additional bundles, as they call it, so that you have more options as it comes to post production away from its free version. In this instance, we're not looking for an audio effect as much as we're looking for an audio transition. So I'm gonna scroll down to the very bottom, or I'll see transition for audio. Two in particular under the folder. One is a cross fade. Now to apply the cross fade, you simply can select it and add it to an edit point. This can be added to the end of an edit, to the start of an edit, or centered over the edit. Now in many cases, if you're using this to clean up the little potential pops that you might hear as you transition from one audio source to another, the result of this might be a little too long. So let me just zoom in to show this to you. With the editor selected, I'll press shift, command, equal. I'll move my play head back and press. - [Lindsey] Whole life on the beach. Going to the beach. - [Instructor] So we can see this overlap of audio from some audio that happens previously on the incoming clip and after on the outgoing clip. In order to fix this, we really just need to take the duration of the audio transition. Which can see here, it's 28 frames and make it a lot shorter So, what I might do is just grab on with my regular tool. And we can see hear that I'm adjusting one side of the audio transition. I'll just undo that. And by the way, I'm gonna now just repeat that on the opposite side. Now just trimming this to be a lot shorter. I really want this audio transition in this particular case to be just about three frames long. You transition. And this should be enough to smooth out the transition. Gonna move play head a little bit earlier and press the - [Lindsey] Life on the beach, going to the beach for the. - [Instructor] And it's not so clear now the transition between one audio source to the other. Because we did cut up Lindsey's dialogue. It's a great way to get rid of some of the problematic audio that we would be seeing as it occurs in our video clips. Express, it's basic package, it's free, doesn't allow you to adjust things such as background noise. What you need to do is actually go to your home. And see that there's add on packs. And if you take a close look, one of these audio packs is meant for audio. It's called the Audio: Toolkit. You can see that I have it installed. You can go and choose to buy this for additional amount. And it will give you a certain amount of free effect filters that you can use in your HitFilm Express projects. Heading back to the edit tab. If I scroll up in my effects tab I will see here that, under audio, I have some additional effects. In particular, it includes a compressor. Especially also an equalizer and a noise reduction effect. So in some of these cases there might be some background noise that you'll want to remove. And this is how you can do the following task inside of HitFilm Express. You can first of all play back a clip to identify where the noisy background is. And then you can simply drag the effects on to the clip. Now, in order to identify what is noisy you need to find the section of your clip, in particular, a frame that is just noise and not, in the instance, Lindsey talking. So by using the period key and the command key I could try to find a silent area. I'm just gonna do that now. I'm gonna use the period key and the command key to find a silent area. (clip noise) So right around here seems to be a great area. And just to let you know, the controls for the noise reduction effect are down here on the lower left hand corner in the controls tab. You can take any tab and dock it to another window just to get a better view of it. If I press this closure triangle next to that I can capture a noise print based on this particular frame of the audio. Now what this is gonna do is allow me to reduce the noise by a certain decibel level. The larger the amount the more it removes that noise. And then there's this threshold level which is how much is selected here, how much to reduce around that particular noise production frame or noise print that we've addressed. Now in my own experiences I've found this effect to be somewhat limited. Now you should keep in mind that there's a program called Audacity that's free that allows for a different type of noise reduction that you could use. In the case of our project, we use Dolby Addition, which has a very similar tool inside. Where we can actually see the audio wave form. And by simply selecting the noise only, we capture a noise print. And based on that noise print, then apply a noise effect to and lower particular frequencies by a certain amount. There is another way to do this in HitFilm Express besides this noise reduction. And that is your option to use equalizer. And equalizer effect contains specific frequencies inside of it, for which you can target. In fact, you can apply it to an audio clip. I just undid the actual effect that I added previously to this shot, which was the noise reduction tool. And you can see over here that there is a certain amount of decibels. And these are targeting specific frequencies. Another thing you can do is use specific presets. Some really good ones for noise and particular things such as hum, are what we would call a high pass filter. A high pass filter, what it does is allows certain frequencies above a certain amount to pass. While a low pass filter allows certain frequencies above a certain amount to pass. And this could cut off high or low frequencies which might be annoying in a particular project. So this actual tool allows you to fix a lot of potential problems that could happen. But again, if you're looking to do some professional removal of background noise, or things that happen throughout your project, you might be better suited off in a program such as Audition or Audacity to get rid of some of those audio problems. So cross phase can go a long way in terms of smoothing up some of this dialogue. You might want to go to the last clip here in the project where there is in fact a hawk that's heard over Lindsey's voice. And what we want to note is that I actually had to use a very specialized tool to remove that because the hawks frequencies were very similar to Lindsey's voice. One really cool thing about this suite is it allows you to work with and see frequencies through their effects panel. So we can target a specific frequency looking at the wave forms and then be able to work with that frequency and minimize a distracting sound. This in some ways goes above the capabilities of HitFilm Express's default audio effects. And there you have it. Dealing with bad sound inside of HitFilm Express.