Beyond Print
Designing a Soundscape
Creative Sound Design with Soundtrack Pro
Making the jump into the world of motion graphics opens up new creative possibilities for your design work. As a designer, you may start to receive requests from clients for motion graphics based projects including web design, podcasts, and client presentations. These days, the creation of visual elements serves only a part of your clients needs. You’ll also need to create sound elements that provide a soundtrack for your visual designs. The art of combining sound to create a final soundtrack for a project is called sound design and it offers you the chance to add yet another layer of creativity to your projects.
A great tool for creating your sound design is Soundtrack Pro. After you have created your visual elements, Soundtrack Pro makes it easy to import them into your audio project allowing you to edit your audio in perfect sync with your video. The tools in Soundtrack Pro provide precise control over your audio elements and make it easy to nudge your sound into place so that your voiceover lines up with your video exactly as you want it.
You’ll notice the layout is similar to the interface of Final Cut Pro. The interface is divided into different panes that make it easy to customize the workspace to fit the way you want to work.
The Project Pane is where you do the majority of your audio editing work. Think of it as your audio canvas. Your audio is represented visually as a waveform. This allows you to actually see the audio that you are working with. Audio is placed on one of the tracks in the Timeline. The Timeline is a visual representation of your project over time.
The Lower Pane has multiple tabs giving you access to different tasks such as mixing or editing files.
The Left Pane contains information about your project, displays any video in the project, and contains the effects tab for applying effects, such as reverb and delay, to your project.
The Right Pane holds the browser for organizing and accessing all of the audio in your project and on your computer.
Another important source of information are the Heads-up displays (HUDs). These are semi-transparent floating windows that provide easy access to controls to help you with the task at hand. These windows will appear when you activate certain features within the program.
Heads-up display (HUD) for an equalizer
Cleaning Up Noisy Audio
The best place to record audio is in a controlled environment like a recording studio.
So what happens when you need to work with some audio that was recorded in less than perfect conditions such as some voiceover that you recorded for use in a podcast?
Most likely, you are going to end up with audio tracks that contain some kind of unwanted noise. This can be anything from the hum of an air conditioner to people chatting nearby. The process of cleaning up audio files is similar to touching up an image in Photoshop. Soundtrack Pro has some great tools to help you touch up your audio quickly and easily. Just follow these easy steps:
Using Set Noise Print to identify the noisy portion of an audio file.
- Step 1: Locate the audio file in the browser.
- Step 2: Double-click it to open it in the Project window.
- Step 3: Drag your cursor over a noisy portion of the file to highlight it.
- Step 4: From the Process menu select Noise Reduction > Set Noise Print.
- Step 5: Press Command – A to select the entire audio file.
- Step 6: From the Process menu select Noise Reduction > Reduce Noise.
Step 7: In the Reduce Noise Heads-up display, press the play button to begin playback. Adjust the Noise Threshold slider to find the right balance of noise reduction and audio quality. Let your ears guide you on this. You don’t have to be a professional audio engineer to know what sounds good.
