Outstanding Audio – Mastering the Mix

Once you’re ready to crack on, grab those  headphones from your audio kit. If you’re taking audio seriously, you’ll need some decent ones now. As we’ve said throughout this entire series, your ears are ultimately the best judge of how your audio is coming together. Ideally you should also have a decent set of desktop speakers but, failing this, use a pair of professional headphones like the Sennheiser HD25s that you should have already in your sound bag.

If you’ve been out recording audio separately from your main camera(s) then make sure you have all the media clearly marked and organised. All my external recorders can title the file, with information that can include the date/time of recording, which really helps. As a top tip, make sure that all your devices are set to roughly the same time/date. I always forget to set one of the cameras or mixers when the clocks move forward or back, and then can’t understand why my shots are all out of time sequence. It’s not the end of the world, but it really helps when trying to match the audio with video, and some apps /systems will use the date/time in the clips as one of the things required to get them all synced up.

I usually organise my audio by type. This will mean that I’ll have my ‘main’ audio, which is from my recorder, then I’ll have separate folders, or events – or whatever your edit software likes to call them – for my sound effects, with perhaps another for different sections such as vox pops, studio interviews etc. Keeping them all organised will help massively when the times comes to pull everything into the main timeline.

It’s now time to put all the components together. Working with audio is like building a layer cake, with each audio element being another slice of texture. You need to start at the bottom and then work your way up.