You can instantly add emotions from hilarity to dramatic suspense by including the right sound effects to your video.

Like music, good sound effects can be created on a computer or you can purchase royalty-free.   Searching royalty free sound effects is hilarious; listening to thousands for just the right BBLOWEEIEE to use with that broken scale shot for your weight loss ad.  Listening to sound effects always creates interesting visual thoughts!

SPICE UP YOUR VIDEO

Do you ever watch America’s Funniest Home Videos? They always spice up the vignettes people send in with the simple addition of sound effects and music.

The “canned” laugh track has been working our funny bone for decades on dozens of shows. Use this technique to your advantage.

RECORD YOUR OWN
In addition to awesome royalty free sound effects, you can often create a well recorded sound effect to use in your video simply right in your own home.
When you’re recoding your video, be aware of sound effects happening all around you. Doing a video on stress reduction? Those birds tweeting might come in real handy during editing. Make a conscious effort while shooting to pick up sounds you can use later as sound effects.  Technically, this would actually be called natural sound but that’s splitting hairs.

If the sound you’re going for is soft– like a clock ticking– record the sound separate from the video.

In other words, take your shot of the clock from a tripod ten feet away. Then, put your microphone (or camera with the mic on it) an inch from the clock in order to pick up the tick, tick, tick.

Then you add the tick, tick, tick sound to the shot taken from ten feet while editing.

AUDIO AND VIDEO ARE SEPARATE
Remember, the audio and video are actually two separate things. You can add any audio to any video while editing.  Unless you are working with a terribly primitive video editing program, the sound and the visual can easily be separated.

Better video editing programs allow you to add up to one-hundred tracks of audio at once! Honestly, that’s overkill.  I’ve never used more than twelve at a time.  But the ability to add multiple tracks that you mix together is essential for advanced video editing.

MOVIE-MAKING SOUND EFFECTS
The next time you’re watching a movie, keep in mind that a lot of the sound you’re hearing is completely manufactured in elaborate sound studios. The director needs a scene of a herd of trampling horses? In the world of big budgets, they take helicopter shots of a herd actually stampeding. But they want sound better than what they can get with the real thing.

Instead, they spend hours manufacturing the sound with anything from real horseshoes being beaten onto real dirt, to computers. They use any object they need to create whatever sound they want and it’s added during editing.

HOW YOU CAN ADAPT MOVIE MAKING TECHNIQUES
You probably can’t go quite that far.  But with a relatively good sound editing program, you can take the real sound of a real horse and duplicate it and overlap it and make one animal sound like a herd.

You can also go on a fun journey around the house to see what you have that makes noise. Pots and pans? Pillows and baseball bats? Water running? Bacon sizzling? If you don’t mind getting creative, you can figure out a way. We once did a swarm of insects with clacky toys.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips.

Lorraine Grula

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