Sound Editing

When listening to the dialogue in our draft trailer, we noticed a significant amount of white noise/hiss that affected the quality of the speech heard. This not only made it harder for the person watching to understand what was being said, but it negatively impacted the professionalism of our trailer, so in order to solve this issue we used Adobe Audition to reduce the white noise.

To begin with, we had to import the file that we wanted to edit the audio of. This was an easy process.

After selecting "Import > File", we just had to find the file. We did this by searching the name of it so we didn't have to spend unnecessary time looking through folders. When we found it, we just selected it and clicked "Open".

When the file has been imported, the sound-wave of the audio is shown, as can be seen above. The height of the sound-waves indicate the volume of the audio at that point. If you look closely at the image shown here, you can see that even at points that are meant to be silent, you can still see a small amount of amplitude - this is the white noise we wanted to reduce.

After importing the audio, the whole track had to be selected, so that both the dialogue and all the "silence" that we were trying to clean up would be included when the changes were made.

The next step clicking "Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > "Hiss Reduction (process)". This is effect we used to refine the audio.

This is the window that opens after selecting the Hiss Reduction effect. By adjusting the levels of the noise floor and how much you want to reduce the hiss by, you can work out where the optimum balance between quality of audio and reduction of white noise. We listened back to the audio repeatedly during this process to find the point of hiss reduction we were happy with.

These are the levels we decided on. As you can see from the sound-wave, the parts of the audio that are meant to be silent have less amplitude than they initially did, showing that the white noise has been reduced.

The final step was simply saving the file. Then we put the edited audio back into the trailer, and we used it as our final audio.