Improve your Edit through Sound Design

If there is one way to dramatically improve the quality of your editing, it’s to improve your understanding of story structure. The next best way to improve the quality of your picture editing is to improve your sound editing.

If you’re just starting out and you want a couple of practical tips on how to improve the quality of your audio with very little effort, I would suggest the following things, which I’m describing how to do in Adobe Premiere Pro, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to adapt to your video editing software of choice.

• Tiny cross-dissolves on every cut

I’ve changed the default audio transition in Premiere to be about 2 frames long. This means I can simply, lasso over a whole bunch of audio clips, press one keyboard short cut and have tiny cross-fades across every edit in about 1 second.
The benefit of this is that if there are any blips, clips, or jolts between my audio edits, they’ll largely be smoothed out with this process. Anything that requires more attention will stand out.
Change the default audio transition under: Premiere Pro > Preferences > Timeline
The default keyboard shortcut for applying the default audio transition is: SHIFT+CMD+D

• Multiband Compression

Most of the projects I cut have fairly simple audio; dialogue, sync sound and music. One of the fastest ways to ensure your dialogue always remains audible above your music is to add the Multiband Compressor effect on your clips.

I drop this effect on and follow a three-step process to get around a random bug with this effect.

1. Change the dropdown menu to anything else, and then change it back to Broadcast to apply these settings.
2. Adjust the margin to -4.5dB
3. Adjust the Output Gain if the level is to low or too high on the audio meters

Here Is The Output Render File Watch It!