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Sound Design for Video

Your audio is more important than your video! While audio and video go hand in hand, the audio quality in your video is far more important than the actual video quality. In this video I show you exactly why you'll watch poor quality video with good audio compared to nearly instantly turning off a video with great picture quality and really poor audio quality. Whether we're conditioned to poor video quality over the years, via viral videos being shot on potatoes or the fact that we're used to hearing better quality audio on a day to day basis from podcasts to Spotify, the one thing that we can all agree on is that audio is so much more important than how a video actually looks. How many times have you watched a video on Youtube or Facebook only to shut down the video because the audio was crackling or distorting. Poor audio quality is a huge turn off and having audio quality in your videos that is actually good isn't hard to do. And it's not that expensive either.

Sound is more important than video. This is what I reply when people ask me what camera gear they should buy? I made this video as a reply to all of my friends who continue to ask me about camera bodies. Whenever you think about investing in good quality video gear, there's no doubt that good quality lenses and professional sound are long-term investments. Everything else, even camera bodies, will lose their value over time and you are more likely to change the camera body in 3-4 years than your lenses or microphones. The misconception lays in the way we talk about video production. As the name suggests, VIDEO production will most likely drive the attention towards how the footage looks, completely ignoring sound design. This is the video where I get deeper into the elements of sound design and why sound can make the difference between high production film-like content and amateurish homemade schoolboy video footage. Don't forget, put your money in a good microphone if you are making videos where you want to be heard.

Let's talk about sound design. I'm going to show my exact process of sound designing...but to properly understand the thought process--and this is KEY--there are some foundations we must cover. Take a step back and think about what the ultimate goal of story telling: to immerse someone into the story you are creating, right? Well, imagine taking someone to Disneyland and making them to wear ear plugs the entire time. When we are creating our story, why deprive our viewer of one of their senses?

Learn how sound design can make anything cinematic in this video! Discover the importance of sound design in filmmaking and how it can elevate your videos to the next level. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, mastering cinematic sound can take your filmmaking to new heights!

Vocal Production for Video

Books and Library Videos

Sound Design for Moving Image by Kahra Scott-James
ISBN: 9781474235112
Publication Date: 2018-04-05
Sound Design for Moving Image offers a clear introduction to sound design theory and practice to help you integrate sound ideas into your productions. Contemporary soundtracks are often made up of hundreds of separate tracks, and thousands of individual sounds, including elements of dialogue, music and sound effects. As a result, many budding filmmakers find them a daunting prospect, and are tempted to leave sound to the last stages of post-production. This book, from award-winning Sound Designer Kahra Scott-James, encourages you to incorporate sound into your pre-production planning, to make the most of this powerful narrative tool. Adopting a specific framework in order to help demystify sound design for moving image, the book isn't designed as a sound engineering handbook, but as a guide for moving image content creators wanting to explore sound and collaborate with sound designers. Regardless of medium, the same, or similar concepts can be adopted, adapted, and applied to any project employing sound. Includes detailed and insightful interviews with leading sound designers, including Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound, and Glenn Kiser, Director of the Dolby Institute.
Post Sound Design by John Avarese
ISBN: 9781501327483
Publication Date: 2017-06-29
Post Sound Design provides a practical introduction to the fascinating craft of editing and replacing dialog, creating Foley and sound effects, editing music, and balancing these elements to a final mix. Based on years of experience and teaching this material to students at Drexel University, award-winning film composer John Avarese offers user-friendly knowledge and stimulating exercises to help compose story, develop characters and create emotion through skillful creation of the sound track. Starting each chapter with a real-life example, the textbook is structured in such a way to create a fundamental understanding of the physics and the biological foundation of hearing, and putting it into practice with suggested movie scenes demonstrating the discussed audio techniques. Post Sound Design engagingly demonstrates the individual areas essential to creating a soundtrack that will enhance any media production.
The Palgrave handbook of sound design and music in screen media : integrated soundtracks The Palgrave handbook of sound design and music in screen media : integrated soundtracks by Liz Greene & Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, editors
ISBN: 9781137516800
Publication Date: 2016
This book bridges the existing gap between film sound and film music studies by bringing together scholars from both disciplines who challenge the constraints of their subject areas by thinking about integrated approaches to the soundtrack. As the boundaries between scoring and sound design in contemporary cinema have become increasingly blurred, both film music and film sound studies have responded by expanding their range of topics and the scope of their analysis beyond those traditionally addressed. The running theme of the book is the disintegration of boundaries, which permeates discussions about industry, labour, technology, aesthetics and audiovisual spectatorship. The collaborative nature of screen media is addressed not only in scholarly chapters but also through interviews with key practitioners that include sound recordists, sound designers, composers, orchestrators and music supervisors who honed their skills on films, TV programmes, video games, commercials and music videos.

Key Concepts in Sound Design - Digital Theatre+
This episode on sound design uses examples from Steven Berkoff's Metamorphosis and Vincent Dance Theatre's Virgin Territory, amongst other shows and takes a comparative look at the use of sound in three adaptations of Macbeth.