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Tip #336: 5 Essential Tips for Editing Soundbites

… for Random Weirdness

Tip #336: 5 Essential Tips for Editing Soundbites

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

It takes a lot of work to make a soundbite sound natural.

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This article, written by Jourdan Aldredge, first appeared in PremiumBeat.

Quality audio is the key to any interview. Yet, working with sound bites is always a challenge because they are filled with pauses, interruptions and awkward phrasing.

  • Look for the good stuff. Look for crisp, concise, and complete bites first. Then, go back and look for good bits that can be built into a complete sentence.
  • Remove ‘umms’ and pauses. Make sure you have B-roll to cover your edits, then delete the pauses, awkward beats and ripple edit everything back together.
  • Edit on valleys. When editing audio, always be sure to cut where the waveform is as small as possible.
  • Edit on similar syllables. If you must edit in a word, edit on similar syllables who’s waveform peaks are roughly the same level
  • Verify the soundbites. After the bites are edited, listen to them closely to make sure they still make sense and fit with the rest of the interview.

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1 reply
  1. Mike Janowski
    Mike Janowski says:

    And here, I’ll give you one for free…when editing sound (as I do all the time), set your default audio transition to two frames, and use it to blend syllables (or do you say “syLAHbulls”?) at the cut; to rid yourself of annoying “pops” at a hard cut point; and to generally make your sound edits more seamless.

    Reply

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