Sound Workshop- Polishing.

Having done the bulk of my work in Pro Tools, I started to pay attention to sound levels. Harry took us through how to create our master track, and how to compress tracks to ensure that our audio was mixed to -10db, which is the industry standard. For the most part, I found that my master track was overall slightly too loud, and this meant I could place a compressor on the master track to try and control the piece as a whole. However, there were still places where the sound went over the limit. Fixing this was not difficult, it's just a question of placing compressors on individual tracks, or taking the volume down on that track in general. However, it can be time consuming especially if you have many tracks and can't figure out where a particularly loud part of the piece is coming from.

Another issue I came across in the later parts of my editing was a couple of popping noises on one of the audio tracks. We tried to cut it out, and then crossfade other parts of the track together, but it made it worse, and it certainly didn't provide a solution. Pro Tools does have a feature which allows you to get rid of these anomalies, but unfortunately the versions of Pro Tools at the university did not include this. So, Harry suggested exporting the track into Adobe Audition and using an element of its noise reduction effects to get rid of this. It took a couple of tries, but thankfully the intelligent feature in Audition meant that the pops were completely gone/inaudible after going through the process.

After putting it back into Pro Tools, Audition had made the track into one connected piece (bottom) and you can see the original was disjointed (top).