DV Filmmaking

Replacing Missing or Poorly Recorded Audio

The best way to ensure a good sound design for your project is to make sure you record good audio from the start. There are times when you’ll need to fabricate audio to match visuals in a project that don’t exist in real life, for example, laser gun blasts or spaceship engines. There are also times when you’ll need to add sound to strengthen the audio in a sequence, for example, adding footsteps or the wet thud of a punch solidly connecting with its target. This kind of sound addition is easily manageable through the art of Foley sound recreation, explored later in this section. You may also need to record and add voice over narration to a sequence, which is also a reasonably straightforward process covered in this section.

Replacing dialog, however, is a much more complicated business. Creating a single isolated sound and adding it to the appropriate part of a shot, so it looks like an organic part of a film, is fairly simple: look for the first frame in which the action occurs (for example, the previously mentioned fist connecting with an opponent’s body part), and then line up the start of your sound effect with the appropriate frame of action in the video track. When the sequence is played back, the sound begins in time with the picture. On-camera dialog is much more difficult to replace, because the sounds have to match the lip movements of the person speaking. A single thud is fairly easy to match with a single punch. Matching full ...