Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies®

Chapter 19. Adding Special Effects

In This Practice

• Applying special effects (SFX)

• Working with background action

• Mixing in Foley FX

• Building your SFX library

When you start podcasting, a good rule is to keep it simple. That's easy to do, sure, especially if you want to crank out your episodes and spend only a day or two editing and mixing in any music. “Keeping it simple” gets tougher to do, though, when you explore some of the higher‐end audio programs and the cool bells and whistles they offer. Filters. Effects. Audio loops. With so many cool toys to play with, your mind begins to get a little crazy mulling over everything you can do with all these extra touches.

That is the trick in mastering all those wacky special effects and royalty‐free music loops — playtime. Some of the coolest effects you can come up with for your podcast simply happen from sitting behind the application and playing with it. While we can't teach you how to play with effects, we can take a simple scene from a podcast (provided on the DVD) and dive into your application's filters and effects, and add a new depth to what begins as a very static scene.

Along the way, we also talk about permissions, licenses, and when too much is too much.

Adding in Foley Effects and Filters

Foley effects are studio‐quality sound effects of the simple, everyday moments of life captured and then edited or dropped into works of audio or video. The term gets its name from sound‐effects pioneer Jack Foley who, in the 1930s, took the art ...