Premiere Elements 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Edit Your Sound Track

If you stay in the theater at the end of a movie as everyone else heads for the door, you may get a glimpse of seemingly endless credits. Somewhere in there, along with the drivers, caterers, publicists, assistants, and accountants, you’ll see a credit for the sound designer. What a great description for the art of making a movie sound as good as it looks. Just as you build the visuals in your movie by layering video clips, special effects, and titles on top of each other, so you build its audio portion, with multiple tracks that may include music, sound effects, and narration.

Chapter 3 explained how to get sound files into your computer. This chapter explains how you craft a Hollywood-style soundtrack by layering dialog, sound effects, music, and narration, and then fine-tuning those tracks using volume settings and all kinds of effects for sound that Premiere provides.

When a soundtrack is done right, your audience is moved emotionally. They may not realize how much the sound affected them, but they’ll feel its influence.

Design Sound from the Start

The first rule of sound design is to treat your audio as an equal partner to your video. That means you need to plan on capturing sound just as you planned on capturing video. Before you start shooting, you identify and organize all your visual elements: You decide where you want your actors, where to put the camera, and what’s visible in the background.

When you capture sound, you should go through a ...