Editing Dialogue Audio: 7 Steps to Get Better Dialogue (Tutorial)

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this dialogue sounds pretty bad and this dialogue sounds a lot better I'm gonna
show you how to do this right now let's take a look
what's up guys welcome back to another video if you're new here my name's Jay
and if you're into things like video editing tutorials gear reviews and vlogs
about being a full time creator then make sure you subscribe to my channel
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today we're talking about dialogue a lot of you guys have been asking me how
I edit my dialogue especially since I did a review on this microphone about a
week ago you guys all wanted to know how I got the dialogue sounding the way that
I got it and today I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that but before we do
that before we jump into the actual tutorial we need to talk about the
recording process cuz really when it comes to getting good sounding dialogue
it all starts with the recording and there's really two things to keep in
mind one you want to be using the right microphone for the right situation and
two you want to have your levels set before you hit record so if you're
popping a new microphone onto your camera for the first time or even if
you're going through a mixing board make sure you set your recording levels so
that the dialogue is peaking somewhere between negative 12 and negative 6 dB if
you look at an audio meter you have that green section that yellow section in
that red section you want your dialogue to be peaking somewhere in that yellow
section now I've got that sequence from the beginning of this video queued up in
DaVinci Resolve I'm going to show you how I edit this in DaVinci but if you're
using a different editing software as long as you can normalize your audio add
a compressor at EQ and add a limiter you should be able to follow along as well
and with that being said let's dive in alright so we're here in the Fairlight
Audio tab in DaVinci Resolve for those of you who are following along in the
same software let's just take a look at what I am gonna be working with today
over here to the left we have our Fairlight effects we may or may not be
using some of these specifically the de-esser depending on how everything sounds over
to the right in the middle we have all of the audio that's in our timeline over
to the right we have our mixer and at some point we will be going into the
inspector to do a little bit of tweaking with the volume now the first thing that
we want to do is normal our audio and normalization is actually
a two-part process there's the automatic normalization that you can do within
pretty much any editing software but then you want to take an extra step and
go through each clip individually and make sure that they all sound like
they're at the same level and the reason why we go through each clip individually
is because normalization just raises and lowers the volume until your highest
peak in the clip reaches the point that you set so if you set your normalization
level to negative 3 dB it's gonna raise or lower each clip until the highest
peak of that clip hits negative 3 dB the problem is each clip has a different
highest peak so they're gonna sound a little bit different you really want to
go back and make sure that overall everything sounds like it's at the same
level now in this tutorial I don't have to go through each clip because we're
actually only editing this clip that's an audio 2 but I still want to
normalize it so all I'm gonna do is right click on the clip I'm gonna go
down and normalize audio levels and I'm gonna normalize to negative 6 hit
normalize and there we go like I said I'm not doing anything up
in to audio 1 because for the purposes of this video for comparison I want just
the raw audio out of the microphone up here the next thing that I want to do is
change this track from a stereo track to a mono track if you are editing dialogue
and you also have music behind it and sound effects and ambient noise you
definitely want to change your dialogue tracks to a mono track and that's
because when you're messing with stereo width which sometimes I do you can see
in my big DaVinci Resolve tutorial that I messed with the stereo with a little
bit I want my dialogue to stay in the center of that spectrum so in order to
do that I need to change it to a mono track and to do that is very easy again
we're gonna come over here to the track we're gonna right click on the track
we're gonna go to change track type 2 mono alright step 3 is kind of optional
you don't really have to do this but it's something that I tend to do as a
above-and-beyond thing is I want to get rid of any extreme peaking before I do
any kind of compression or limiting or anything
that and that's it's just gonna make the edit a lot cleaner down the road so if
you look at our audio clip you can see right around here we have a pretty big
peak in comparison to the rest of the clip we want to get rid of that and
we're gonna use keyframes in order to do that so we're just gonna bring our
playhead over here I'm gonna zoom in on this track just a little bit that should
be good I'm gonna set a keyframe open up our
inspector I'm gonna add a keyframe add another keyframe
and another keyframe I'm gonna go ahead and bring the volume down on that one
peak just to even everything out zoom that out make sure we got rid of the
peak everything looks fairly even there we're gonna go ahead and renormalize
this clip to negative six and that looks pretty good alright the next thing that
we're gonna do is add a compressor and a compressor does exactly what you might
think it does it compresses the waveform it takes your lowest volumes and brings
it up it takes your highest volumes and brings them down and makes it so your
volume throughout each track each clip is fairly level and it doesn't fluctuate
too much and this will end up because it's bringing that low end up a little
bit it's gonna actually give you a fuller sound in your voice just a word
of caution you don't want to compress too much because if you do you're gonna
end up sounding like a robot because there'll be no fluctuation whatsoever in
your voice now in most editing software's you take the compressor
effect and you drag it onto your clip and you edit from there in DaVinci
Resolve it's actually a little bit simpler than that let's dive in alright
so to add a compressor we're actually gonna add the compressor across the
whole track here so I'm gonna just come over to dynamics for audio two and
double click you can see down here we have expander/gate compressor and
limiter we're gonna go ahead and add that compressor by clicking on
compressor I'm gonna keep this at a two to one ratio we're gonna lower the
attack lower the release and bring the threshold to negative 15 I'm gonna bring
up our gain a little bit until the top of this line hits the corner seven point
five that looks good and we're done alright the next step is where the magic
happens now we're gonna mess with the EQ a little bit and once again I'm doing
the effects across the entire track because everything is filmed with the
same microphone in the same location if you wanna EQ track-by-track you can just
click on your track open up your inspector and activate the clip
equalizer get out of the inspector we're gonna come over here to audio to double
click equalizer so the first thing we're gonna do is activate band 1 and band 6
that's gonna get rid of some unwanted noise on the low and the high end of our
dialog we're then gonna change the pattern of band 2 to Q same thing over
on band 5
and I'm gonna take our cue factor and bring it all the way down on those same
two tracks I'm gonna come over here to
band 2 we're gonna raise that up to plus 15
come over to band 5 raise that up to +10
we're gonna take bands 3 & 4 and bring them down and listening to that back it
sounds a little tinny to me so I actually want to go back into my
compressor and compress that just a little bit more and go ahead and lower
the threshold and raise the gain and from there you just want to keep going
back and forth between your compressor and your equalizer until it sounds just
right
all right I've got it sounding almost exactly how I want it the only thing I
want to do now is add a limiter to limit some of the fluctuation in the voice so
I'm gonna come back over here to dynamics and double click I'm gonna
activate my limiter I'm gonna bring that down to 14 I'm gonna set my threshold to
15 I'm gonna bring my attack down I'm gonna bring my release down
now there's another thing that I want to do here which is get rid of some of the
noise there's a lot of noise under all my dialog there's the the compressor
from this little mini-fridge right behind me there's the buzzing from the
lights there's just there's just noise this is not a very sound friendly room
so back in dynamics again we're gonna activate our gate let's increase the
hold a little bit because it's cutting my voice out just a little bit too much
and that sounds perfect take a listen this dialogue sounds
pretty bad and this dialogue sounds a lot better I'm gonna show you how to do
this right now let's take a look now these settings these effects that I use
the effects that I use are pretty much standard you want to use these same
effects the the noise gate and the limiter and the compression and all that
stuff you want to use those but as far as the specific settings you want to
make sure to go through and tweak them to your liking everything that I did was
based on what I know about this microphone what I know about my own
voice what I know about this room and how the sound carries in this room
everything is custom everything is tweaked there is no one-size-fits-all
settings for your dialogue you really need to play around with it and get the
sound that you like but either way I hope that this helped and I hope that it
at least pointed you in the right direction so you know kind of how to
think about your dialogue and and how to kind of get this sound that you want and
if it did please let me know in the comments give this
video a like if it didn't and you still have more questions again let me know in
the comments I'd be happy to help you as much as I possibly can and with that
like this video if you enjoyed it share it if you think your friends will enjoy
it and don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell if you haven't done so already
I will be back on Monday with a brand new video but until then thanks for
hanging out and I will talk to you later see ya

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Editing Dialogue Audio: 7 Steps to Get Better Dialogue (Tutorial)

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