Hi All,

Is anyone interested in learning more on the topic of editing audio for video productions?  I started to write an article on this topic, then thought I could finish it and expand it into a tutorial, but before I go to the effort of doing this I wanted to see if this was a topic that anyone would be interested in this as a topic?

Why Audio Editing can be much more challenging than video editing.

This is an introduction for those who would like to edit audio for their video productions.  Audio, especially voice synchronization is probably the most difficult challenge for the home or small video editing producer.  Second would be the precise placement of sound effects in a video to provide the most impact.  This series of articles will be geared towards the video producer who really wants to provide accurate editing for the audio component of their productions.

Let's start with the very basics.  For most home or even some professional video producers, the software they use to produce their videos edit at the very most at 1 frame per second.  1 frame per second (for NTSC) is 1 sixtieth of a second.  That may sound like a very short time frame, but try cutting out 1 frame on both your video and audio tracks for speech, or music, and see what the result is.  The result is that your audio drops out and sounds strange.  Do this often enough and your audio track sounds like the sound drops out.  Or try removing 1 frame from your video and leave the audio intact and what happens?  Your audio is out of synch for the entire sequence.

Audio editing is probably one of the least understood concepts of most producers using typical consumer editing products and a big cause of frustration for many.  It is actually not as hard or mysterious as it may seem, and there are tools out there that can do this that are available for free.  Magix provides some really good tools to help remove audio noise, unwanted sounds, etc. from video with their Sound Cleaner for Video and a few other products.  Unfortunately, these products really only work well at the video frame level.  When actually to really synchronize audio most effectively, you need to be working at the millisecond or in some cases the microsecond level.

Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in exploring further.
Thank you,
George