Audio Asset Exercise

In this exercise, you will be experimenting with adding audio to prerendered video. Using video editing software, as well as audio editing software, you will be creating sound assets and adding them to a video file.

You will need to find a creative commons video to work with. There are resources such as Pexels that provide access to free stock videos that you can use. You will then cut down this video to 30-60 seconds long, mute any audio currently in the video, and add your own audio assets (a soundtrack, sound effects, voice, etc) to create a cohesive soundscape.

For this exercise you will need atleast 4 audio files, a music soundtack and 3 sound effect clips. For the music soundtrack you are free to find a free one online. The sound effects however must be original records made by yourself.

You are free to use any video editing software that you wish. During class I will be using shotcut website(which is not installed on the lab machines), which is a free and open source similar to tools like Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas.

Finding / Editing Audio

You can acquire audio files in a number of different ways. These include but are not limited to recording them yourself, finding them on a website that hosts creative commons audio or using tools to create your own sound effects and music.

For music, try resources such as this creativecommons.org article.

For the sound effects, you need to make the recordings yourself. You can then use the audacity skills you learned from the readings to trim and/or edit these recordings.

Adding Audio to your Project

Once you have some audio, you can import it in the same way as the video or you can simply drag the file into the “playlist” window. Click the “hamburger” menu button on the timeline window, and click “Add Audio Track”. You should see a new track appear in the timeline. Drag your audio file from your playlist into the audio track and position it so that it lines up with your video properly.

Continue doing this with audio files until you feel there is a proper amount of audio to match the video. Your video should have backing music, as well as 3 other audio files (SFX, voice over, etc). Feel free to do more.

Rendering

To create a single video file containing your new audio, you will need to “render” your project down to a single file. Click the “export” button at the top of the Shotcut window. A new window will open. At the left side, select the “youtube” preset, and then press “Export File”. Name it and choose somewhere to save it to. You should see a “Jobs” window pop up, with the render progress underway. This will take a minute or two to fully render out your video depending on the length of your video clip and the number of audio layers you added.

Submission

When you are done upload your rendered video and the sound effects you made onto your GitHub repo we made in class. Make a copy of this HTML Template and update all of its contents. When you are done upload that file to your GitHub repo. Get a link to that page and upload it to the Exercise: Audio dropbox on myCourses.