Audio and Video Post-Production Tips

Whether you're recording in high quality video or audio, having a solid post production workflow will bring your content to the next. Obviously you wanna start with the cleanest recording possible. That's why you use Riverside, but sometimes you or your guests may have background noise in the recording.

Maybe the image was recorded in low resolution, or you just want to have pristine and properly equalized audio. Well, here are some strategies for having a streamlined and quality post-production workflow. Before you do any editing, cleaning up your audio and video is key. If you or your guest audio was damaged during the recording, or maybe there's some background.

Here's some software tools to try. I use Izotope RX 9. It's an incredible suite of audio plugin tools. It has things like D noise, even deep breath, where it'll take you out breath throughout the recording. And of course you can remove echo and reverb. So maybe your guest was in an echoy environment, or maybe you had to record in one, if you have to remove some background noise from a clip, can Izotope has tools for that, or if you have Adobe audition and access to the Adobe creative.

The Adobe capture noise print can actually capture static noise, whether it's background noise or crowd noise, and then you can do the noise removal process, and it can remove some of that background noise. And you have to be mindful because the more noise you remove, the more robotic a voice may be. You can equalize some of that out later, but just be mindful how much you weigh the background noise with the clarity of voice.

Now, actually a great tool that's come out recently is Final Cut Voice Isolation. This is Apple's technology that they even use during FaceTime calls. So when you're on a FaceTime call, voice isolation can help focus on the spoken voice of participants on the call. You can actually use that now in Final Cut. There's still the noise removal tool in Final Cut, but now voice isolation, I actually find works incredibly well, whether it's an echoy environment or there's background. Try out that voice isolation feature is just a toggle with a slider that goes from zero to a hundred.

And I have found that I can crank that up pretty high and it still keeps clarity and understandability in the spoken voice. Now, when it comes to repairing video, it's actually more difficult cause you're dealing with lots of pixels. It can be processor intensive to run some of these plugins, but there are some tools you can try.

If there's some noise, maybe you were recording at night and your video is grainy or noisy. Maxon Red Giant actually has some plugins to reduce that noise. You can find lots of plugins for this online, but the Red Giant ones are some of the best in the industry. And again has D noise and D grain to help that video look cleaner, not as noisy.

Again, if you recorded in low light, there's also plugins available from Topaz Labs that can actually increase quote, unquote, the resolution. So maybe something. Filmed in low quality, maybe 4080 P or you're just trying to crop into something and then make it bigger while still retaining quality. We'll put links to Topaz labs and the red giant plugins in the video description.

And of course, if you're talking about color grading, maybe you filmed an HLG or some kind of slog format on your camera, a very flat profile that looks gray until you do some kind of color correction. You might want to use something called a LUT, L U T. It stands for Look-up Table and LUTs are available to purchase from many different YouTubers online and different camera manufacturers, even Sony, Panasonic, and can, will have LUTs on their websites.

You can download for free and a LUT takes some of that log footage or very flat footage and provides just kind of a base level color helps you get started. And then you can tweak more color from there. We'll put links in the video description to some LUTs. You can try. Now, once you've done any repairs to the audio and video that you can, it's time to clean and process the audio itself.

You probably wanna put equalizer, especially on spoken voice, depending on the voice type. You might want to take out some lows in that hundred hertz and lower frequency. Maybe take out some highs and boost things in the mid. Again, equalizing is different for every voice. So you have to play around with both your voice and any guest you might have.

Don't use the same equalizer settings for both you and your guest. See what sounds best with each voice time. You also might want to use a compressor. Compressor settings can boost a little bit of gain. If there was a very low volume recording, it can help boost that up a little bit. You wanna be mindful, you don't wanna peak or drive it too hard.

A compressor can also bring down loud sounds during the track. Let's say your guest laughs very loud, but talks very quietly this way. When someone's listening, the laughs aren't shocking or abrupt and they can actually hear when the person's speaking as well, play around with the threshold for compressor and the ratio, the ratio setting in a compressor decides how much the volume is lowered while the threshold decides when the compressor kicks.

You might also try a noise gate. The noise gate setting will actually mute a track or eliminate any volume. Once it goes under a certain threshold, let's say your guest had some background noise going on and you wanna cut that out whenever they're not speaking, what a noise gate can do is whenever the volume falls below a certain threshold, it will mute the track entirely.

If your guest ends up speaking quietly for a moment, it might cut out what they're saying. So make sure you listen back to the track after you apply something like a noise gate or. When it's time to export that audio, if you're just exporting the audio track, but you're gonna bring it into your video editing software later export as an uncompressed 24 bit wave file.

You'll wanna use 48  kilohertz. If you're syncing that audio to video later, or you can do 44.1 kilohertz. If you're just using it for audio, like an audio only podcast. So you wanna get that uncompressed wave. If you're gonna be doing more with that audio track. Wherever you're just ready to publish it. As an audio podcast, you'll wanna do an MP3.

You can go as low as 96 kilobytes per second, and it will still retain decent quality for spoken word in a podcast. Now, when it comes to video post production, the first thing you'll wanna do is color grade your footage. If you used a LUT or lookup table, it'll help you get. At least to a base level, but some of the things you might wanna do in color grading is increase the contrast of a video.

Typically, when I pull these videos into Final Cut, I'll kind of lower the shadows to actually provide more contrast, maybe even lower some of the highlights, but boost the exposure overall. And then for color grading, maybe you want to increase the blues or the reds depending on white balance, or if you need to correct that later, there are many different ways to go with color.

We'll actually refer you to Tyler Stallman. His YouTube channel has great resources on color grading. And so we'll link to some of those videos in the video description. And depending if you are using a handheld camera or you have some shaky footage, you can use stabilizing and rolling stutter to try and make that footage a little more viewable stabilization will reduce motion like this or shaking in the camera if you were hand held. Rolling stutter. If you were trying to do like a pan, but it kind of stops in the middle. Rolling stutter can help smooth that out then as you're editing your footage, if you have a lot of talking head footage like this, maybe you'll wanna zoom in and zoom out. As you talk to kind of break up the video.

Visually, if you had multiple cameras, you can use the multicam feature in Final Cut or Adobe premier to quickly edit between multiple camera shots. I use the multicam feature a lot. I have a top down camera shot. I use a lot for product or B. And then with the multicam, I can actually sync all those camera angles together and quickly switch between them in Final Cut.

When it comes to transitions from clip to clip, most of the time, you probably just wanna do a hard cut, meaning, no transition. You can use crossfades. Maybe if you're going into a still photo and picture. But I would use kind of wild transition sparingly, too. Many of those in the video will be difficult to watch.

And it'll probably distract from your content once you've produced your video and you're ready to export your export settings will change depending on its final destination. If you're uploading for YouTube, you probably wanna do an MP four file. I try to keep mine pretty high quality. So I'll go with 20,000 bits or higher, the higher, the bit rate, the higher, the quality, but also the larger the file.

So uploading will take longer. Processing will take longer. If you're exporting directly from Final Cut or Adobe Premier, there's probably some built in settings for H 2 64, or maybe even upload to YouTube settings. You can just use directly, or you can use a more advanced application for exporting whether that's compressor, which is made by apple works very well with final cut or Adobe media encoder, which is part of the creative suite works very well with Premier.

Those applications give you even more options to granularly control, your bit rate or quality resolution frame rate, and you can export multiple versions of your file using those applications. So those are some strategies for post-production both in audio and video. If you have questions about anything we discussed.

Drop a comment below the video. We'd love to answer you there or make a future tutorial on something that you're interested in. Subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon. We have lots of tutorials on podcasting, audio and video creation, and of course, remote recording in high quality using Riverside.