The following notes are meant to help you use Adobe Premiere to accurately edit footsteps to a walk sequence, and to apply a few effects to sweeten the sound and give spatial qualities to the environments the character walks within.
First of all, export a movie file that involves the walking character. For sound editing purposes, you should render a lower-resolution “cutting copy,” expressly for the purpose of cutting sound, a MP4. Use Premiere to do this. When you are done with the sound design, you would then export a stand-alone movie that pairs the full-resolution imagery with the audio mix.
When choosing suitable recordings of footsteps, the sounds themselves should suit the kind of surface you are trying to portray, such as feet on a gravelly road, sandy path, wood floor, or concrete sidewalk. You will find that you only have to work with a handful of sounds, as steps repeat. However, you should strive to find a good range of step sounds, so the clips in the loop are not overly evident. You will not want the audience to recognize the short cycle.
To this end, locate appropriate footsteps, from the ECU sound effects library, on-line from a site like Freesound.org, or record them yourself.
Using Premiere
Referring to the short clips you’ve selected, clean them up by adding very short fades at the heads and tails of the clips. Doing so will reduce any clicks that might be on the track, because of inherent noise in the original recording.
- A quick way to do this: referring to a particular Audio Track in the Timeline, use the Pen Tool and hover over the Volume Level in the audio clip. Click on the Volume Level to set key frames and then make short fades at the head and tail.
- Alternatively, you can use the Effects Controls Window to set audio keyframes for each clip.
- After you have made short fades, you might also have to trim or extend the ins/outs of the clips. To do so, use the Selection Tool to hover over the edge of the clip until a “red arrow” appears, at which point you can click and drag to expand or decrease the length of the clip.
Use the Selection Tool to edit/move the sound clips to the animation. You would do this by moving the Current Time Marker or Edit Line up and down the Timeline, while viewing the animation in the Monitor Window. The key sounds should match when each of the character’s traveling feet contact the ground. That is, line up the sound to the point where the character’s heel touches the ground surface, contacts, and shifts to her/his toe.
Edit the steps so the animation for one foot syncs with a footstep sound on one track, and the animation for the other foot syncs with the other track. By doing it this way, the feet sounds can overlap if they have to.
For the sake of accuracy, you might want to expand the height of the audio tracks to reveal the wave forms (making it easier to visualize where the strongest part of the sounds are located).
As you edit and adjust the sounds to picture, you should occasionally preview the audio composition in real time. Do this by hitting the Enter Key. It is best to evaluate sound in a natural timeframe every once in a while, rather with an animator’s precise focus, frame-by-frame.
To mix the footsteps
The following steps describe how you can assign audio effects to either a whole track, either one alone or a selection of tracks. It is a way of affecting a collection of similar sounds, so that you don’t have to go into several individual sound clips and adapt them, one-by-one. Furthermore, you will be able to edit and adapt the tracks as you go along and continue to modify the sounds as you mix the tracks together.
Call up the Audio Mixer: Go to the Main Menu > Window > Audio Mixer.
From the Timeline, add a new kind of audio track, called a “sub-mix.” This will mean that you can “assign” the two individual “Near Foot” and “Far Foot” tracks to a common “Footsteps” track. From there, you can add effects like the Multiband Compressor, to reduce high, mid, and/or low frequencies, and Reverb, to enhance qualities of space and sonic reflections.
To add a Sub-mix Audio Track, context-click on a track in the Audio Track Region of the Timeline and choose > Add Tracks and select the following:
- Video = 0 (that is, do not add a new video track)
- Audio = 0 (that is, do not add a new audio track)
- Audio Submix Tracks = 1
- Track Type: Stereo
- It will probably be labeled Submix 1 or something similar. Go ahead and rename the submix to “Footsteps.” Simply locate the track in the Timeline, context-click and choose “Rename.”
Assign the footstep tracks to the Audio Submix
First, referring to the Audio Mixer, go to the “Near Foot” channel. From the pull-down menu near the top (labeled “Master”) pull down and choose “Footsteps” (formerly Submix I).
Secondly, do the same for “Far Foot.” Refer to the Audio Mixer and go to the “Far Foot” channel. From the pull-down menu near the top (labeled “Master”) pull down and choose “Footsteps” (formerly Submix I).
The two footsteps are now assigned to Footsteps / Submix 1.
To add effects to the Submix
To add effects to the submix, you will have to use the Audio Mixer. Each track in the Timeline is represented with a similar “channel” on the mixer. They are one in the same. If you make changes on a channel on the mixer, the adjustment will occur on the track as well, and the inverse. In this case, you can add an effect to the channel/track. The subsequent effect will affect the whole track. For example, you could reduce the low frequencies on the Footsteps submix and, as a result, the overall sound of the character’s footsteps will sound crisper and sharper.
First, referring to the Audio Mixer, you will have to “Show the Effects/Sends.” Look at the upper-left region of the Audio Mixer Window, where you will find an Expand/Collapse icon (that is, a little black triangle shape). Click on it to open/expand the Effects/Sends. By opening the Effects, you will notice a region at the top of each channel, with pull-down options for each channel.
Go to that particular region for the Footsteps Submix and click on one of the grey pull-down “grey arrows,” to reveal a long list of effects that you can add to the channel. For instance, choose “Amplitude & Compression > Mulitiband Compressor” and “Reverb > Reverb.” The link to the selected effect should then appear in the Effects/Sends Region. To make adjustments to the newly added effect, double-click on the link, to open the effect settings.