Brickfilming Tutorial:Audacity Basics

[Nich Artri]

I was asked by Captain Zuloo to contribute a tutorial for his Brickfilming index, so here it is; slightly over a week late... (busy week at work )

Welcome to my Audacity Basics tutorial. While Audacity is a program with a ton of options and tools, I'm going to go through the basics; that is, I'm going to cover what I do to get my Brickfilms to sound as good as possible in the shortest possible steps. Let's begin!

Step 1: Install Audacity and Start It Up. You should be met with a window that looks like this shortly after startup.

Step 2: Perform a Mic Check. There are many different types of microphones, ranging from the plug in jack types to $50 USB affairs. If you (like me) film with a web cam, you already have microphone, as most of these have one built in. Click the microphone monitoring button and say something. It should register as a pair of red oscillating bars.

Step 3: Start Recording. If you've ever used any kind of recording device, you know how this goes; click the red circular record button to record and the yellow stop button to stop. QED! Your recording should show up in the soundwave display. If you wish to review your recording at this point, hit the play button.

Step 4: Noise Removal. Now at this point, you have a working sound project, ready to be saved as a project, tweaked, or exported as a .wav, but here's a tip that will help your soundbyte sound better! If you look at your soundwave, you might notice little spikes in areas that should be silence. Click and drag over one of these areas, click on the Effects menu, and select the Noise Removal option. This window should pop up, at which point, you should click on the Get Noise Profile button.

This let's Audacity know what you consider noise. The window will then close. Now, select your entire soundwave by clicking and dragging over it.. Reselect the Noise Removal tool from the Effects menu. The window should now look like this.

Use the slider to set how much noise is removed and hit preview (I use the least amount, as seen in the screenshot). Hit Remove Noise, and presto! Using the noise profile you selected, Audacity has removed all background noise.

Step 5: Normalize. Think you're done? Well..not just yet. Reselect your soundwave if it isn't already, go to the Effects menu again, but this time, select Normalize. When this window pops up, make sure that both boxes are checked and hit OK.

This will make your entire soundwave a uniform decibel level; quite handy when you're working with multiple soundbytes in a film!

Step 6: Saving and Exporting. Great! You've finished! Now, under the File menu, select Save Project. Name it, save it and voila! You have a project file that you can modify at your leisure. The next logical step would to export the project as a file that you can use with any number of film editing programs. I personally use the .wav format. The quality of the .wav can be tweaked in the Preferences found in the Edit menu.

(The technical aspects for this example were an 8-bit PCM Microsoft .wav format, a 96000 Hz default sample rate, and a 24-bit default sample format. These were tweaked with in the Preferences and work best for me; though you might want to play around to find settings that work for you.)

And the final result? Well hear for yourself in this short animation I made using the example in this tutorial!

I hope this helped.

Cheers!

-Nich