Thread: Fixing up Badly Filmed Footage (Audio, Video)

heya,

Hopefully this is the right forum, the questions are somewhat diverse topic-wise, but I didn't want to flood the forum with too many separate threads.

I was recently conscripted into filming a wedding, unfortunately my inexperience in this quite a bit.... I was wondering if members could have any advice on fixing up a few issues?

1. Portrait Orientation, 16:9?

I stupidly taped parts of the speeches in a portrait (vertical) orientation (I do photography, must be from that). The camera is widescreen (16:9), so I'm not sure how I'm going to use this?

Would I just scale it down and add black bars on the side or something? What would be the easiest and most natural-looking way to do this (I'll probably be trying to use Premier Pro/Aftereffects).

2. Syncing audio from an external MD recorder?

I used a separate audio recorder (MD player), since I didn't trust the microphone pickup on the machine (plus it only has a stupid propritary Sony connector). What would be the best way of syncing this to the video (in Premier) ? (No slate, unfortunately...lol)

3. Filtering background music in an interview?

Some of the audio (even on the MD) has really annoying background music, when I was doing interviews.

Is there actually a way to strip out, or at least soften the background music, and leave the audio behind? (I'll be using Adobe Audition for audio, but have no idea how to do this - frequency?).

How about stripping out background noise, as well as clicks from accidentally hitting the microphone? (I suppose I play around with noise reduction filters for this?)

4. Jittery/Bad footage - Hiding with fade outs/ins?

Some bits of it were just screwed up (my fault, lol). Knocking the tripod, jittery footage, filming the wrong parts/people etc. Could I just use black fade ins and fade outs to hide this? What would be a good way of making it look natural? (I still have the full audio tracks of everything, of course, so I can still use the audio during black/fades - but would it be natural, or look forced?).

I know that's a lot of question, hopefully you guys can help me .

Thanks,
Victor

1. Rotate and crop but it will result in a poorer picture with a lower effective resoloution.
2. Import the video to the editior and match up the video / audio - fiddly.
3. Not much that can be done to help, any changes that 'may' improve the speech may make the sound a bit odd, try bossting the speech frequencies, around 1Khz, or using a noise gate to reduce music between words.
4. Just use the good bits but make sure that cuts are natural.

Not having used a 16:9 camcorder, still stuck on the bog standard 4:3 I'll leave that to others to answer. As far as the sound questions go, can you see people mouths moving in the interviews or whatever or scenes you recorded them talking? If they are all close ups, and you can see their mouths, then listen for a distinct sound of someone doing some action and the resulting sound coming from that action - a bang, click, thud, find it on the audio track, you'll see a spike in the graphic display and drag the audio clip (unlink it from the video track to do this) and try and line up both the sound on the audio track with the visual on the video track. And that is your slate/clapperboard being snapped. Your 'annoying background noise' may be able to be lessened depending on what it is? Is it music, chattering, coughing, furniture being moved around, if you know what it is and it has a range of frequencies you may be able to lessen it but if it shares some of those same frequencies with the audio of your interview then it will be affected. The clicks can possibly be edited out, just zoom in fully to were they occour on the audio track and unless they last for a long time, you may be able to put a cut before and after them to remove them and join the audio back together again. Listen to it and see if you can spot the cut. Your jittery/bad footage can be edited out aswell if it doesn't affect the flow of the video or the narrative to be more precise. Or try using a transition such as a cross dissolve or cross fade rather than a lot of fade in and fade outs.