Following on from my last blog I wanted to go through how I edited the sound in my trailer to get it sounding right, at least as to the effect that I was going for.
As the beginning of my trailer was telling the story of how both aliens and demons invaded Earth on the same date and what prompted Duke & Doom guy to join forces the first part of my trailer I wanted to have appropriately sombre music.
I liked the music which was at the start of the Doom 3 trailer and since I would assume they already own the rights to it using it in my game trailer (which is a collaboration between Gearbox & ID Software) should be fine. I would need to check with the composer and check the licensing agreement that they had with ID Software to confirm that ID held the rights to use it whenever they wished to but for my purposes I will assume that ID and therefore by extension, my game do have the rights to use the music in the trailer.
By dragging a clip of the trailer onto my timeline I add both the video and the audio to the timeline. However if I just want to have the audio and not the video I need to unlink the audio portion from the video portion. To do this I right click on one or the other - both should become white to show they are selected. I then need to select unlink from the context menu which appears. Once I have done this I can drag around and edit either the video or audio portion without changing their counterpart. In my case for this first backing track I only wanted the audio part anyway so I simply cleared the video part from the timeline and just kept the audio part.
One of the really clever bits of Adobe Premiere is that you can extend a bit of audio from a clip and it will then refer to the source file it comes from to add any extra missing audio from that. It meant that I could extend my short 20 second clip to 27 seconds and not have it stretched and sound odd or I could adjust it back down if needed without affecting the timing. This makes editing audio to fit a specific time frame very easy.
To add extra time to an audio track simply select the piece you want to extend and then with the selection tool selected hover the mouse next to the edge of the audio piece which you wish to extend and wait till the cursor changes to look a red line with an arrow pointing in the direction that you want to extend the piece of audio. Simply left click and hold to drag the audio size to fit the correct space and then let go.
With my first piece of backing audio added to the timeline I now needed to make adjustments to the volume levels so that some pieces of in game audio, specifically Duke Nukem saying "Dammit, why do they always take the hot ones". I wanted to have the audio fade out at this point so you can just hear Duke speak.
In order to adjust the volume up and down you use a similar method to adjusting opacity on the titles in that you add key frames to the piece of audio where you will be able to drag the volume up and down without changing the volume of the whole piece of audio.
In CC to first make the volume accessible you need to left click and hold in the middle of the piece of audio and drag up until a little black line with a white outer stroke appears - this dictates the audio volume.
In order to add keyframes to the audio levels you need to have the pen tool selected (press p). You can then add several key frames along the audio level. Once these have been added you can then drag these points up or down to raise and lower the volume at specific points.
Hopefully you can make out in the above image that I added 4 keyframes on the audio line. The first one just before the "Ladies" video clip featuring Duke where I start to fade out the backing soundtrack. I positioned this slightly before the Duke piece so that the sound was low enough when h started speaking to not distract the viewer. The next 2 points were where the audio was at it's lowest and could not be heard. The last one was again positioned slightly after the Duke piece finished so that the soundtrack did not interfere with that segment at all.
The next part of the trailer is again quite sombre. Initially I tried running a short segment of the music which accompanies the video as it is quite fitting. However in order to appreciate the change in music from initially very cheerful and happy to the macabre twist and change in music style I needed it to be at least 15 seconds long, time I didn't have. Having only a small bit of the music in there just made for quite a harsh change in sound which didn't last very long. It was even more jarring going into the next Duke monologue. I therefore decided to lose the original music that came with the clip and revert back to my original soundtrack piece. This seemed to work better than having two very short different pieces of backing music. If I had of been able to make a longer trailer I would have preferred to have both pieces of music in it.
I again faded the soundtrack out during the next Duke monologue about Kicking ass and chewing bubblegum.
The next bit of music I wanted was something with a heavy dance beat to it - similar to that found in the Doom 3 and Duke gameplay sequences. his should match the intense gameplay sequences I recorded and make the gameplay seem fast paced and frenetic. In fact I ended up going with the same piece of music used In the Duke Nukem Forever trailer. It's a piece of music called Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy. Given the elements of my game it seemed very apt. Also since Gearbox has licensed the music in the past it seems likely that they would be in a position to license it again. Plus fans of the past games would recognise it from the trailer, I certainly did without realising what the track name was.
Again placing it into the timeline and listening to it allowed me to make changes to the length and starting point of the audio clip. I wanted the bit of the song where it gets heavy to be my starting point and for it then to run till the end of the trailer. I faded out the volume at the end. I didn't need to fade it in since it was coming off a blank piece of audio at the end of Duke's second monologue and I also wanted the music to be impactful so having it come in at full volume seems correct. Given that the video has also just changed quickly to frantic in game footage I think the transition works ok.
There was one issue however. The in game audio at the beginning features a loud gun firing continuously at the start which was initially drowning out the music completely and therefore lessening the impact of the dance tune. I therefore lowered the volume of the first gameplay clip so that the start of the music could be heard more clearly. By the second gameplay clip the music had established it's presence and so I was able to keep the remaining gameplay footage at full volume.
That was pretty much it for the audio side of things; in the next blog I will look at the video and any transitions or effects that I used.
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