How to Create Dialogue Tracks For Muvizu

Getting Multiple Dialogue Tracks into Muvizu

During the recording of one of my videos I encountered the problem of how to get more than one dialogue track into Muvizu and make it sound like a natural conversation. It may be a bit time consuming, but with practise it should be easy enough. Here’s a step by step guide of how to accomplish a video with more than one audio clip.

This was done using the open-source programme Audacity, which can be downloaded from this link for free http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/here!

Step by Step

1. Record your audio clips. My finished clips were saved as .wav files. This is best to be done in mono as opposed to stereo as it makes it easier to have one audio channel to edit, this will help when cleaning the channel as well and also overcomes any excess noise issues which may be caused by moving to and from the mic during recording.

2. Import them to Audacity using File, Import, Audio. You may need to Import Raw Data if the file is unreadable.

3. You should now have two audio clips on top of one another, or one track with two or more characters talking, depending on how you recorded the audio.

4. Before you go any further, you may want to normalise the file. This can be done by going to Effect, Normalize and choosing your settings, i.e. changing the decibel level. Note: This should only be done if the file is too quiet or there is anything else such as direct current, which would cause a hiss preventing it from sounding normal. You probably always want to do this as it creates a standard normal level for your audio.

5. Your audio files may have background noise from when you recorded them so you should remove this by getting the noise profile. To do this, first use the select tool to highlight the noise in the audio clip. Then go to Effect, Noise Removal, Get Noise Profile. Once Noise Profile has been retrieved we can go back into Effect, Noise Removal and OK the selection. This might need to be done 2 or 3 times in order to totally remove any noise.

6. Using the Selection Tool you can splice the audio up by clicking on where you want the split to be and pressing ctrl + I.

7. Now select the Time Shift Tool and move the individually spliced bits of audio into a position that seem to fit a natural conversation.

8. Listen back to audio to deem whether or not you are happy. Save!

9. If satisfied then you can save it out as an .aup file. Reload it and change from Mono to Stereo using the drop down arrow on the audio file. Or you can go to File, Export, this will save it as a .mp3 file. This automatically saves as a stereo file.

10. The new .mp3 file you created will be able to be uploaded into Muvizu. The .aup file will not.

11. If you already have a stereo file like the one below. You could change it from stereo to mono by clicking on the drop down arrow and selecting Split Stereo to Mono, this helps when cleaning, as it allows you to do the left and right channels separately.