 Hell yeah, what's up guys, this is KurtzPyte. My friends, call me Banksy. I'm back in action today. We're continuing that series, where I show you how to be the best video editor, audio editor, you know, step by step using free software and free tools, guys. I'm gonna show you how to become amazing at this using free stuff. It's pretty wild. Let's get into this. The other episodes, we covered a little bit of video editing. We covered how to record gameplay footage. In this one, I'm gonna show you how to record your audio professionally. And what do I mean by that? I mean, we've all heard it. We go on a YouTube video and you're watching a gameplay video and the gameplay sound is too loud. Or the guy, or the gal speaking over top of the game is too quiet and the music's too loud and vice versa. Or they've got multiple people on the call and one of them's just blowing out loud and the other one you can barely hear. We're gonna sort all that out using Audacity. Let's get right into this. All right, before we start getting into Audacity, I do wanna remind you that you will need a microphone for it. So there are two, basically two types of mics that are usable. One of them is a desktop mic, of course. You know, blue Yeti's, blue Snowballs, all those different types. And then there's headset mics. If you've got a desktop mic, I do recommend keeping the microphone about nine inches away from your mouth. And yeah, apparently according to my girlfriend, I don't know how long nine inches is. So you better measure it because I've been rounding up. Sorry about that. And if you've got a headset microphone, well, you basically wanna keep it as far away from your mouth as possible just to keep the pops down and any crackling and any loud jarring cracks. And I'm gonna show you how to take those out. So with that preamble out of the way, let's get into Audacity. All right, here we go. The first step to downloading Audacity, again, free software, is you wanna go to audacityteam.org. There we go. You wanna go there and then left click on download Audacity. It might start the download automatically for you. If not, just click on the first link, Audacity 3.1. Whatever it says or whatever it shows you at the time of watching this and download it. Once you've done that, left click on the EXE file and it will quickly install the software for you. It's very small, very quick, very good software. All right, let's keep going. All right, here we go. I have a copy of Audacity open in front of me. And yeah, it looks a little overwhelming and scary, but I promise you it's very easy to use once you get the hang of it. All right, the first thing you wanna do before you go any further is you wanna make sure you've got the correct microphone selected. This is often a problem for people because if they don't have it selected, it often has the default built-in microphone to your laptop, for example, and it's horrible. So again, make sure that you have the correct one selected. I'm using a blue snowball for this one. So again, make sure that this here is selected to the correct microphone. All right, now that we've got the correct microphone selected to record, you just basically wanna left-click on this red button. This is R4 record. And as we do that, you're gonna see it going here. And as I talk louder and quieter, you're gonna see the waveform adjust up and down. That's exactly what we want. It looks good. All right, so that is all you gotta do. And if you wanna stop it again, just click on that stop button and that will be the end of it. So I'll just do that right now just to show you, left-click there, stop, okay, we've got like almost 10 seconds of audio. I'm recording with another program in case you're wondering how I can keep talking and this isn't recording. But now let's get into some professionalism. This, in a lot of cases, if you have a perfect environment and you're in a quiet environment with no distracting sounds and you've got a great mic and you've got it all set up, you might be able to just go to File and then just go to Export as MP3. If you're in a good spot and you don't wanna make any changes, you got your settings right, go ahead and do that. That's all you need to do. But there are a few things you can do to make audio a little more professional and I'm gonna show you the top three. So let's get right into those. All right, the first one we wanna do is we wanna get rid of any noise reduction. So any buzzing, anything that sounds just distracting, let's get rid of it. In my video, I have the mic close to my laptop and my laptop fan is going a mile a minute. So it's really, really buzzing. So I wanna get rid of the laptop fan for me. So how do I do that? Simple, I'm gonna go ahead and select some of this audio here. I just left click on the timeline and I just dragged it back and this allows me to select that part of the video. Now, what I'm doing is I'm basically selecting a time period, a period of time where there's nothing, no audio at all. It's just a background fan, I'm not talking. So once you've got that selected, you wanna go now up to Effect and we're going to go ahead and do some noise reduction. Left click now on Noise Reduction. When you do that, you'll have a few options. The first thing you need to do is left click on Get Noise Profile, click on it. So now we have the noise profile. Basically, we've isolated the sound fan or the background humming sound, okay? That's what we wanted. Now, the next step is you wanna hit Control A, Command A if you're on a Mac, but you're probably not. So Control A and that is select all because what we wanna do is we wanna apply noise reduction to everything. So we have the profile, now we're going to apply it. Go ahead and click on Effect, go back to Noise Reduction and instead of selecting Get Noise Profile, just left click on Okay. When you do that, you're gonna see here that at the beginning of the timeline, it went from a little bit of a buzzy waveform to basically a flat line. We have isolated the background noise and taken it out. That is the first step and it's very, very important, especially if you don't have optimal conditions. Okay, let's get into step two. All right, everybody, the second step is the Compressor step. Basically wanna take out some of the highs and the lows. It's very, very easy to do and it adds another level of professionalism to the audio. So what you do is you basically click anywhere and click Command or Control A, Control A if you're on a PC. Once you've selected the timeline, head up here to Effect and drop it down and you're gonna see Compressor. Now under Compressor, you have a few options. They're pretty good right out of the gate. I like to increase the ratio from the default two to one. I increase it up to about, yeah, let's go to six to one. So we're basically just going ahead and taking out the highs and lows and normalizing the audio. Left click on OK and watch the wave or the waveform. See how it adjusted up a little bit? Basically, we're just going ahead and making the audio a little bit better. All right, the third and final step, again, making sure you've selected everything in the timeline is a limiter. We wanna make sure that there's no overly loud bangs or crashes or noise that basically scare people off. And again, they may opt, especially for really loud noises. They may opt to disconnect or close the video. And again, we don't want that for video search engine optimization. So again, what you wanna do here is you wanna go to Effect, left click on Effect and drop it all the way down here to Limiter, left click on Limiter. And then you wanna basically just this highlight right here, it's Limit to DB. In my case, I don't want the audio to ever go above zero decibels. If it goes above zero decibels, you run the risk of getting blown out audio. And again, loud jarring noises and people clicking off your video. So set that to zero, left click on OK. It won't make many changes, you won't see it. But basically we set a limit to it and that's it. Now, if you play this back, let's see what happens. All right, so that is all you gotta do. And if you wanna stop it again, professional audio, it sounds great. The last step is to go to File and then you wanna go to Export and you wanna export this as an MP3 and then you wanna save it. I'm gonna save it to desktop and I'm gonna call this audio.mp3, whatever, it doesn't matter. Left click on Save Presto. We've now got audio. And you know what, as a little bit of a bonus because we're on a roll here, I'm gonna show you something else. And this is an important part because it does trick a lot of people. All right, everybody, here's a final little piece of tip I wanna show you. How to sync your gameplay and your audio. So when you're speaking through your mic and your gameplay that you're playing on your computer, a lot of the times they're not exactly synced up, especially if you started recording one before the other. You're off by a few seconds, milliseconds. Let's just fix that problem right here. The way to do it, if you wanna go, and this is using HitFilm Express. There's other programs that are actually better at this but I'm gonna show you how to do it the manual way using HitFilm Express. Left click on Import, once you've got it opened up and I'm just gonna import some footage. So I'm gonna import the AE4 video that I've got here. That's just me playing Age of Empires 4 and you'll see here that it is loading up and that's what we want. So it'll take a few seconds and then I'm gonna drag and drop that onto my timeline and I'm gonna start it exactly at the beginning. It says here, do you wanna change the sequence settings? Yes, I do. I want them to match my gameplay footage and as I scrub through it, you'll see here, boom, presto, that's me playing the game and again, that's just the beginning of the game. The next step is you wanna import the audio which is the separate file that we just created and I showed you how to create and that's called AE4 Audio 3. We're gonna import that as well and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop the audio onto its own separate audio track. So let's see if I can do that. Right about, what do you think here? There we go. So we've got the audio now and you'll see here that they're matched and they're scrubbed together. Now there's a, oops, I didn't wanna do that. What you wanna do here, and this is where it gets a little tricky but you're smart so you can figure this out, is you basically wanna go right to the beginning of the clip and then you wanna basically match it up. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete part of this audio and what I'm doing is basically wherever I say, wherever I want the audio to start, I move it along the clip. So if I start doing my talking around, let's say exactly at the 30, 28 second mark, for example, or 28 frame mark, then I would move my audio to there. If I wanna, if I don't say, okay, here's where I start talking or I start shooting or whatever you do, you just basically nudge this audio one frame at a time until you get them to match up. There are programs like Adobe Premiere Pro where you can do it automatically but HitFilm Express is still manual so just drag and move the audio until you get it exactly where you want it and then from there, well hey, they're both gonna match up and I'm gonna show you how to export and do all that other stuff in HitFilm Express in the next movie. Thanks for watching this one guys, ton more stuff coming up, stay tuned, be back.