PTE and MP3

[The oldie]

Although I haven't put much on the forum, I read it with great admiration for all you experts. Thanks for all the help. Specially Alrobin for his super tutorial- absolutely great.

Now to my possible problem.

I am finishing a little sequence which requires a voice over,

background music and some sound effects. As the story is a complicated one I needed to have the VO in PTE to try it and make accurate adjustments. I thought that it should be converted to mp3 to use it in PTE, to make is run ok.

I then decided that to use the mix down facility in the multitrack part Cooledit, I should probably need to have all three tracks in mp3.

I have started to mix it, and it seems to me to sound ok.

However I am well aware that I am ancient with probably hearing to match!

Do you experts in the sound field think that I cannot do this and get acceptable results.

Best regards to all you good people.

The Oldie, Alan,

in UK.

[alrobin]

Hi, Alan,

Thanks for the kind words!

It's unfortunate that one cannot cover all topics important to AV creation in one tutorial without making it overly large, and therefore difficult to use. Maybe we need one devoted to sound and music aspects, alone.

To answer your questions, you don't need to convert all files to the same type in order to mix down in Cool Edit. You can convert to mp3 at the end, after you done your editing, and after you have mixed down to one track. This way you can make adjustments to each track (e.g. voice over) independently, in the format in which they were created. It is best to do this in an uncompressed format, and then mix down and compress to an mp3, or other, file.

Voice is very tricky, and very subjective. As you probably noticed, my voice is not as young as it used to be, either, and I had to make some modifications to it in Audition (Cool Edit) just to make it usable for the tutorial.

Age really doesn't have a lot to do with it, however. You really have to try it out, speaking as distinctly and clearly as possible, into a good microphone, and then maybe get somebody to listen to it and give you their opinion. You can also adjust the frequency response to cut out any raspiness, and emphasize the treble or bass, etc. (See Oleg's excellent detailed instructions on sound editing elsewhere on the Forum). I get my wife to listen to my voice-overs, as I know I'll get an honest answer! Good luck!