by October 6, 1927, was a crucial date in the history of Cinema. It was on this date that Warner Bros. released “The Jazz Singer,” the feature film that marked the end of the silent film era and introduced a whole new dimension to the world of video editing: sound.
Today, the music, dialogue and foley that sound editors add to our favorite films are as central to the experience as the images and scripts themselves. From Hollywood blockbusters to low-budget short films, sound drives stories forward. It sets the emotional tone, helps actors’ performances feel more real, and ensures that audiences hear and feel exactly what the filmmakers want to hear and feel during their viewing experience.
More from IndieWire
In short, audio editors turn the punchy dialogue and noise recorded with the boom of a mike and elevate it into the crisp, emotional sound that brings visual storytelling to life.
As the 2024 Sundance Film Festival takes over Park City, Utah, Adobe is proud to celebrate the invaluable contribution sound editors make to our favorite films. And to highlight the ingenious ways they use tools like Adobe Premiere Pro to mix, enhance, and enhance raw recorded audio into the momentous audio experiences that stay with us long after the film is over.
Dig AI Information Icons
Adobe’s creative tools play a central role in the creation, editing and production of Sundance Films’ audio. Most of the submissions this year — buzzy films for example “God (弟弟)“, “Will & Harpist“, “FRIDA“, “Thelma“, and “Little Death” they used Adobe Premiere Pro to bring their stories to life. Or, in the case of Ondi Timoner and Tristan Baylis, giving new life to their award-winning masterpieces.
Timoner’s 2004 film, “DIG!,” which explored the relationship between Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor-Taylor of The Dandy Warhols in their early days as bandleaders, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. Ar. the 20th anniversary of their victory, the film has been invited back to Park City to screen a new edit, “DIG! XX“so that fans could fall in love with him again.
Using Adobe Premiere Pro, the “DIG!” the post team was able to improve the resolution of the original feature, build the film with never-before-seen footage, and add present-day content to the story to bring it into the present. At the same time, a post-audio team from Gigantic Studios used Adobe’s Adobe-powered Enhance Speech tool to extract dialogue from archive recordings for use in the final mix for inclusion in the new cut.
“Our audio mixing team insisted on using Adobe Enhance Speech when we embarked on this new edit,” says Timoner. “It was exactly what we needed to save and enhance our 25 years of pieces from our archive.”
“Adobe’s Enhance Speech tool is a pioneer in total audio isolation and enhancement,” says Baylis, lead mixer at Gigantic Studios. “Standard noise reduction tools can remove some of the noise, but they can easily compromise the quality of the voice, resulting in a loss of character in most cases – and a robotic sound at the very least. Enhance Speech has been invaluable for working with challenging dialogue in post-production, especially in a documentary format where automated dialogue replacement (ADR) is not an option.
“The ability to cut the new footage in a native solution was also fundamental to the project,” says “DIG! XX” editor David Timoner. “We couldn’t do this enhanced, remastered version of ‘DIG!’ to deliver. so fast and effortless without Premiere Pro.”
Breaking new sound barriers
Audio editing is a labor of love, and as a result has historically involved intensive processes that take hours of the time of editors not traditionally trained in audio mixing. The Speech Enhancement feature in Adobe Premiere Pro is just one of the innovations that brings editors closer to the final mix while editing, making the transition from craft editing to audio mixing smoother and more intuitive for filmmakers and their audio editing teams.
Adobe recently announced a new audio workflow that makes it faster and easier to edit and mix audio directly in Adobe Premiere Pro (beta). With new interactive fader handles, users can quickly create custom audio transitions by dragging them across their editing timeline, taking the tedium out of a traditionally laborious process. Meanwhile, AI-powered category tagging automatically identifies audio files as dialogue, music, sound effects or ambiance. After that, post-production teams just need to click the relevant category badge to access the tools they need to edit their clip in the Essential Audio panel.
These improvements come at a transitional time for editors. As Adobe’s Paul Saccone recently told The Verge, many of these creators are being asked to expand their remit by adding color work, basic effects and titling to their expertise, as well as audio editing and image editing. For audio specialists, less time and energy spent on the minutiae of editing software leaves more headroom to focus on the details that matter most and elevates video from a visual medium to a memorable multi-dimensional experience.
Adobe Creative Cloud members are invited to try out the new feature today in the Premiere Pro beta app.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for the Indiewire Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
