recording and processing sound

As with other Flash movies that involve imported media, the first steps with a voiceover are capturing and processing the audio. With today's desktop systems, you can record directly into a program such as SoundForge or SoundEdit 16. The requirements for recording a live performance, as was done in the case of this chapter's example, are very straightforward:

• Secure a microphone with either a mini-jack plug or a mini-jack adapter.

• Ensure that your recording levels are good. In both SoundEdit and SoundForge, there are recording level meters . If the recording volume is too high, the sound will distort; if the volume is too low, the sound won't be properly heard .

• Record in a quiet room. Except in a professional sound studio, it's very difficult to remove ambient noise without affecting the primary sound.

• Capture your audio at the highest sample rate possible. I typically shoot for 44k / 16-bit stereo. Remember that the better the source the better the export.

• Have available plenty of clean hard disk space. Converting any analog signal to digital ”whether it's audio or video ”is file- intensive . The higher the quality and the longer the audio clip, the larger the file size .