I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have all the source material available on tracks. When they are all sitting in the Region Bin you can’t reorganise them, or re order them or make comments on them… So I make a couple of new audio tracks (3 C and 2 LR) and name them LIB 1 – LIB 5 and I drag all of the 18 source files on to those tracks, but further along the timeline, so they are away from my video & edit session.
I drop a marker on the first library sound and edit the marker number to 99, so as to make a mental note and I can then instantly jump back here at any time later on, by hitting 99. on the numeric keypad.
Quickly skipping through the files I listen and then reorder the sounds, putting the bright harsh sounds on one Lib track, the dull sounds on another & the misc on a third track.
The first actual sounds I feel like doing is to create some basic background ambiences for the two shots. I have a quick listen through the source material, select a few files and start cutting them as a generalised distant layer of ambiences, shot 1 layers on AMB1 tracks (feeding AMB1 stem) and shot 2 elements on to AMB2 tracks (feeding AMB2 stem)
Shot 1 we are out at sea, so the general ambience will be fairly inactive – just a diffuse gentle roar, no waves are actually breaking & the shoreline is too far away to worry about.
Shot 2 we are on a gravel beach, so it can be a little brighter.. but there are a lot of other elements to go into that shot so I dont sweat the details too much.
I select some mono files and create a stereo ambience by offsetting parts of the same file, place them & edit them to length paying particular attention to the start of shot 1 (I don’t want the ambiences to start too abruptly or bump in too hard) but I do want the shift from shot 1 to shot 2 to feel dramatically different, so I make that a fairly hard cut. I set some relative levels using volume automation and I now have a very basic ambience bed to work against & layer elements over.
40 minutes have passed. No rocket science as yet…