A quiet sound pass

What Hound does with it

1. Goal: the polish of an edit someone scored, never a game show. One sound for each kind of change the viewer sees, the same sound every time, most minutes with none, and every word as clear as it was without it.
2. Read their notes first. If they have taken sound effects off before or said they do not want them, add none and say so.
3. Read the timeline and list every moment something arrives on screen: a card, a clip or a picture of theirs, each item of a list, a chapter card, a number or a result.
4. Pick one sound from Takehound's own library for each kind of moment and keep it for the whole video: a soft whoosh for a card or a clip, a tick for list items, a page turn or a slower whoosh for a chapter, a soft hit for a number.
5. Keep only the changes that matter. Leave out the first seconds of the hook, anything under a punch line, a confession or the emotional beat of a story, and a card that lands close after another sound.
6. Land each sound where the thing starts on screen, not on the word it is about. If that moment is on the word that carries the line, move the sound into the breath before it.
7. Set each effect about 10 dB under the voice at its loudest, and ticks and clicks a little quieter than that.
8. Lay them all in one script, so one undo takes them all back, each with a why that names what it marks. Lay no music bed in this pass.
9. Check: watch each stretch with a sound in it. Every word is as clear as without it, the sound lands on the frame the change happens, and nothing is too loud for its moment. Fix the level or the moment, or take the sound off.
10. Say how many sounds you placed, which sound marks which kind of moment, which moments you left bare and why, and five times in the video worth checking with headphones.