Working with sounds in our advertisements

Alright, this video were going to learn about sound. Now sound is a bit of a problem when it comes to banner ads, especially our simple ones. It’s pretty much just not allowed, I'm going to show you here because you might be using it for another application. You can use sounds for some sites, but that’s a site-by-site bases. If you're doing rich media ads, you can definitely do sound, generally in conjunction with videos, games will do it but outside of the scope of this but its quite easy so I think its something well quickly cover here.

So first of all you need to import a sound, I've got a bunch, so what you're looking for is commercial use sounds, so you then need to buy it from a site like istock and I istock, yeah you pay say $20 USD and you'll get a sound or a backing track or anything like that or you're looking for free stuff online. You want to go and look for stuff that is commercial use and free. A good one is adobe has a bunch of free stuff themselves; so if you're going to go do it, let me open up, this one here. So you want to do a search for they're hidden in the depths of adobe land. Just do a Google search for adobe sound library and its often the top one here, see there's adobe audition. So if you're paying for the full license for the creative cloud you'll get something called audition and audition is just their sound editing software and as part of that they’ve bundled in some sounds and you can see there’s a bunch of music loops. And here’s a bunch of sounds so I can go into here. The only trouble is its not searchable its just lumped in this big junk pile here. So if you want ambient noises, you could download, they’ve got 1.3GB of them and then go through them. What I've done for this course is I was trying to look for a rocket blasting so I downloaded this one called weapons and there was one in there called fire somewhere. So I downloaded those and then sifted through them and found some stuff that’s not particularly perfect but its going to work for us.

So double check the license to make sure it’s going to work with what you're using it for. There are some restrictions but normally these are royalty-free sound effects that we can use throughout our adobe products. So I've downloaded some and I've put them into your exercise files. So in adobe animate, what were going to do is import them into the library. So were going to go to file, and were going to go to import, and instead of the stage, were going to import it to the library because there's some stuff we need to do to it first when were dealing with sound.

So I'm going to play around with, I cant even remember which one I'm going to use, the explosion blast heavy crackle, that sounds good, I'm going to import that one. And you'll see, well you didn’t see there, it was a wave file and wave files are really good quality but very big so we want to keep this as small as we can. And one of the reasons that we don’t use a lot of sounds is because it’s huge in terms of file size; it’s much bigger than images, not as big as video but it blows out our file size limits.

So what you want to do is you want to right click it in here, if you're going to be purest about this, id open this up in adobe audition and sample it down to something really small- file size, that was at least something really low in terms of its compression but something that’s actually hearable. Nothing too distorted, but we’re going to stick this to adobe animate. And there are some features in here you can use. So I'm going to go to here, go to properties, and you want to go down to compression, we want to set it to mp3 which is really low. And you're going to play around with this bit rate, how low can you go, just start at the bottom, 8KB and hit test. It’s pretty terrible, and just keep going up until you find something that’s useable. And you can see the difference between the original and this, it’s about 1.1% of the wave so it’s really, really small. There's a bit crackle afterwards. So it’s a very long one, I don’t really like this one, I'm going to bring in a different one. File, import, to stage, that one goes on forever. This one, goes on for a while as well, okay, that ones funny. I'm going to bring in that, it’s just like a fire cracker. So right click it, properties, I'm going to go to default, mp3, how low, quite often 64 Kbps is too high, it’s too perfect. Its fine, its 20KB its reasonably small but if I can get away with 16, and 5KB, test. It’s maybe a little crappy so I'm going to go up to 20KB and hit okay.

Now, to put in sound, it needs to be on its own layer, this one in this case, can you see I've already dumped, not sure how I did it but I've already got sound already applied to this layer. So what I want to do is undo, go away, it’s because I went import to stage, so I'm going to have to do this thing again. That seems good, I'm going to import this one. So import to library not to stage because other wise it ends up mashed up with this layer here under flames. So I'm going to go to fire, where is it, fire ball large. Properties, why do it once when you can do it three times on the demo. So were going to make a new layer, were going to call this one sound, its very common, you can have them mixed up in other layers but you just want to make sure that its just to keep everything separate its pretty common to have them on separate layers.

Now what you'll see down here is that there's nothing here, blank key frame. So it needs to go on a key frame, so where do you want to start it? I'm going to stick it just at the beginning here and just see how it goes and you just drag it. Weirdly, everyone tries to do that, well not weirdly but that seems really natural, right? It doesn’t work, so what you’ve got to do is just drag it to the center, boom and you can see my little waveform appear. So that layer is just going to be for this, so I'm going to do a little test. I'm going to preview in a browser. I don’t know what that little tick is at the end there, lets go have a look, cool so it plays along and there's a little hiss at the end there, oh well.

So yeah, the timing is alright for me if you wanted it to move you can click hold and drag this one. You can see, I drag my key frame along and made a second one and I could start it a little bit later to make it around the timing. Depending on what you want to do. Yeah, that works okay, its not very exciting. The same with the background, it’s the same if you want say background music, ambient background sounds. So you’ve got to be careful when you start using stuff like that. Say you’ve got a background loop that you want to use what you can do is just dump it in there, but its going to be really long. What will happen is if it’s a 3-minute mp3. It will get exported as that full mp3 so you need to go and chop it up.

Okay, so that’s how you go an add sound to your adobe animate files.