How Important is Audio in Film/Content/Video?

Very Important.

When I first started editing video, I came across a common adage: "people will forgive bad video, but they will not be able to overlook bad audio in a video". It was actually great news, since I'd been an audio engineer for about 15 years already, and my ears were trained to listen for those inconsistencies.

But why is it important? I am a digger, I need to find the REASON in everything I do. I have to understand every facet of a problem before I'm comfortable working on a fix. In this short post I'm going to look at a few of the reasons that people are uncomfortable with audio issues, but will likely forgive a bad cut, artifacting or any other big video errors.

Rockadove Productions says "Your audience might forgive a blurry, out of focus image but they won’t forgive bad sound because if you can’t clearly hear what a person is saying, then you’re not going to be to engaged with what they are talking about". I agree, if the audio is so bad you can't understand the dialog, you've got a BIG problem.

But what about audio that you can clearly hear, but it's either grainy, or not adequately EQ'd, or the FX just don't line up with the scenery? That's more important, in my opinion.

Think about the last time you saw this in film. If you watch any content on Tubi, Philo or any of the other free streamers, you'll see it a lot. Many B-movies are notorious (and sometimes it can add to the campy feel).

Picture this: Our protagonist walks into a giant gymnasium to face off against the bad guy. He yells at the top of his lungs "I'm here for you, you terrible bastard!" (forgive me, I'm not a dialog writer).

Somethings wrong, though. The voice didn't bounce, in fact it sounds like he's in a cotton factory, not a gym. No reverb was added, no depth to the sound. YOU DON'T BELIEVE HE'S THERE.

And I think that's the main thing with bad FX: we see unbelievable things on the screen all the time, but we don't HEAR unbelievable things, because it's not very complicated to recreate sound profiles in that case.

So we go on expecting our hero's voice to sound like it's where we're putting him in the script.

It also has something to do with the way we perceive video and audio respectively. If there is artifacting or grain, AJ Henderson, a Stack Exchange user says "if detail is missing from video, it's pretty easy for our brains to adjust for detail loss from compression artifacts and such because we are good at matching patterns of what we see and filling in the details. Really, this is what persistence of vision and our ability to move our eyes around without it being a hugely jarring experience does all the time (not to mention hiding the giant blind spots where our nerves enter the back of our eyes).

On the other hand for audio, we have drastically better ability to perceive sound than we have to play it back. We have quite good positional noise filtering capability, so we can normally make decent sense of a noisy situation, but when it is recorded and then played back through a few speakers, the noise and the audio we are interested in are coming from the same place. Our normal tricks for filtering don't work and so we struggle."

Our brain has light and definite sight to justify video and reassemble it, it is the same reason that we can wee two dots above a circle as a face. Audio is a little "squiggier" though; sometimes our brains can make it something completely different, but if there is noise involved, it likely will fill in the holes with much more artistic license.

Another point to ponder is what we grew up with. Remember it's only been lately that high quality, near realistic video has been around. Even in the end of the 20th century video was a little blurry, especially if you weren't at a theater or IMAX. So we've been conditioned to see blurry video, if you grew up in the 90s then you're conditioned to cancel out scan lines, etc. Audio, on the other hand has been largely lossless since the advent of the CD (don't get technical on me here, I understand it's not lossless, but the average human ear can't really perceive the difference. You and I can, sure...but grandma and grandpa cannot).

Lastly, I wonder if smoothness has anything to do with it. We're used to 30FPS, when gaming got 'real', you heard the old claim that the human eye cannot perceive any difference above 30 FPS. I don't think that's necessarily totally true, but our audio is a much finer detail. We're recording at 48KHz sample rates and huge bitrates that our ears really CAN perceive, so (and this is a shot in the dark) it stands to reason in my mind that you can compare that "smoothness" to frames per second in video, at least on a basic level. When you think about the both of those on a grid, one is significantly smoother rolloff than the other.

So those are just a few thoughts off the top of my head about the issue. I have seen several people claim that the adage is not true, however in my experience it is. I can watch a grainy, horizontal lined video from 1982 and as long as the audio is intact I'm not going to lose my mind.

If you have any questions or comments, please add them below! I'd love to hear your thoughts.