Behind the Scenes: Roosters, Iron Men, Frying Bacon, and the sounds of Breakfast With the Author

One of the most fun parts of editing down the footage of Breakfast With the Author is putting together the soundscape. From the rooster crowing at the beginning to first strains of our title song, every moment of each episode is carefully calculated to come out sounding its best.

The rooster sound is a public domain .wav file that I downloaded quite some time ago from a free sound effects page, and the bacon frying sound effect and title song are both used under a generous creative commons license from SoundJay.com. The title song of the show, incidentally, is called "Iron Man" and can be heard in full on the SoundJay website along with loads of other great background music for your own projects if you so choose.

One thing that's been a real challenge for me as I've recorded these episodes is that the two cameras I use (an iPhone 4 in a custom tripod mount and a Kodak Z650) each have very different microphone gains. Which means one usually records too loudly and the other too softly. Sometimes the iPhone will lose the lower register of my guests' voices and I'll need to boost the volume/gain of the audio track or even occasionally swap in the audio from the other camera for that shot in the mixdown. Other times the Z650 will be so sensitive that it zeroes in on the stove fan in the kitchen and overlays everything with an infernal hum that will have to be fixed and de-hissed later.

For things like the on-location video shot at Jumbo's Diner in Gouverneur, NY, I had to actually strip the audio completely out of the original video footage and reprocess it in Apple's handy GarageBand software, extruding the voices, canceling out the at-times-overwhelming background noise, and then compressing it back down so it sounded normal. This ended up being the most time-consuming part of producing that entire episode, but at least now in the final version all the voices are audible. I can't say enough good things about the Apple hardware I use to edit and master the videos. There's no way I'd be able to achieve the final quality I get without it.