How to Fan Dub for free in TrakAx: Part 1: Importing Video and working with music

How to Fan dub for Free!

In this tutorial I'm going to guide you through dubbing in a piece of free Software called TrakAx. Obviously, these skills can be also beused with your own original animation, machinima or abridged parodies. To further amuse regular visitors to this site I'm going to use the “ Fighting guys” video from our voice acting panels and first contest.

Get the video in TrakAxe.

If you want to know how to make a clip from a larger file, please see the VirtualDub tutorial.

Bear in mind TrakAxe is fussy about codecs so you're better off not compressing into DIVX whilst you mix.

1. First things first, right click in the mixing area and Select Insert>Video Track.

Right click then...(Click image to expand)

Select insert track

2. Next select the video from the Media browser on the left, and drag it onto the video track. It can take a while to load. If the video file has sound already left click on the audio track and press delete. You'll now have a file without any audio.

Audio Tracks

Generally speaking you'll have to recreate all the audio from scratch there's no magical voices away feature, You can salvage audio from the original, but it's tricky to get right so for now we'll leave it.

Broadly speaking there are four main areas of audio:

The Voice- the dialogue in the scene

Sound effects caused by action

Ambient Sound Effects: this is atmospheric sounds like birds or traffic

Music: The Background Music

3. Right click in the mixing area and click Insert> Audio track until you have four audio tracks. This is the minimum, you can also if you want create an audio track for each character.

First let's start with music:

4. If you want to use the whole track, you can either drag the music directly on to an audio track. Or if you want to use just a bit of it If your video file is longer than your music,and you're using a video that's longer you can click on the end and drag to make it loop. This only really works on things like video game music that's designed to loop. If the music is too longer you can also drag to make it shorter.

5.      If you wanted to use bits of music you can split it into segments. Simply right click where you want to split and select 'Split Segment''.

You can then drag these segments around or delete them as needed.

Now let's talk about some audio effects you'll want to use. By far the most common and essential is fade in and out. This ensure music starts and stops naturally. Especially important when you could be using material from the middle of the track.

6. Since this track is background music, make the volume of the track fairly quiet by moving the slider to left in the Audio Track Information area. You can always make it loader, but that's something to fine tune when all audio tracks are complete.

7. Drag the the Audio track information section down until you see the icon'Volume Envelope':

or Right Click on the audio track and Click Insert> Volume Envelope.

8.You'll see a red line appear, this allows you to control the volume throughout the track. So you can always make music or other sounds lower in volume when characters are talking etc. so they can be heard better. For now let's create a pan or fade in.

9. At the point where you want the volume to reach it's normal level click on the red line. You'll see a little box appear.

9. Do the same at the start.

9. Now click the red box at the start and drag it down. Click the play button at the top of the screen. The music should now fade in.

9. Do the opposite at the other end to make it fade out, or control the volume more precisely.

Next time I'll talk about sound effects in your fan dub. The final part will cover scripting and mixing voices into your project.