A guide to the 53 sound effects in Video by Zaweba

The sound in a video often needs more than a level change. A voice can sound boomy, a recording can clip, a scene might want an echo or a voice that sounds like it's coming down a phone line. Video by Zaweba carries a library of 53 sound effects for jobs like these, each run through FFmpeg once and then cached so playback stays smooth.

Repair tools first

A good share of the library is about repair. Click and clipping repair deals with the crackles and the harsh flattened peaks you get when a recording was too loud. The hum remover goes after electrical hum. The de-esser tames sharp S sounds that spit out of a close microphone. De-reverb reduces the boxy echo of a bare room, and voice clarity helps speech cut through.

These are the effects most people need most often, and the best ones to learn first. Use them gently and compare with the effect switched off, since repair that goes too far can sound worse than the fault.

Shaping tone and level

Next come the tools that shape a sound. There are several kinds of EQ: a 3-band EQ for quick tone changes, a parametric EQ for precise ones and a graphic EQ with a row of fixed bands. High pass and low pass filters cut everything below or above a point, which is the fastest fix for rumble. Bass boost does what it says.

For level there's a compressor, which evens out loud and quiet moments, a multiband compressor, which does that separately across frequency bands, and dynamic EQ, which changes tone only when a sound gets loud. A limiter stops peaks going over a ceiling, and a gate shuts the sound off when it falls below a threshold, useful for silencing hiss between lines.

Space and character

Reverb puts a sound in a room or a hall. Echo repeats it. Chorus, flanger and phaser are classic modulation effects that thicken or swirl a sound. A stereo widener spreads a sound across the speakers, and mono collapses it to the middle, handy for a one-sided recording. Tremolo wobbles the volume and vibrato wobbles the pitch.

Effects for fun and story

Some effects are about character rather than correction. Pitch shift raises or lowers a voice. Telephone makes it thin and tinny, like a call. Old radio adds that crackly broadcast feel. Robot and underwater do exactly what you'd expect. Distortion and bitcrusher roughen a sound up, which suits a retro game feel or a dramatic moment.

These are great for flashbacks, phone calls in a short film, comedy and children's videos. Used once at the right moment, they add a lot.

Stacking and comparing

Effects can be stacked on a clip, and the order matters. A common chain for a voice is repair first, then EQ, then compression, then any space like reverb. To treat a whole track instead of single clips, put the effects on as track inserts.

The sound effect editors open any EQ or dynamics effect in a window with a curve you can drag, so you don't have to work purely by numbers.

Above all, listen. Toggle each effect off and on while the clip plays, and keep only what makes it better. Video by Zaweba makes trying things cheap, and the cache means you hear the result straight away once it's processed.