Advanced Audio Processing for Video

hi my name is Dave bode for tuts plus and thanks for checking out this course on advanced audio processing for video in the context of video production audio is perhaps more important than picture in a film subpar video with good audio works but good video with subpar audio doesn't capturing good audio in the studio or on location is very critical but what happens to the audio and post-production is also important in this course you will learn how to work with audio in post-production you will learn how to use essential audio plugins like eq's compressors gates expanders and DSS you also learn how to clean up dialogue tracks by reducing noise cleaning up mouth clicks and mixing multiple microphones you will learn how to mix in process sound effects so that they sit nice in a mix finally you will learn how to use some mastering plugins like compressors limiters multiband compressor x' and more to make sure your audio levels and tone is kept in check to keep your productions as streamlined as possible you will learn how to do almost all of these processes inside your video editing application this saves you time from having to bounce out tracks to an external DAW or audio editor by the end of this course you will have the skills that you need to be able to confidently tackle the audio portion of your projects like a pro to start things off we're going to talk about a few basics like audio monitors and headphones how to record good sources and audio formats which is coming up next Before we jump into tearing apart audio tracks it would be smart to talk about some of the basics of audio formats in this lesson you will learn about audio file types sample rates and bit depths in the world of audio you're going to come across a lot of different audio file types and you can classify these in three main groups you have uncompressed audio like WAV AIFF and PCM you have lossless compressed audio like black monkey audio or apple lossless and then you have lossy compressed audio file types in the two most popular formats there are mp3 and AAC these audio file types can come in many different for example you're definitely going to come across a dot wav file a dot mp3 file add a a C file and these different file types can be baked into all kinds of different video files the main thing that you want to understand about these different file types is that there's a big difference between uncompressed in lossless uncompressed and lossy compressed audio lossy compressed audio like mp3 and AAC files throw away audio information now this is done to save size because when you can press them down it makes the files really really small when you're recording audio or you're downloading music or sound effects you always want to shoot for the best quality that you can get because just like video you want to start with the best possible source because in the end almost all delivery formats are going to be compressed the video is going to be compressed and the audio is going to be compressed so if you start with something that's already lost lis compressed like mp3 or AAC you're going to be compressing it again and more of that audio information is going to be thrown away so it's best to try and preserve as much as you can at the start it's always a good idea to start with the best quality audio files that you can in your projects so that when you deliver your final files they have the best sound quality possible two other terms that you're going to come across when you're looking at audio files are sample rates and bit depths sample rate is the number of times the audio was sampled per second so for example CD audio has a sample rate of 44,000 100 which means every second the audio sampled 44100 times the video standard starts at 48,000 or 48 K and that means the audio is sampled 48,000 times per second now I say start because it can go up from there most cameras will record audio at 48 K but if you're using an external recorder you can have much higher sample rates anywhere from 96 K all the way up to 192 K bit depth is the other spec that you're gonna see when you're looking at audio files and you're pretty much only going to see 16-bit and 24-bit audio now if you're recording audio you probably always want to stick to 24-bit if you have the opportunity 24-bit does make larger file sizes but memory is pretty cheap and it's usually the better option the reason is 24-bit has a higher theoretical signal-to-noise ratio 16-bit audio has a theoretical signal-to-noise ratio of 96 decibels and 24-bit audio has a theoretical signal-to-noise ratio of a hundred and forty-four decibels now this does not mean that 24-bit audio is louder it means that it has a higher theoretical signal-to-noise ratio now I say it's theoretical because there are a number of other factors that are going to be more prevalent when you're recording and when you're working with audio like noise generated by the analog to digital conversion noise generated by your preamps or your microphone or background noise those things will often have more of an effect on the audio than this theoretical maximum signal-to-noise ratio but in general it's usually a better idea to record 24-bit when you can because you don't want to be in the type of situation where you have a piece of audio that you've recorded and it's right at the noise floor and you recorded it at 16-bit and you don't want to wonder if it would have been a little bit cleaner had you recorded it in 24-bit so usually a better idea to just record in 24-bit the other specification that you're going to see when you're looking at audio files is bit rate now don't get this confused with bit depth these are two different things bitrate is literally how many bits per second and that's more a description of the file size than anything else although when you're looking at lossy compressed audio you want to shoot for the highest bit rate that you can because usually that's a good determination of the audio quality for that particular file size now that you have an understanding of audio file types sample rates bit depths and bit rates you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're gonna learn how to record good sources later in this course you're going to learn how to deal with cleaning up dialogue tracks but it's best to record it properly so you don't have to clean it up in this lesson you will learn the basics of signal-to-noise microphone types and how to capture good audio capturing good audio I think is a pretty simple process because all you really have to focus on is getting a good signal to noise if we were to use the example of recording a person's voice the signal would be that person's voice and the noise is everything else it's preamp noise it's microphone noise it's background noise it's anything else that's making noise that's not the person speaking so how do we get a good signal to noise well first try and choose a location that isn't noisy if you have the option of a few locations pick the one that's not going to be right next to a construction zone or right next to the road sometimes you're going to have to record in an area that does have a lot of noise but if you have the option you want to start with the least amount of noise possible and that's going to increase your signal level the second part of the equation is use a decent microphone and use the right kind of microphone for video a lot of times you're going to be using a lavalier microphone like I have right here or you're going to be using a shotgun microphone those two microphone types are great for recording in all types of situations however sometimes you may want to reach for a plain old pencil condenser microphone if you're recording indoors depending on the type of shotgun microphone you have and how directional it is sometimes these can become a problem when you're using them indoors because of the pickup pattern a shotgun microphone picks up almost everything directly in front of the microphone they have a very low acceptance angle right in front of the microphone and then the most amount of rejection comes from the sides and then right in the back of the microphone they also have an area where they pick up sound this means that if you're using a shotgun microphone close to the ceiling you can get some really weird sounding reflections because the sound is going to bounce off the ceiling and it's gonna go right into the back of the microphone and you wouldn't think that it picks up some sound but it does and it can sound weird in those type of situations you may want to check out a lavell your microphone or a small pencil condenser microphone just like this I think these pencil condenser microphones are really pretty fantastic because they're super inexpensive most of them have a cardioid or super cardioid pickup pattern and they sound fantastic now these type of microphones you really can't get too far away from your because you're gonna start picking up a lot of room reflections but as long as you get it on a boom and you get it over your subject just like you would a normal shotgun microphone and if it's within 12 inches or 18 inches it's gonna sound really nice and if you're working with a low ceiling or something that's causing some weird reflections and your shotgun microphone this can be a great alternative if you want to find out more information about microphone types and which microphones are great to use for what applications I have two fantastic courses on touch plus one is the fundamentals of audio recording and the other one is audio production for interviews so for more information on microphones and how to use them check those courses out the last key to capturing good audio is to get your microphones nice and close to your sound source there's an inverse-square law in audio that says that for every doubling of the distance from your ears to the sound source you're gonna get a six decibel reduction in level now if we think about that in terms of microphone and signal source if we take a microphone and we have the distance we're gonna get a six decibel increase in our signal if we have a microphone right here for example we'll say this is two feet away from me and we're using this microphone to pick up my voice and all throughout the room we have a little bit of ambient noise maybe there is an air handler on or something in the room that's making a little bit of noise in the distance between this microphone in any one of those surfaces is let's say 15 feet if we take this microphone and we move it one foot closer to me so was it two feet and now it's at one feet we'd have the distance and so now my voice is six decibels louder in this microphone but the distance really didn't change that much from microphone to any one of the surfaces that the ambient noise is reflecting off of we were at fifteen feet from the nearest surface in the room and moving it one foot in this direction may mean that now this microphone is fourteen feet but the difference in level between 15 feet and fourteen feet is almost nothing but the distance and level between the microphone at two feet in one feet from me has gone up six decibels which is significant if we take this microphone and we have the since again so we go from one foot to six inches now we're gonna get another big level increase from my voice it's going to be another six decibels so we got six decibels from going from two to one feet and from one feet to six inches we get another six decimals so now we're at 12 decibels but the distance between the microphone in any one of these surfaces it's only gone up six inches and because that distance is a lot bigger the audio level increase for the ambient noise is going to be almost nothing so we've made a 12 decibel increase in the signal which is me and almost no perceivable increase in the ambient noise from the room this means that we want to get our microphones as close as we can to the sound source and pointed in the right direction so for a shotgun microphone I get it just out of frame here you can see it's just out of the frame there and then for a lavalier microphone I just get it a few inches below my chants sometimes you can get it up a little bit tighter depending on the shirt configuration here but again the closer you can get your microphones to your sound source the more signal-to-noise you are going to get now that you understand what you have to do to capture good sources you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're gonna learn about audio monitors and headphones you can't expect to get a good mix on your audio projects if your listening back on cheap computer speakers you need to have a high quality full range monitors and headphones to hear what's going on in this lesson you'll learn why that's important and what to look for in a set of monitors and headphones these audio monitors are a special type of speaker that's designed to very accurately reproduce sound in an uncoloured way this means that they don't sound hyped up they don't have a lot of treble they don't have a lot of bass they sound very flat in neutral sounding and this is what you want because this is going to give you the most amount of detail in your mixes audio monitors are a place where you're going to want to spend a little bit of money but you don't have to go bananas in order to get a really good upgrade from your computer speakers you can get something pretty decent for a couple of hundred dollars now maybe a couple hundred dollars scares you but that's the reality of the situation a lot of studio monitors are gonna be pretty small but I would recommend that you stay with something that has at least a 5 inch woofer and if you can I would go up to an 8 inch woofer the larger the woofer the better job it's going to do on low-frequency sounds if you do need to go with a smaller monitor for a price or size restrictions you might want to think about getting a dedicated sambal for it to go along with it in fact I would recommend that you get a system that's meant to go together because it's going to be very well matched in terms of frequency you'll have your main left and right speakers and then wherever they start to drop off in frequency the subwoofer is going to pick up where they leave off and extend that low-frequency down as low as it can go the reason why it's important to have a full range monitor system is that a lot of times low frequency stuff can sneak by in a mix a lot of times you won't realize that there's a little bit of low Rumble on a dialogue track if you're not listening back on a full range system and what happens is you go and export this and you give it to your client they play it back on a full range system and they hear some ungodly low Rumble coming from the main focal track if you were listening to your mix on a full range system you would have caught this and you would have put a high-pass filter on that channel and you would have saved the day so this is why it's really important that you get something that's full range or as close to full range as you can get a lot of these systems won't actually go from 20,000 Hertz all the way down to 20 Hertz but as long as you get monitors that have a pretty good reproduction down to 40 or maybe even 30 Hertz you're going to be doing just fine there's not gonna be a whole lot of information down past 30 Hertz unless you're mixing a movie soundtrack now when you're looking at monitors you're gonna see powered monitors and you're gonna see non powered monitors powered monitors have the amplifiers built right in and usually these are called active monitors a lot of times he sounds better because it's much more efficient to have an amplifier that just handles the high frequencies and then a much beefier amplifier to just handle the lower frequencies and some nicer monitors have some DSP built in and this means that they've already gone through some processing to time the drivers to make sure that the EQ is set up really nice to account for any kind of frequency anomalies that may be inherent in the box shape or whatever and so generally these speakers are gonna sound a good bit better than your standard passive speakers and unamplified headphones are important but not nearly as important as monitors you do need headphones though because there's going to be times when you're going to be mixing and someone is running a jackhammer outside or you're going to be doing a voiceover and you're going to need to monitor that with headphones you can't monitor that with your regular studio monitors or audio monitors unless you have the microphone in another room because if you turn a microphone on and you have audio monitors in the same room you will get feedback and it will destroy your monitors I've done it it's no fun headphones is another place where you're gonna want to spend a little bit of money but I think you don't need to go crazy spending several hundred dollars on a set of headphones headphones that I use most of the time cost thirty-eight dollars they came from monoprice com and I have three other sets of pretty nice headphones two of them are made by Audio Technica and the other one is made by Sennheiser to me a lot of these other headphones sound hyped up so they have a lot of sizzle or if you're using like Beats headphones it sounds like they have a subwoofer strapped to your face none of these are really great for mixing video or mixing anything really because they sound super hyped up you want something that sounds pretty flat and pretty neutral sounding and I found these pretty cheap $38.00 headphones do a fantastic job plus they're pretty comfortable for my ears which is also something that you want to consider whatever products you choose for headphones or monitors it's very important especially for monitors that you spend a good amount of time listening to a lot of different material on those monitors so your brain and your ears can really get accustom to the sound of your monitors because over time your ears and your brain are going to get much better at getting good mixes out of whatever products that you choose at the start you're gonna have a hard time kind of making your brain get the right kind of mixes out of your speaker so you're gonna want to reference that with some stuff that you like that you think is really good quality until you're getting mixes that sound great on your speakers and then when you take them to other systems you know your home theater system they're gonna sound fantastic so now that you understand about audio file formats how to record good sources and the importance of a good set of monitors and headphones you're ready to move on to the next lesson in the next lesson you're to learn why it's important to put a limiter on your master buss whenever you start a new project so check that out coming up next it can be a good idea to start all your projects with a limiter on the master track to make sure nothing jumps out and mouth your face while you're editing in this quick lesson you'll find out why throughout this course we're going to be talking about lots of different audio effects and audio plugins but what I'd like to suggest is when you first start working on your projects you throw a limiter on your master buss the reason is when you're mixing and you have multiple elements a limiter is pretty much the only tool that's gonna save your butt from this happening right here you see these little red lights on this level indicator this means that the audio in my project has clipped it has gone above zero decibels we don't want that digital clipping is a bad thing and that means that the audio in all of our tracks has added up to more than zero decibels and the result is a nasty nasty sound that sounds distorted and awful it's really not a good idea to send the clip signals to your speakers so in order to prevent this from happening there's one very simple thing you can do at the start of all your projects all right we're gonna come up here to the audio track mixer and if you don't have this you can come up here to window and I know the menus just off the screen there but you'll see it and just select audio track mixer and select your timeline here when you do you'll see this and you can dock it anywhere you like and I'll make this a little bit bigger for you this is basically kind of a representation of an analog mixer we have lots of different options here but what I want to show you is right up here there's a little show/hide effects and sin twirl down so we hit that and now we have this effects rack okay we can put in processors and put in effects in this rack so what you want to do is come over here to your master bus here where all these other audio tracks go you can see they're all set to go to the master and we're going to come here in the very last effects slot click this little triangle come down here to amplitude and compression and select dynamics now there's other limiters that you can use and we'll talk about those in an upcoming lesson but to start this one is really fast and really easy to manage double click on the dynamics effect to open it up here and what I want you to do is uncheck compressor okay and an able limiter okay because we're not going to really worry about any of this stuff right now you're gonna learn about compressors expanders gates in an upcoming lesson what I want you to do for right now is just check the limiter and then turn the threshold up to zero decibels what this is gonna do is provide you some protection to make sure that your master bus never goes over zero decibels now is this gonna make everything sound great nope not really but it will protect you from sending up projects that have clipped audio on the master Channel I'm gonna reset this clip indicator here and I'm just going to replay a portion of this project here now this is part of my video resume that I put together several months ago and right about here I have a whole bunch of sound effects I have music I have a voice over here and watch what's going to happen I'm gonna disable the limiter here watch what happens to the master buss here video-production who at some point wasn't excited by visual effects oh look at that a big old explosion and we clipped our output now did that clip a whole lot it didn't sound like it to my ears it wasn't crazy super crackly distorted but look at this we'll just go back here and re-enable the limiter and I'll reset these clip indicators and I'll play it again who at some point wasn't excited by visual effects this was blue look at that now everything is kept in check really really simple to do and this will save you if you do nothing else if you stop watching this course right now which I would not recommend but if you did nothing else to your audio projects this will save you from sending out clipped audio in your video projects which is really important you do not want to send out something that's a distorted and mess I've seen several projects mixed by people who are just getting started in editing now listen to the audio if something doesn't sound right it's usually really cracky and distorted and I'll say hey did you use a limiter on the master Channel and it's pretty obvious that they didn't because it sounds like a distorted mess so really really quick and simple to do just throw it on here turn the threshold all the way up to zero decibels and that's a really good start that's the first step in making sure your audio for your video projects comes out great now that we've got that out of the way you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about syncing audio with video so check that out coming up next at some point you're going to have to handle multiple cameras or separate audio tracks in your project and everything has to be in sync in the last several years video editing apps have added these synchronization features but they're not always perfect in this lesson you'll learn how to use some of the automated tools in Adobe's Premiere Pro to sync up your video and audio clips so we're looking at a little project here in Adobe Premiere Pro and I have a little folder open here with an audio clip and for video clips now this is a project that I shot and we recorded dual system audio so the cameras were recording audio but they were using the UM microphones which are pretty terrible and then we used a condenser microphone on a boom to record the vocal up close and that was recorded on a separate recorder so what I need to do and what probably you're going to have to do in many projects is to sync these cameras and the audio track so that it all plays back nicely now in fermier we have a few automated systems that will help us out with this process if we set this to sort by name here we can kind of see how these clips are laid out so we see we have the first wide clip in the second wide clip and then we have the first tight clip in the second type clip because I know that this clip goes with this audio clip here I can take both of these I can right click and then I can choose merge clips and then I have this dialog box that pops up here and I have several different methods that I can use to synchronize these two clips I can do it on the endpoint I don't want to do that because they have different end points I can do it on the out point that's not going to work either if these clips had timecode we could use timecode to try and sync these clips but the one that I want to focus on is right here and we're going to sync these clips with the audio tracks and then we have two more options here I can use the timecode from the audio clip which I don't want to do and I can remove audio from av clip I don't want to do that either for this example so I'm just going to click OK and then premier is going to process both of these files and we're gonna get another clip and we're gonna check that out as soon as it's done processing okay so here is our new clip you can see that it has a different length to it and so if we pull this down into my sequence here we're gonna see what premiere did for us this is the audio track and when it merges these clips it explodes the channels on the clips so what that means is this is a stereo clip right here and when it merges the clips when you bring them in it comes in as a dual mono track so it separated the right and left channel from this stereo clip and it's shown here is two separate channels same thing with the video clip so the reason why this clip is longer than the video clip is because the audio portion is longer than the video clip and premiere went ahead and attempted to sync this with the audio so it tried to line these up and if we play this we can see how close it got wheels on Wheels is a valuable service to homebound seniors right now there's a waiting list for home delivered meals it looks and sounds as though premiere did a really decent job at syncing these tracks now if this was the only thing that I had to sync this would have worked really well and at this point what I could do is I could take these clips here because I don't need the camera's audio it's kind of terrible sounding I can take this whole group here which is linked together and I can right click and choose unlink and I can take the audio clips right here and I can delete them select them and delete them and then I can zoom out here I'll select these and I can trim them down and just snap them right to the end of this video clip I can also take the beginning here and trim that right to the beginning and select all of these and then right click and say link and now my new audio from the recorder with a nicer microphone that's right above this gentleman's head here is now synced with the video and I don't have the on-camera audio in this project anymore and that's totally fine because I don't want that what I do want is I want the nice audio with this clip meals-on-wheels is a valuable service to homebound seniors but right now there's a waiting list for home delivered meals and it looks and sounds fantastic so that's one method that you can use to try and sync your clips you can select them right here and then you can choose merge clips I'm going to delete this and we're gonna look at another method I'm also going to delete this clip here from this folder another method that you can try and use if you have multiple camera angles multiple clips and an audio track that you need to sync is you can attempt to select all of your clips right click and then choose create multicam source sequence if you click okay you're going to get this dialog box that pops up and we have some similar options here we can sync with the endpoints the out points timecode and audio and then we have some other options down here sequins are presets we want it to enumerate the cameras if I were to try and sink this just like it is we'll just let it go and do its thing premiere is going to attempt to try and sync all of these clips with this one audio clip and I say attempt because despite what you may have seen in the promotional material or the advertisements for Premiere Pro and it's syncing capabilities it doesn't always work as they advertise it and sometimes it's a little bit more difficult so what that did is when it finished it created a new folder for us and this is our processed clips so that's what it just looked at and then it gave us a new sequence which is right here if we take this sequence you can pull down we can see it's a nested multi-camera sequence if we control double click on that sequence we can see what it tried to do here and it looks like premiere did a reasonably good job of trying to sync all of these clips up for us and we can check that by playing ok yeah and then we'll enable and disable these meals on wheels is a valuable search service to homebound seniors but right now there's a waiting list for home delivered to make sure that it locked these right up we can also as long as we're in the timeline or the sequence window here we can hit the tilde key and that will bring up the timeline window full screen and then we can make some room here we can expand these out and we can make sure that these are synced up by just visually checking so we can go to the first spot here where we can see and it looks like premiere did a really pretty fantastic job at syncing these up so this first set of Clips is all synced up for us and that's great now let's check to see if this second set of Clips is synched up and I can make some more room here let me collapse this down and this down and then I'll zoom way up in here and we'll see we'll look right here if so making an appropriate referral can bring the individual back to the Senior Center which is usually the best option that looks pretty close let me just check it here with the monitor okay if so that looks right and then we'll look at the top camera here making an appropriate referral can bring the individual back to there and so that's an automated way of getting multiple clips to all sync together so you can edit this as a multi camera sequence or if you don't like to do that and I don't prefer to edit that way what you can do is just kind of work with the video clips just like they are in this sequence but it's my preference to just kind of clean these up a little bit so normally what I would do is probably trim up the beginning of these clips here take this guy and pull it down here pull up this audio clip then I would take this video here which is linked to this audio clip I'm gonna unlink that I'm gonna delete the audio here then I'm gonna come to the end here make sure that these are nice and trimmed up which they are and then I'm going to take this audio clip and I can grab the razor tool which is you on my keyboard and then I'm going to select this audio in this video clip and I'm going to re link it excuse that guy up there then I'm going to take this audio clip here that I sliced I'm gonna pull that over and line that up with these clips over here I'm gonna take the end of this audio clip trim that up same thing here then I'll take this clip right here I will unlink it delete the audio select both of these re link them together then I can pull this up right here pull that video down pull this guy down and then these two clips should be lined up just like that and that's how I know that those will be in sync scooch those together just like that by doing a little ripple delete I'll go to the beginning I'll ripple delete this and this is ready for me to edit this is how I prefer to edit this type of footage I have one audio track the rest of these are meted in fact I don't even need the rest of these audio tracks what I can do is right click down here and it's just off the screen I'm going to choose delete tracks and then I'm gonna delete audio tracks all empty tracks I click OK and so now my project is nice and tight when I play this back we need to make sure that people who could benefit from Senior Center activities have the ability to go to a Senior Center everything's nicely in sync I don't have extra material here extra clips that I need to deal with Perl can bring the individual back to their Senior Center and it's looking fantastic now the reason why I like to leave this audio clip still linked to this video clip is if for whatever reason any of these gets out of sync when I'm editing I have a reference point and I can go in and I can manually sync these up if I have to and so that for me is basically ready to edit now I want to show you one more quick way you can synchronize your clips I'm going to jump back to this sequence here and I'm just going to pull in these individual elements so I know they go kind of like this we can try and select these right click on these clips and then choose synchronize and because we don't have time code or a clip start and end that we can sync to what we want to do is choose audio and again premier is going to process this and it's going to try and sink this premiere did a fantastic job of syncing it in a multi-camera sequence and let's see if it does as good of a job inside the sequence for whatever reason doing it this way causes premier not to sync these correctly premier does not like to sync these particular clips inside of this sequence by choosing synchronized when we right-click on these files in this context we're not going to be able to select all of the clips here and synchronize because we don't have that option available what we can do is we can make this a little bit easier by splitting this audio because we know that it's split right here and then we can try and sync these like this will right click on just two of these and then we'll synchronize them and that looked like it worked so let's mute this and see if these two files are safe okay remember keep your eyes down here right here good that sounds like it's nicely in sync there's a small delay but really it's pretty decent now what we could do is we could go right where I trimmed up these clips and I could throw a marker in by hitting M on the keyboard and then I can choose this audio clip and then this top video clip which haven't been synchronized and I will choose synchronize again and premiere is going to attempt to try and synchronize these clips I'm fairly certain that did not work for whatever reason the audio inside this clip is not working with the synchronization feature inside of premiere so at this point what we'd have to do is go in and sync this manually in syncing manually is something that we're going to talk about in the next lesson in this lesson we're going to pick up where we left off in the last lesson and we're going to look at manually syncing up our audio and video clips so sometimes the automated synchronization tools in Premiere are not going to work the way you want them to and what you're going to have to do is come in and try and sync your files manually not really a big deal and it's something that you definitely should know how to do I want to get rid of this marker here and let's look at how to synchronize these clips one way is we can use clip markers now before premiere had all kinds of fancy synchronization tools that was a great way to synchronize up your clips and let me show you how that works to synchronize your clips with clip markers what you want to do is find a distinct sound or a distinct area which you can identify in your clips and then we're going to drop a clip marker on your clip so I know that these two clips right here are pretty close let me get the tilde key so we can kind of zoom up on this so what I would probably do is select these two guys right here these are already in sync and I can select my audio clip here and I can hit em on the keyboard and that's going to drop a clip marker right here I could do the same thing for this video clip right here I know that this audio meals-on-wheels is is right in the same time so I can hit M and that'll drop a clip marker there and so now what you want to do is find the exact same spot in the audio and drop a clip marker on this other clip here that's not in sync so what I'm looking for is this audio blob here let me solo this up there's there's a click here meals-on-wheels is a valuable service click and it looks like it's right here let me just solo that up okay so what I want to do is go right to the beginning here and I'm going to select this clip so I can hit M that's gonna drop a clip marker now what I can do is select all three of these and then I can choose synchronize and this time I can choose clip marker and what that's going to do is that's going to align those clip markers for us and so now these are nicely in sync let me go up here and unsolo this and let's listen to all three listen to that all three are nicely in sync now if it wasn't in sync we'd hear some weird kind of delay and phase eNOS to the audio which is something we're gonna check out how to deal with minute let's look at these other clips over here and let's just focus on how to manually sync these up so again we're going to be looking for a distinctive piece of audio that we can drop a clip marker on now if we were using some kind of clapper at the beginning of these Clips it would be very easy but since we don't we're gonna have to find something else that we can kind of latch on to let me play this I'm just going to solo this audio track like the meals-on-wheels diet technician just okay and what about this like the meals on wheels I'm gonna try and latch onto this right here and so I'm gonna go to this beginning part of this little audio blob here I'm gonna hit em with this clip selected and that's gonna drop a clip marker now I'm gonna look at this second clip here and try and find the same spot okay okay so it looks like it's right there I can tell because I'm seeing this audio blob and I'm seeing this audio blob he said the same thing twice and this the second time you said it there's a little bit bigger of a spike and I can see that's right there so I'm gonna zoom up on this clip right here this clip is selected I hit em and I'm dropping a clip marker right there now I'm going to I'm gonna scroll over to the side here and minimize these then I'm gonna solo up this clip right here and try and find the same spot and it looks like it's right like right there because I can see that same waveform pattern right here so I'm gonna go right here select the clip hit em and there we go select all three of these right click go to synchronize I have clip marker selected and hit OK and now if I take the solo off this channel and play these like the meals-on-wheels dive technician the Senior Center staff needs to determine these are all in sync so at this point what I would do is trim these up and now I can get to editing this project now I wanted to show you one more thing and to do that I'm going to solo two of these audio channels what I'm going to do is I'm going to solo the nice recorded audio and one of the cameras audio tracks to show you what happens if we can't get these perfectly in sync you see the furthest that we can zoom in here is to the frame level because this is the default view in this timeline window but over here we have the option to show audio time units and if we do that now we can zoom in a heck of a lot more so sometimes what might happen is when you use the automated tools in premiere or even if you try and sync it manually the audio won't lock in super tight and so it may sound something like this you can hear that it's generally in sync but we're hearing this kind of phase II delay and echo and if we were looking at the normal kind of frames view here we may not have the right kind of resolution to get that in really perfectly but if we choose show audio time units we can get right in here and kind of make some room here make these nice and big and then we can really try and line up these waveforms nicely now it helps when you're doing this to have a really distinctive marker it's back here there was this nice click so we can look at that click and we can drag these really close just like this and now that phase eNOS should be almost completely eliminated built on Wheels is a valuable service though there is no facing us and that's a way that you can go in and just make sure that your audio clips are perfectly lined up now keep in mind when you are fine-tuning your audio clips like this with your reference audio on your camera the distance to the camera is going to matter okay in this particular project the cameras were only about eight or ten feet away from the subject and the microphone that was recorded with his green audio clip here on the audio recorder was approximately maybe 12 to 18 inches away so we have a delay from when the audio reached the microphone to when the audio reached the camera it's about I don't know maybe seven to nine feet somewhere in that neighborhood if you were much further back so you had a closed microphone on your subject but your cameras were let's say sixty or a hundred feet back you're going to have a much larger delay and so when you try and sync your camera's audio to the recorded audio if you're using a dual system audio that's going to be much different if you try and lock them up just like we just did to this very distinctive click it may not look right because at sixty to a hundred feet you're going to be dealing with a much more noticeable delay in the audio and so what you might have to do is do a little calculation and you can find some distance calculators online to figure out what the speed of sound travels at at your particular elevation and so it may be something like 60 milliseconds and so what you might have to do is take your camera's audio which you know is like 60 feet back and then over here you want to control click this so that you're seeing this view right here we're still in show audio time units and this has two different ways that we can look at the playhead position this is showing us milliseconds and this is showing us samples because these are recorded at 48 kilohertz we're going to see 48,000 samples go by but what we want is milliseconds so that we can figure out how far we need to adjust the audio so what we do is you can throw in some kind of marker so we can make sure no clips are selected and then throw a marker in for the sequence right here and then we can go back 60 milliseconds so let's just for example say we're gonna go back to 8:35 somewhere in that neighborhood and we could just drop another marker here then we can select this clip drop a marker on the clip now we have a little visual reference so we want to get that marker over to here and this would be basically shifting your audio to be 60 milliseconds ahead of where the camera is because in real life the audio is going to reach the microphone if you're using a closed microphone on your subject right away I mean we're talking maybe one or two milliseconds from his mouth to the microphone but then if our cameras are 60 70 feet away it's going to take about 60 milliseconds for that audio to reach the cameras and so by pushing the audio forward this is going to align the audio visually with what's happening on the camera so distance between your subject and your camera and your subject to your microphone is going to kind of play in effect here because it's not always going to work I'm just gonna undo this to just get your audio perfectly lined up for most of the projects that you're going to be shooting this is going to be how you want to do it you're gonna want to line up your audio clips and get everything in sync this way and you can edit it however you want but if there's a pretty big distance between your cameras and your subject and you're using a wireless lab or you have some other microphone or audio system that you're using to record your subject you do want to take that into consideration when you're synching up your audio I'm gonna switch back to the normal frames view here and I would do the same thing that I did before I would take this top clip here because for me I like the audio track that I'm actually gonna use to be on audio track number one that's just kind of a personal preference thing I'm going to unlink this clip right here delete the audio select that video in this nice audio clip and I'm gonna re link those with my keyboard shortcut same thing over here I'm going to unlink these delete the audio select this video and audio clip and then re link them and I can drag these up here and then I should be able to select both of these clips if I need to because I already have those clip markers on there and I can resynchronize them really really easy see if but this for whatever reason gets all goofed up synchronize clip marker and then we're good and now I can edit these make sure that this track is muted and hit the tilde key make some room here so you can see what's going on we need to make sure that people who could benefit from Senior Center activities and everything is in sync check out the second camera need to make sure that people who could benefit from Senior Center activities have the ability to go to a center and it's looking fantastic now that you know how to use the automated synchronization features in Premiere and you know how to manually adjust your tracks for perfect synchronization you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about normalizing and making level adjustments to your audio clips even if you're working with a pro sound recording engineer your tracks will frequently need to be adjusted so that they are at an adequate level to work with in Adobe's Premiere Pro this can be accomplished in a number of ways in this lesson you will learn how to use clip gain clip volume and track volume so I have a video clip in this project and it has an audio track that has already been synced just like we looked at in the last lesson now this was recorded with a condenser microphone on a boom and it was recorded on an audio recorder in the level was a little bit low let me play it back for you hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends so this sounds reasonably decent but the level is way too low to work with so what I need to do is I need to bring the level of this clip up the first way and usually the method that you want to reach for first is using clip gain now in Premiere Pro it's just labeled as audio game but because this only affects the audio gain for this clip you can kind of think of it as the gain of the clip or I like to call it clip gain so what you do is select your clip and you right-click on it and choose audio gain a dialog box pops up here and we have a few options our first option is set gain - and the default value is zero decibels this option allows you to set the gain to a specific value this value is always updated to the current gain even when the option is not selected and the value appears dimmed the next option is adjust gain by the default value here is set to zero decibels and this option allows you to adjust the gain by plus or minus a certain amount if we for example put in 2 decibels here you can see that the set gain - updates to that value and so these two options here do a very similar thing they just go about it in a slightly different way so if we were to say adjust the gain by 2 decibels you're gonna see a small increase - the waveform size here and if we go back in here we can adjust this again by 2 decibels and you'll see that the set gain - is now set to 4 decibels but alternatively we could set this back to 0 we can go up here and we could just set this to 4 and it's going to do the same exact thing they're just two different ways to do it then we have the option of normalizing max peak - and the default value here is set to zero decibels so for example you may not want to normalize your dialogue tracks to zero decibels because you may want to leave some Headroom for other sounds above there so you may want to set this to something like negative 3 or maybe negative 5 it depends on the project that you're working on finally we have another option that says normalize all peaks - and the default value here is again set to 0 this normalization option is for when you're selecting multiple Clips okay so what it's not going to do is take every single peak in this clip and ramp that up to whatever the value you have set here that's not something that you'd want anyway because that would sound ridiculous if we leave this to zero decibels and we only have one clip selected it will essentially do the same thing as normalized Max Peak - but if we have two clips and we have this option selected it will normalize both of the clips to the selected value here let me just put this back to where it was before I just said zero there a lot of times what I will do first is I will select normalize Mac speak to and that's a good place to start when you pull up the audio gain dialog box it will also tell you what the max peak amplitude is okay so if we were to normalize this to zero decibels it's going to turn this clip up sixteen point three decibels all right which is quite a lot but that may be what's required like I said before you may not always want to normalize to see our decimals because let's say you have some other elements in this project we have sound effects we have music well if the peak is at zero decibel here there is no room for anything else if you add another sound the zero decibel peak gets added to whatever other sound is underneath it and all of a sudden you have a signal that's greater than zero decibels and that's going to drive your output bus really really hard as long as you have a limiter on there it's not going to clip but it's probably not gonna sound that great so you probably want to stick to values perhaps less than zero decibels depending on what it is so for this clip I might say negative four okay and you're gonna see a huge increase of what's happening and now if we play this back hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends it sounds like it's at a much more comfortable level to listen to now sometimes you'll have an audio track where there are other noises maybe there are clicks maybe there are claps or maybe there are other loud noises if you try to normalize a clip that is not super consistent then what will happen is whatever that loudest peak is will be normalized to whatever the value you just set was and that means that the volume of your dialogue may not be at the right level now this clip there are no extraneous noises there are no cliques or claps or anything that rises above the dialogue so when we normalize the dialogue the loudest noise in the dialogue is going to come up if we had a peak in here if we had a click or a pup that would be the element that's brought up so you may have to bring up the level of your clip higher let me show you what I'm talking about I just pulled in another clip and this is actually the audio from the last lesson and let me play you this bit of audio right here maybe not in these words but yeah we need to make sure that people who could benefit from seeing yourself okay so what you're hearing is the main level of the dialogue is down here but we have this big loud thing where this guy laughed unusually loudly and if we pull up the audio gain here you can see that the peak amplitude is already set to point zero one decibels so if we try to normalize this to zero decibels it's only going to turn it up point one decibels which is essentially nothing so that really didn't do what we want it to do because this part of the audio we need to make sure that people who could benefit from Senior Center activities have the ability he's still too low so in this particular case what I would do is I would just adjust the gain by and then pick a value and see if it sounds right so I would say let's just bump this up six decibels alright and that looks much better we need to make sure that people who could benefit from Senior Center activities have the ability to go to a Senior Center now what that means is this part of the audio is going to clip if we look over here you can see that that's going to clip on our track mixer here let me close this up here for you so you can see well click to reset that but that's okay because this part of the audio we don't really need what we're mostly concerned about at least what I'm concerned about is this part we need to make sure that people who could benefit and so sometimes you'll have to use one of these different options set gain to adjust gain by to get the desired result let me delete this and we'll go back to this clip here now there are a few other ways that we can adjust the level of this clip but you want to start with the audio gain or the clip gain and make sure that's at a pretty good level now if we listen to the end of this clip our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April twenty-fourth nine and ten for five you can hear and you can see that the amplitude of this part of the wave or this part of the audio is much lower he starts off pretty strong he kind of tapers off at the end of this first thought idea here and then the second thought idea is much lower and the very end tapers off quite a bit well that's not something that you can handle very easily with audio gain I mean sure we could split this and then we could set the gain to this clip we could say let's bump that up for more decibels you could do it like that but that's not the way you usually want to go about it unless there are drastic differences in the audio that go beyond the range of what I'm about to show you right now we are looking at the clip keyframe right over here in the audio track we have this option to show keyframes and we can show clip keyframes or we can show track keyframes and the default value is to show the clip volume see volume level now that's the volume level for the clip because we are looking at clip keyframes if we change this now we're looking at the volume level for the track you can see it says track volume okay so there is a difference there they both do a similar thing but it's not exactly the same because of the way the signal flow goes when we're looking at clip volume clip volume happens before track volume and that's important to understand because we're going to be looking throughout this course at using different audio effects and audio plugins up here in the effects rack okay and if we were to put something like a compressor which we're going to look at in an upcoming lesson and let me show you why this makes a difference in which volume you're adjusting so if we play the beginning part of this clip a good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th you can see on the gain reduction meter that the compressor is working okay it was turning down the level because the level of this audio rose above this threshold if we jump over here our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April 24th 9 and 10 45 the audio level of this section is not really going to rise above the threshold that much so the compressor is not going to really kick in and if we wanted this whole clip to have a nice compressed punchy sound then it's not going to work super great like this so what we could do is we could add a couple of clip keyframes okay so if we control click right here on the volume level we can boost up this section here now let's say well boost it up for decibels or so now when we play this let's watch what happens to the compressor our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April 24th 9 and 10 45 what we've done is two things one we've brought up the level of the end part of this clip and we've done so before it gets to the compressor now let's look at what happens and I'll delete these keyframes I'll select them and delete them if we do the same thing with track volume now you can also see that track volume has a line that extends kind of infinitely because making adjustments to the track volume will hold when the clip ends ok so if we increase this for decibels any other clips that we have after this will also be for decibels louder but watch what happens to the compressor now that we've turned up the track volume our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April 24th 9 and 10 45 so what's happening here is we've increased the volume of this section of the clip but we've done it after these effects ok watch right down here what happens 'yes this is the track volume right here and it happens after this stuff up here all audio effects that we can add and so this is an important distinction because even though we are boosting up the signal we're boosting it after it gets to the compressor whereas before let me delete these key frames I'll go back to clip keyframes and I will turn up the clip volume now our Easter touch cards we are driving it harder into the compressor which will make the compressor kick in and it'll give us that nice compressed sound so this is an important distinction also you can see that the clip key frame only affects this clip right if we throw another audio clip in here this volume increase is not going to affect whatever's going on down here so those are the three main areas that you're gonna want to deal with first when you get your clips in if you have to make a volume adjustment you're going to want to do it with audio gain or clip gain right so we come in here and we set the gain of this clip and we get it kind of straightened out and then if you want to make small adjustments after that you can do that with clip keyframes like this okay for example at the beginning of this you can hear me yell action what I would do is put two keyframes in here by ctrl-clicking to set the keyframe then I would take the first one here and I pull it down like this is that you can't hear anything hey good morning ru now you could do the same thing with track keyframes it's just kind of a preference thing I normally don't even mess with track keyframes the only way that you might want to do that is if you had something that was really really all over the place in terms of dynamic range there was a ton of loud stuff there's a ton of quiet stuff and what you might have to do is put a whole bunch of clip keyframes in here to kind of normalize and adjust the level past what you could do with the audio gain right here then if you wanted to globally adjust what's going on here you could you jump over to track keyframes so now that we've got the back half of this nice and juicy if for whatever reason we wanted to make an adjustment to this we could be turning it down here and watch what will happen our Easter touch cards easy forgiving friend the volume is lower and we're turning down the compressed and processed sound okay it's still going to run through the compressors but if the signal is not loud enough to get past these thresholds of the dynamic processors that we're going to look at we're not going to be getting that nice compressed sound clip keyframes and track keyframes can only go up above zero decibels by six decibels okay so we can only get this up a positive six decimal so we can get this down to negative infinity and we can do the same thing with track keyframes we can get this up six point two decibels but we can get this down pretty much all the way so if for whatever reason this adjustment wasn't enough in a six decimal increase is pretty good what you'd have to do is either make the adjustment here to the clip keyframes and to the track keyframes or split your clip and then Jack up the gain of the second part of this clip a little bit more maybe we just add three more decimals to it easy forgiving to friends and family now in this particular clip I probably wouldn't need to do that I just undid those but I just wanted to show you there are many ways to be able to normalize and make those level adjustments first do it with audio gain then throw some clip keyframes in there if you have to then if you need to make some more global adjustments to what's happening in your track jump over to track keyframes and you can do that there now that you know how to normalize and make level adjustments to your audio you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about eqe your audio tracks for dialogue sometimes the dialogue track only needs a low-cut filter in other times it needs more intense frequency adjustment one thing is for sure they almost always need something in this lesson you will learn how to tackle EQ for dialogue so in this example I have two audio clips that we're going to be taking a listen to and I said listen to because these don't have any video associated with them because I want to focus in on what's happening with the audio in my experience almost all dialogue tracks need a little bit of EQ sometimes it's a very little amount like a low-cut filter in other times it's going to need a good bit more help so I want to take a look at these two examples the first example here was recorded with a DIY level ear mic that I made and it sounds a little bit honky let me play a little bit for you and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here it sounds okay but there are definitely some deficiencies in the audio spectrum so to deal with these we're going to need to use an EQ effect I'm going to come over here and I'm gonna grab an EQ and this is the one that you're probably gonna want to use this is the standard EQ effect in Premiere now I should say that technically you can't come down here and apply the same exact effect to this clip if we go over to the effects controls window we have it listed here and you can make essentially the same adjustments to this EQ as you can to this acute they're exactly the same the one benefit by putting the EQ on the clip itself is you have access to key frames and you can keyframe a lot of the parameters and occasionally you may need to do that to deal with problem areas of the audio but for now we're gonna look at just a queuing up this entire track and the reason why you might want to do that is if you have a lot of Clips that all have the same audio to them it's much easier to just throw them on one audio track and then put all of your processing in this effects rack up here and that way all of the clips have the same processing applied and you don't have to worry about copying and pasting effects everything's all right up here now the downside to this is that we don't have those key frames so we can't animate any of the parameters but for a general EQ that's not a big deal usually you want to get the frequencies balanced out and then you're good to go so let's take a look at this EQ filter to start we have a graph and the graph shows us the frequency spectrum of human hearing it goes all the way up to 20,000 Hertz and down to 20 Hertz and then we have a decibel scale that goes in the vertical so this line is zero decibels and then we can go plus 20 and minus 20 down here we have selectable bands or a little EQ nodes that we can adjust three of these the middle three are fully parametric in the first and the last EQ filter are shelving filters or cut filters let me show you how that works if we engage the low EQ filter by default we can control the gain so we can push this up and if we raise up the frequency here you can see how it's pushing up these frequencies it's pushing them all up kind of in a shelf shape and so that's why this type of filter is called a shelving filter everything gets pushed up equally below the frequency the same thing would happen if we reduce the gain everything gets cut equally in a big line here now these filters also double as a cut filter so basically below this set frequency we have a roll-off here of the frequencies that goes down and so this is a good way to be able to reduce frequencies that we don't want that are below a certain point same options available for this highest filter here we can push it up in a shelf we can reduce it as a shelving filter or we can cut just like we can on this low filter here now the middle three filters are fully adjustable in frequency so we can go all the way up we can go all the way down if you need to we have gain adjustments so we can push this up we can pull this down and then the other thing that makes this a parametric EQ is we can adjust the amount of frequencies above and below our center frequency so right now we have this set to 341 Hertz and if we pull down this last parameter here which is called Q we get a more narrow band of frequencies above and below 341 Hertz that we are going to affect with this gain increase or gain reduction we can increase the Q and now we get a much wider band of frequencies above and below our Center frequency which is 341 that we are affecting and this will help you to get more finite control of exactly what you're adjusting and so we have all five of these to try and clean up your audio and you can also stack these so if for whatever reason you couldn't get it done with this you can just add another one right underneath it and go to town let me just reset this back to the default position like I said at the very beginning of this lesson sometimes all a dialogue track needs is a low-cut filter and it's my opinion that all dialogue tracks need a low-cut filter the human voice does not produce any meaningful frequencies below say 80 or 70 Hertz even if you're a male with a really deep voice you're not gonna get much benefit out of keeping the frequencies below 60 70 Hertz and one of the benefits you get by cutting is that any low rumbles or woofs that may be lurking in your dialogue tracks will be reduced several times I've heard projects mixed a friends of mine and when they've been played back on full rain systems I hear something like that way down in the dialogue track and usually that's because they mixed it on a laptop or maybe some headphones if you want just a really easy way to protect yourself against that just throw a low-cut filter in and you won't be really missing anything and you'll be protecting yourself against any stray low woofs or rumbles that may be in your dialogue tracks I'm gonna show you one of the methods that I like to use to clean up tracks whether they be guitars drums it doesn't really matter it works for just about everything I'm gonna enable one of these filters and then I'm gonna push it up so that we're increasing the gain of this frequency band and I'm going to use kind of a medium cue and then I'm gonna sweep this around until I hear frequencies that I don't like because it's pretty easy to identify frequencies that you do like but sometimes you miss frequencies that really need to be cut and EQ generally works better when you're in a subtractive mode when we're reducing frequencies so I'm going to play this clip and I'm going to sweep this around and see if I can find some frequencies that sound particularly annoying and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online a little bit of spare wire sand heat shrink tubing and a microphone element which you can scavenge from something or you can purchase for one or two dollars on we get ourselves a little microphone here so you probably heard there are some frequencies in there that don't sound good you might have also noticed that there are some frequencies they did sound better when they were boosted and we'll look at those after we're done cutting out some of the more annoying frequencies one of the reasons that you don't want to sweep with a really narrow cue like this is because all of the frequencies will sound bad check this out cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online when you do that everything sounds bad so it's helpful to have just a little bit more broad of a cue somewhere I would say in this range right here let me see if I can find some of those nasty frequencies again and then I'll reduce them in intensity and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs so just pulling down that one made to my ears a pretty big difference now keep in mind I'm doing this demonstration listening on headphones and it is possible to get good mixes on headphones but you need to be mixing on headphones all of the time if I was making this adjustment with my normal audio monitors I'd be able to probably do a much better job but I'm going to do the best I can with these headphones let me enable another one here I'm going to pull this up I'm going to sweep this around and see if I can find one more frequency to pull out and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive right about there sounds like there's some nasty stuff let's pull that down and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector that sounds just about right to me now you don't want to make drastic eq adjustments unless you need to if we crank these down it's gonna sound ridiculous school project because it's very easy to do and now it sounds like some weird kind of radio Frankenstein creation I think it would sound much better if we were just a little bit more relaxed it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little can this guy right here for this band right here what I'd probably do find some lower frequencies and maybe boost us up because I kind of like a little bit of that and this particular microphone was not picking that up so I probably roll back to here and see if I can find some frequencies right around here now generally for guys you can start right around the 90 Hertz region that's gonna be where you're gonna find some really nice sounding beef for the male vocals and this is a really cool project project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now too much of that is going to be pretty ridiculous but we can probably sneak a little bit of that low-end goodness in there to beef up the sound of my voice maybe get it right it let's just try 90 Hertz and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars on line a little bit of spare wire some heat shrink tubing and a microphone element which you can and probably what I do is I boost up this low-cut filter here so that I'm still getting a nice bump here around this 90 Hertz region but it's dropping off pretty rapidly after that and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now the last thing is we might want to add just a little bit of sizzle up top and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs now to test this let's roll it back and I'll disable the EQ and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now to my ears I'm hearing one more frequency in there that I don't like so rather than boost this guy up here I think that I'll find another frequency and I think it's right around 200 Hertz and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts I think it's right around there let me let me pull that back and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online a little spare wires and heat shrink tubing that sounds a little bit better than trying to boost up that one low frequency no there so let's continue on here I want to take a look at one more audio track here this is a female and before we get too much further I'm just going to normalize this up so it's nice and loud for us to listen to and then I'm going to pop an EQ over here just like we did before I like to put the EQ as the first effect in the rack here and the reason is if there are some particular frequencies that are way out of hand let's say we put a compressor first and there was some low-end stuff in our track that low-end frequency may trick the compressor into compressing the audio when we don't really want it to so I find it best to throw an EQ on first clean up the audio make it sound great then compress it a little bit that's the order that I like to put the effects especially for dialog so let's take a listen to this and see what it needs gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses to start I'm going to throw a low-cut filter in just like I always do and then if you want to figure out exactly how high you can set this what you can do is you can play the clip and then just push the frequency up until you hear it making an audible difference until lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating so you can hear that's going to be too high gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses around 109 I'm not really hearing any adverse effects so I'm going to leave it there and then I'm going to use the same technique I'm going to boost up some frequencies sweep them around and see if I can clean this up gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti reflective quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses directions spray on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth caution do not ingest avoid contact with on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth caution do not ingest that sounds pretty decent to me let's check an a/b comparison here gentle lens cleaning formula quick easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses I probably pull back its high-frequency stuff just a little bit and then maybe relax some of these frequencies just a hair because they it sounds a little bit too much gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses and that's pretty much it so that's a great technique that you can use kind of boosting up sweeping around the frequencies and then gently reducing them until your track sounds more natural now that you know how to EQ your tracks for dialogue you're ready to move on to the next lesson in the next video you're gonna learn how to use a compressor to level out your tracks and get everything sounding nice and punchy check that out coming up next compression is an essential tool for keeping your tracks punchy and keeping levels in check the compressor is a pretty simple tool to use but it's even easier to mess up in this lesson you will learn how to use a compressor like a pro so for this example we're gonna be looking at my buddy Rob again doing this church video announcement and we're gonna be talking about compressors now the job of a compressor is to reduce the dynamic range of your audio and this might be a strange concept because a lot of times we want to be preserving the dynamic range but to make things sound nice and to control the level a lot of times we need to reduce the dynamic range of our audio so that we can hear things clearly especially if you're mixing your dialogue over any other elements sound effects music background noise NAT sound elements whatever a little bit of compression can go a long way to make the dialogue tracks and your project in general sound nice I'm going to go up here to the effects and I'm going to pull down the standard dynamics effect now this effect has a few different effects built-in we have an auto gate we have a compressor we have an expander and a limiter what we're going to be looking at is the compressor one of the things that you have to understand about all dynamics processors is they work with a threshold audio level and in the case of the compressor when the audio is below the threshold nothing happens your audio is completely unaffected except by this right here this is called the make up game and the reason why we have this is because if we are reducing the dynamic range of our audio we need a way to be able to turn that back up because basically we're taking the loud stuff and we're turning it down and if we're turning down the loud stuff then everything is going to be quieter so we need a way to bring everything back up so we still have the loud stuff at the level that it was before we compressed it but when we turn the loud stuff down and then we turn everything else up the effect is that the loud stuff remains the same but the quieter noises in the dialogue are brought up now unfortunately we'll also be bringing up everything else along with those quieter dialogue we'll be bringing up background noise and anything else that's in the track but that's something that we're gonna be dealing with in an upcoming lesson so let me walk you through some of the parameters of this compressor first we have the threshold the threshold sets the level that the signal must exceed to invoke compression if the level falls below the threshold it's completely unaffected and this can be set to negative 60 all the way up to zero decibels the ratio sets the ratio by which compression is applied up to 8 to 1 so for example if the compression ratio is 5 to 1 in the input level increases 5 decibels above the threshold the output will only increase 1 decibel okay so this is basically how much the audio is reduced as it comes up above the threshold this knob here the attack sets the time that the compressor takes to respond to the signal that exceeds threshold so this is basically how long the compressor weights before it starts compressing after the signal comes up above the threshold the release specifies the time it takes for the game to return to the original level when the signal falls below the threshold as soon as the audio level rises above the threshold the compressors going to kick in and it's going to turn it down how fast it releases the amount of gain reduction is the release if this is set pretty high the compressor is still going to hold that audio down here for a half a second after the level has fallen below the threshold okay so this is going to be an important knob because it's going to affect how subtle they compressor sounds this Auto button right here calculates the release time based on the incoming signal so this is kind of a little bit of voodoo magic that you can click on and it will basically set the release time based on what's happening to the input signal finally the makeup gain adjusts the compressors output level to account for a loss in gain caused by compression so let's check out what the compressor sounds like okay what we want to do is we want to set a threshold level here and a ratio and we can leave these other values wherever they are for the moment a good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th all right so you can see something is happening this right here is the gain reduction meter and we're getting a reading here of how much the gain is being reduced warning are you thinking about coming to our East which looks like it's quite a lot it's upwards of 8 decibels so if we wanted to account for all of that gain reduction what we do is we crank this up to about 8 decibels here in the make up gain to basically make up for what we are turning down a good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on and now listen those loud sounds will sound just about the same if we disengage the compressor good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th now the loud sounds happened very quickly and the compressed sound is going to sound louder overall because we're taking those louder sounds we're turning them down and then we're turning everything back up so the effect is that it sounds louder even though the peaks are about the same as they were before we compressed it listen to this sound it just sounds louder good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th everything is just louder it's it's making everything louder and punchier and we can use this compression technique for a number of different applications we can set it so it just handles the peaks and so we can knock down just the peaks and we can do it in a more subtle way where we turn down the ratio and we turn up the release and the attack time and what that'll do is it'll kind of provide a general leveling to the track it won't be so harsh where it's slamming down the peaks it'll just kind of gently ride the volume level and make everything just a little bit more equal in intensity let's look at what happens when we adjust some of these parameters if we want more compression the fastest way to get more compression is to drop the threshold because now more of the signal above negative 49 decibels will be compressed which negative 49 decibels is way down here so pretty much everything will be compressed that's probably not what you want most of the time if you're doing dialogue and you're looking for a subtle compression basically you want to adjust the threshold and the ratio so that we're just seeing a little bit of compression about 4 decibels of compression is enough to have an effect but not so much that you hear it and I know that it sounds funny to think about but you don't want to hear the track being compressed and I'll show you what that sounds like if we turn the release time really really fast and we turn the attack really really fast we turn the ratio way up and we turn the threshold down what this is going to do is it's going to slam all of the peaks and then it's going to quickly release them as soon as the audio drops below the threshold the effect is that everything sounds super super intense good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards it sounds super super hyper loud this is kind of what I think of as radio compression where everything is just really really loud if we want to make this a little bit more subtle what we do is push the release time up a little bit we push the attack time up a little bit we reduce the ratio and we push up the threshold just a little bit and we're also gonna pull down the make up gain thing about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends now this is still quite a bit of compression because we're seeing upwards of 10 decibels of compression and 10 decibels is perceived as being about twice as loud so we're turning it down a heck of a lot if I was going to apply some compression to this track and I usually do apply some compression to all of my dialogue tracks I would start like this I would start with a ratio of 1 to 5 because that's very very light that's a minimal amount of compression and again we don't want to hear that super hyper compressed sound we just wanted to handle some of the peaks here and then I would adjust the threshold up a little bit I probably set the release around 100 milliseconds and the attack to around 5 milliseconds and then we'd adjust the make up gain by whatever we needed to to make sure that it sounded nice and punchy hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these we're seeing some gain reduction but it doesn't have that hyper compressed sound and that's usually what I go for I said it so that it reduces the intensity of some of those peaks and brings everything up just a little bit I mean a four decibel increase is audible but it's not huge a three decimal increase is about the smallest increase in volume that we can detect with our ear so we can't really hear changes of 1 or 2 decibels not until we reach 3 decibels are we able to detect a change in volume so we're hearing a change in volume but it's very very subtle and that's probably what you want now over here you can see that I still have the key frames set from a previous lesson when we talked about kind of normalizing and leveling out your tracks we could set up the compressor to basically level out this stuff for us and let me show you how to do that what you want to do is start with the quieter stuff and we want to make sure that we're boosting this up enough so that we can hear it where we want to hear it our easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April twenty-fourth nine and ten forty-five so probably I would boost this up another couple of decibels maybe six decimals our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April twenty-fourth nine and ten forty five I also might not want this to be compressed as much so I might scooch up the threshold just a little bit our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family so now this is being compressed a little bit and I know it doesn't look like the gain reduction meter is jumping all around but that's because these gain reduction meters here in this LED display on this auto gate here are very slow they only update it looks like to me about four times a second and that's very very slow compared to other plugins that we're going to look at so now when we jump over here to this louder section of this clipping are you thinking about coming to we are going to be turning it up a lot which is a problem so what I would do is I increase the ratio and I would turn up the release time quite a bit into our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these and we may have to pull down the threshold just a little bit good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these a good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy forgiving to Fred and family April 24th 9 and 10:45 so essentially setting the compressor like that did a very similar thing as when we put in some keyframes and we ramped this up so what we're doing is we're compressing this section are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th quite a lot you can see we're getting gain reductions of more than 6 decibels right here which is essentially almost the same as turning this section down by 6 decibels right it's it's like taking this in reducing it 6 decibels and then pushing everything up 6 decibels which is more or less the same as going like this and increasing this because if we're seeing a 6 decibel decrease here and then we're bringing everything else up by 6 decibels down here we're basically knocking down the peak so that this ending portion of the clip is very similar to what's happening right here are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April 24th 9 and 10:45 coming up in the next lesson you're going to see some other compression effects that are built into premiere as well as some third-party compression effects so check that out coming up next in this lesson we're gonna pick up where we left off in the last lesson and continue talking about compressors in this lesson we're gonna look at some different options we have in compression effects in premiere as well as some third-party compression effects so if we get rid of this compressor plug-in and we look at what else we have available we have two other basic compressors that are built into premiere I know you see multiband compressor that's not one that we're going to want to reach for we're gonna check that out coming up in another lesson we also see multiband legacy that's very similar to this one it's just an older version then we have single band compressor and tube modeled compressor let's check out the single band compressor this is basically the same idea as what we just looked at except we don't get a gain a reduction meter so we're using this one we have to use our ears a little bit more but this one allows us to have a little bit more flexibility in some of these parameters for example the other dynamics plug-in that we looked at we could only have a ratio of 1 to 1 to 8 to 1 and on this we can go all the way up to 30 to 1 which is essentially a limiter we also have an attack time which we can set much later with this plug-in here or this effect here before we could set an attack time maximum of 10 milliseconds but here we can set it to 1/2 a second also the release time here we can set way up to 5 seconds 5 thousand milliseconds where before we could set it at a maximum of 500 milliseconds which is a half a second we also have more flexibility in the output gain we can Jack this way up to 30 decibels which is crazy this is gonna work very similar and let me just walk you through how to set this up really quickly hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April 24th 9 and 10 45 now you can't see what's going on so you have to trust what your ears are telling you all right let me play this back for you and then I'll switch on and off the compressor so you can hear the difference hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th you can hear that the compressed sound hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th sounds louder even though the peaks are landing just about in the same spot that they were before the effect is that everything is brought up to a little bit more comfortable of a listening level and I promise you if you throw some music under this and you're listening to this in an environment that has a high noise floor a compressed sound is what you're gonna want if this audio we're supposed to play it like a trade show or some other live event where there's a lot of people a lot of people means that the noise floor in the space where your videos are going to be played back is going to be higher and in order to make sure that your audio is going to be consistently above the noise floor you're going to want to compress or tracts to make sure that the low stuff the quieter sounds are brought up now unfortunately this is gonna bring up the background noise but that's just something you have to deal with and coming up in another lesson we're going to look at how to deal with the noise if as we push these values up so that we're using a slower release time and maybe we increase the attack a little bit and we adjust the threshold we're gonna get a different compressed effect hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these now even though you can push this up to like five thousand milliseconds I would not recommend it five thousand milliseconds is really really long five seconds that means when the signal falls below the threshold the compressors gonna be still turning down your sound for five seconds okay you don't want that that's that's way too long but a little bit more flexibility depending on what you're listening to you know you may go upwards of a second or so the attack time attack time is something that you you probably don't want super quick like if we were to set this way down here you're gonna hear that really hyper intense morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th the attack time is something that you want to keep probably in the range of five milliseconds to maybe fifteen milliseconds okay transients are spikes that happen really really quickly and if you want your compressor to be able to grab transients spikes things like really quick syllables and other audio elements that happen really really quickly you're gonna want to have the attack set fairly quickly five milliseconds is a great place to start because as the audio starts to rise I'm one of those really fast transient noises the compressors going to be able to grab on and start compressing that sound before it reaches its peak if we set it to slow peaks will happen basically loud noises will get through before the compressor is able to jump on and start compressing now the other dynamics processor did not let us push it past ten milliseconds which is kind of idiot proof because 10 milliseconds is still really pretty fast I would recommend sticking between 5 and maybe 15 milliseconds as a good place to start and for the release you probably want to be anywhere from 50 milliseconds to maybe a hundred milliseconds for general use if you want more subtle you may increase that to between 150 and 500 milliseconds I probably wouldn't go much past 500 milliseconds for spoken word I would keep it you know pretty tight but you're gonna have to let your ears be the judge let's look at another effect here the tube modeled compressor this is another compression effect and this is a quote unquote tube model okay and usually tube model devices have a colouring to the sound so that means that when it gets compressed it's going to change the tone of the audio sometimes this means is going to make it sound warmer tube amplification is known to be kind of more mid-range II and more warm it doesn't let really harsh sounds through sometimes it's meant to be more aggressive sounding so it may give a little bit more crunch a little bit more edge kind of like a tube guitar amplifier now it's probably not going to sound distorted like a tube guitar amplifier but it is probably going to color the sound and you may like the sound of this tube modelled compressor let's just set it up to about where we had it before and be a light amount of gain reduction here that looks pretty good let's try that hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy forgiving to friends and family this sounds totally fine to me and it's another great plugin you know maybe like the look of this better that's totally fine maybe like the sound of it better this one does have parameters that we can Jack way up here you can see very similar to the single band compressor we can go all the way up to five seconds release and 500 milliseconds attack time which is you know probably more than you want most of the time we have a lot of ratio that you can play with there but you know experiment and what I would recommend is look for a subtle amount of compression and go from there I want to show you one other effect here and it's the one that I'd like to use and it's a third party effect made by Native Instruments it's called solid dynamics now this does essentially the same thing as what the stock plugins do I just like it a little bit better in particular I like how the expander works better than the stock expander which is something we're going to explore in an upcoming lesson but I just wanted to show you what this looks like here very similar compression settings here that you have we have threshold we have ratio we don't have an attack time but we do have an adjustable fast attack and non fast attack and we do have an adjustable release time here as well the cool thing about this compressor is that it does have an output over here but this compressor does auto make up gain and what that means is the more it compresses the sound the more it increases so it kind of takes care of that make up gain for you watch what happens I'll just crank this up here and I'll start turning down the threshold and what you'll hear is the audio is going to remain at a pretty consistent level even though it's getting compressed more and I'm not going to adjust the output sound all right check this out hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family you can hear that it's being compressed but it's also doing some makeup gain internally which I tend to like usually this is the compressor that I use in fact what you've been listening through the entire course my voice has been compressed with this dynamics plug-in from Native Instruments now this is what I consider a premium effect basically that means that you have to pay for it and you can find more information about this particular plugin at Native Instruments com but you know don't get too excited about third-party stuff just because you know compressors cost one two three four hundred dollars does not mean that they're any better than the stock compressors because honestly you can get the stock compressors that come with premiere to sound just as good I just like using this one because of that Auto make up gain feature and I really like this expander and it's hard to find good expanders now there are some free VST effects that will work with premiere but they have to be 64-bit VST audio plugins 32-bit VST audio plugins which the vast majority of all audio plugins and audio effects are 32-bit will not work with the last several versions of Premiere Pro now to make premiere see these third-party plugins what you have to do is come up here in the audio track mixer there's a context menu right at the bottom here there's an audio plug-in manager this brings up a window where you'll be able to add a folder where your plugins and where your effects are located again these have to be 64 bit audio plugins but by default Premiere will not just see these on your system you have to show it and you have to tell it here's the folder for me I have those in my s drive but you can see I have a whole bunch of 64 bit plugins some of these I don't really like to use inside of Premiere because they have settings that are not adjustable and when I reopen the project the settings are set to default and that's super annoying but a lot of these work fine and you can't find some free plugins out there for example a company called Coco's makes software called Reaper which is what I use for a multitrack audio editing and music composition and they have released a collection of their plugins called re plugs for free and they have a 64 bit version which works on Windows I don't think it works on Mac but you can download these and you can try them as well you point premier to the folder you scan for the plugins it'll scan all of your plugins you can select and deselect the ones that you want to use and then you'll have them available down here under VST or VST 3 if they're VST 3 plugins which I do have a few of those in there so again I would recommend that you can press all of your dialog stuff at least a little bit if your gain reduction meter is only reading about 4 decibels that's going to be a very very subtle amount of compression but it will bring up those lower sounds and the lower bits of the dialogue up a noticeable amount so I would recommend that you start there and if you need a little bit more the compression go ahead and adjust it from there but always aim for a compression that's very subtle because if it sounds like that really nasty kind of radio hyper compressed sound that's probably going to be a little bit distracting so go for a slower release times to start and dial it in from there and you will have great success using these compressors coming up in the next lesson you'll learn about some effects they're gonna help you deal with what happens to the audio when the dialogue stops we're gonna be looking at expanders and gates and these are gonna help you control some of that background noise and the extraneous noises in your audio tracks so check that out coming up next just like compressors helped to keep the dialogue at a comfortable level expanders and gates help you to handle the track when the dialogue stops in this lesson you'll learn how to use them for cleaning up background noise and helping to draw focus to the dialogue so we're gonna be checking out this clip of my buddy Rob doing these church announcements again but this time we're going to be looking at expanders and gates so I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna put on this dynamics processor again this dynamics effect the reason why I'm using this one is because this is pretty much the only option for gates and expanders that comes stock with premiere so first let's check out what a gate does this Auto gate here cuts off a signal when the level falls below the specified threshold this is used to control unwanted background noises in your recordings the LED display which is not really an LED display but that's what it's supposed to look like indicates when the gates open when this turns green when it's attacking or releasing the signal when it's yellow in the middle here and when it's closed when it's fully red so the job of the gate is to basically open in close and allow the signal to come through or be completely muted there's really no in-between with this particular gate I'm gonna enable this and play the track and let's see what it sounds like hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these and so the idea behind the gate and also the expander is to control the background noises when the main signal in your recordings stops or starts to trail off at the end of roms phrases here if we zoom up we can hear that if we take this off service on April 24th we hear that there's a little bit of ambience in the room is this okay sure it's okay it's not a huge deal but it may bring a little bit more clarity to this track if we can reduce it just a little bit service on April 24th so let's engage this auto gate again April 24th now it's reduced a little bit so let's go through some of these other controls here so we can figure out exactly what this gate is doing the threshold is the level that the incoming signal must exceed in order to open the gate if the signal falls below this level the gate closes muting the incoming signal the attack specifies the time the gate takes to open after the signal exceeds the threshold the release sets the time the gate takes to close after the signal level has fallen below the threshold and finally the hold specifies a time the gate stays open after the level has fallen below the threshold so very similar to the compressor the attack and the release and also the hold are going to contribute to how smooth this effect operates if we pull all these down to their fastest values this is going to sound a little bit more choppy hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these you can hear it's very very choppy that's not very good so we can use some of these settings to kind of massage this the attack is something that we want to have pretty quick but if we have it slow we're gonna lose some of the beginnings of these words grab one grab one do you hear what he's saying there grab one sounds like he's saying Rab Rab Rab one but he's not really he's saying grab good rap when we set the attack to long we will miss the very beginning of this because as the signal comes up there's kind of a 10 millisecond kind of ramped up to when the gate is fully open so it's not so much an always on off switch there is a little bit of kind of fading but it's very very slight it's ten milliseconds if we pull this down to like 1.3 milliseconds grab want to grab one it we're getting a little bit more but if we find that we can't get the beginning of this word basically that means that the threshold is set too high so we're gonna have to pull this down a little bit Rab wanna grab one I still can't hear it grab one it there it is grab one grab one if we turn the attack up grab one of the we're gonna get a little bit more smooth of an attack there so this is kind of a combination of the attack time and the threshold we can probably increase the threshold just a little bit grab one grab one these are some settings that you're gonna want to experiment with so that you're getting the right sound the release and the hold effect what's going to happen at the end of words or as the audio is kind of trailing off here well well you can hear that that's very very fast right well well well it starts to cut off the sound very very quickly now the release is kind of like a little bit of a fade so it goes between open and closed and technically a switch from unmuted to muted has no in between it's either muted or it's not muted so this is sort of a little bit of a fate but it's very very fast if we increase this well grant you can hear that it didn't quite get all the way down there because it's set to a half a second 500 milliseconds well grab one of the where that is very drastic right 50 milliseconds well again just like this compressor this Auto Gate is kind of idiot-proof some other gates will allow you to set the release time really really fast zero milliseconds and that gets really really choppy as the audio starts to get right on the threshold you'll get this kind of stuttering effect and so this one doesn't even allow you to make it that fast so you're already in a pretty good position here now hold will hang on to this audio signal after the signal has dropped below the threshold for little bit up to 100 milliseconds which really isn't that long well grab one of these our Easter touch cards so we can kind of massage the hold in the release time to make this a little bit more usable to make it reasonable sounding your touch cards now the one issue that you'll get with agate is as the audio drops like this will work pretty well for this loud stuff on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well it definitely sounds tighter but as the audio drops off in intensity like it does at the end of this clip and family April 24th 9:00 and 10:45 it's going to start to get chopped up a little bit more especially as we increase this threshold if we were to push this up even more like this we're gonna notice that this stuff is tighter morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th but as we get towards the end here April 24th 9 and 10:45 it's gonna start to get down close to the threshold and then it's gonna become problem so this may take a little bit of massaging as long as you keep some reasonable values in here you may be able to get away with using a gate and you may get some good results now for me I usually reach for the expander to do this job because the expander works very similar to the gate but it's a much more subtle tool because the gate is really kind of an on/off switch with a little bit of fading that we can do here with this release time but there's not a lot of range it's either on or it's off and an expander is a little bit different the expander reduces all signals below the specified threshold to the set ratio the result is similar to the gate but it's more subtle now this expander only has two controls we have the threshold that specifies the level in which the signal must fall to activate the expander levels that go above the threshold are completely unaffected then we have the ratio the ratio sets the rate at which the signals are expanded and technically this is a downward expander which means that as the signal falls below the threshold this expander is making it quieter upward expander would make the audio that came above the threshold louder but this is a downward expander which means that if we were to set the ratio here to let's say five that's a ratio of five to one so if the audio level falls below this threshold by one decibel the expander is going to make that decrease a five decibel decrease so it is expanded that audio level so in a way this increases the dynamic range and so if we play this clip again with this expander just kind of set just like this we're gonna hear a very similar effect to the gate but it's gonna be smoother check this out hey good morning are you thinking about coming to our Easter service on April 24th are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy for giving to friends and family April twenty-fourth nine and ten forty-five now you can hear the default value here was set to negative twenty decibels which is a lot higher than we had our gate because it was higher the very end of this clip was starting to get expanded downward the expander was actually making this quieter which is something that we don't want so generally I try to stick to kind of negative thirty-two maybe negative forty I stick in that range and then what I'll do to adjust this is adjust the ratio so we can adjust this down and see what happens here are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends well grab one of these our Easter touch cards easy forgiving to friends and family April twenty-fourth nine and ten forty-five so we're still getting that reduction of the background noise but it's happening to my ears at least in a more subtle way where the gate is a little bit more glitchy you can definitely hear the gate kind of opening and closing even if we kind of massage these levels an expander is usually a much more refined tool it's going to give you a better sound because those reductions of the volume are gonna happen in a more smooth way are you thinking about inviting some of your family and friends now do we need to crush out all of that reverberant no not necessarily but you will encounter some tracks that do have a pretty high noise floor so this is going to help in combination with some noise reduction with some EQ with some compression in getting a much cleaner sound really quick I want to pull in one more audio clip here and let me take off this compressor and expander as you can see a lot has changed in a year so this is another clip and I can hear that there's a pretty good amount of noise in this clip I'm going to normalize this up to zero decibels to just make this really nice and loud so that we can hear what's going on as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of now let's see what happens when I rename this and I have expansion set and I have some compression set I really don't know if it's appropriate for this clip but we'll just see what it sounds like as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and so you can hear how it's really crushing out that background noise now in this particular instance that background noise having it being reduced like that is a little bit distracting we may want to go through and clean this up first with some pretty heavy noise reduction which will reduce a lot of that noise when my buddy Andy here is talking or we could just set the expander to do just a little bit less by turning down the ratio as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and explosions and so what we want to listen for to see if this is working correctly is let's just hear what the audio is doing right before he speaks and then if we turn off the expander let's see if that's louder oh yeah it's definitely louder so this is working as we push this up we're gonna hear more of a drastic effect as you can see it's gonna completely eliminate it but if the noise is pretty nasty like it is on this clip putting it up really high maybe too distracting it really depends on kind of what's going on with the rest of the track if this was just naked like this there was no music probably it wouldn't work and we'd want to keep some of that noise in there if we weren't going to denoise it which we're gonna look at later in this course I want to show you another expander here and this is on this solid dynamics effect from Native Instruments that we looked at in the compression lesson this has a gate and an expander on it but this expander I think works a little bit better than the stock expander for one we have some control over the attack in the release of the expander when we click it over into expansion mode this expander has a fixed ratio of two to one but it does have an adjustable range knob which sets the maximum attenuation of the gate or expander and unlike the other gate this gate is not on and off this gate is on and then when it's off it goes down by whatever we set this range to so it's a little nicer to use than the auto gate because we do have some range now I like this expander a little bit better because I can adjust the release where before the release is whatever it is and we don't have any control over it but this one if it's sounding too choppy like if I turn the release all the way down to 0.1 seconds as you can see a lot has changed in a year it sounds a little bit choppy but if I push this up you maybe even go up close to a second as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend instead of this just hammering down as soon as the audio signals kind of dropped below the threshold it's gonna fade it down a little bit more gently and we're gonna get a more subtle effect but with that said you know I know this is a premium effect you can get really pretty decent results just by using the built in processor here this built in dynamics effects processor so expanders and gates are really great tools for cleaning up that background noise and helping to increase our dynamic range with this expander after it's been compressed for a more polished sound in the next lesson you're going to learn about another very interesting compressor called a de-esser a de-esser is a great tool to help reduce harsh sibilants in a speaker's voice without reducing the clarity so check that out next a de-esser is a fantastic tool to have when you need to reduce the harsh sibilance of a speaker's voice without reducing clarity in this lesson you will learn how to use a de-esser to tame those harsh sounds sometimes you'll record some audio or you'll be working on a project and you'll have a dialogue track that sounds overly harsh sometimes s-sounds Shayne's and other high frequency consonants and syllables can be really harsh in a dialogue track if they're too loud now that doesn't mean the dialogue is too loud that means that those particular frequencies are too loud sometimes it can come from a microphone that has a lot of presence in that frequency spectrum and the entire situation can be exaggerated by the EQ setting that you use if you're boosting up too much high frequency information that's gonna make those s sounds sound a lot worse now fortunately there are some pretty fantastic tools to be able to deal with this and these are called des errs right over here in the effects rack I'm gonna pull up a de-esser and it's going to be listed under the amplitude and compression slot here because a de-esser is a compressor a de-esser is a special kind of compressor that only targets those high frequency sounds and this is a really simple effect this is a compressor that gets triggered by a particular range of frequencies and so by default it's set up to be a broadband compressor now broadband means it's going to compress all of the bands but the thing that's going to trigger the compression is what's selected here in the green so essentially you can think about it as this compressors going to be only listening for these frequencies and when these frequencies break the threshold then the compressor kicks in and then it will do gain reduction and when it sets a broadband gain reduction it will compress everything so it'll compress the entire sound of this channel when we said it's a multiband it will only compress these frequencies in this range which is we're looking for when we want this to work like a de-esser just to show you how this works I'm gonna play this track and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now let's push the threshold way down and listen to what's going to do it's very easy to do it's very expensive this is compressing the entire signal here okay this is not just the particular part of the signal we're compressing this is the entire thing you can hear the the whole track gets quieter when it hears whatever's in this band and we can preview that by checking this output sibilance only so can you hear that that high frequency stuff there is what the compressor is listening for in this configuration this kind of works like a ducking compressor so if there were some kind of noise in the audio that we wanted to kind of hone in on and we wanted to target and every time we heard that particular frequency in this track we wanted the whole track to get quieter we could do that that's not a feature that I use a whole bunch but setting it to broadband is basically doing that but what we want to focus in on is the multiband okay because this is going to make it work like a de-esser and what we want to do is we want to find those sibilant frequencies and so when we click it over to multi band we can click and drag the area that we want to be focusing in on so let me play this right here I'm trying to target the frequency range whenever I say s's or T's or things that stick out a little bit too much now to make that a little bit more obvious what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adjust my EQ here I'm gonna give it way too much high frequency okay so starting at about 5,000 Hertz I'm just gonna ramp it right up and I'm gonna make it way too much and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive so we have a lot of high frequency now maybe for whatever reason you need to increase the high frequency that much but you want to tame down those SS because they do sound a little bit hot with just a few parts this little connector here it's a little crispy in that region so I'm going to output sibilants only and I'm going to listen for those frequencies and see if I can find the range now it should be between five to seven thousand Hertz somewhere in that region okay so that sounds just about right and now what I want to do is I'm going to pull down the threshold here so we start getting some gain reduction and what you're going to hear is those higher frequency s's are going to be momentarily attenuated so it's not going to pull out those frequencies altogether we could do that with an EQ this is going to listen for those frequencies when it hears them it's going to compress them now we don't have a whole lot of other controls over this de-esser but it is going to make an effective difference in how this track sounds and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online so you can hear big difference there right and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive all right if we wanted to cover kind of more of those high frequency areas we could just like this and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now the reason why this is kind of a cool plugin to use is because sometimes a voice needs a little bit more presence right if we were to take off this high frequency filter here it'll jump back to the DSR I'll just turn the threshold all the way up to zero you can hear this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive if you just listen to the tone of my voice it doesn't have much edge it doesn't have a lot of brightness so if we wanted to get some brightness basically we'd give a boost now this is a lot of boost in the high frequency but this is just kind of an over-exaggeration so you get the idea of what's going on here and so now the tone of my voice has a lot more clarity it has a lot more bite in a lot more edge and it cuts through a little bit better and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive but those s's and T's and s H's are too much they're too loud so we can use this and we can really target where they are by clicking on this output sibilance only and then we can just have that be reduced a little bit now we don't want to go crazy and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and because then it's just going to be hammering down these frequencies all the time and we don't want that what we wanted to do is we wanted to do some when the esses and T's and SH a--'s are hit we want some reduction but we don't want it to be reducing everything because that's going to be essentially doing the same thing as an EQ and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online a little bit of spare wire sand heat shrink tubing and you can hear how that just sounds more pleasing to listen to now let's check out another track here this is from the EQ example again and this is my wife Rachel Allen's cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating Lanza's now I recorded this little demonstration on a dynamic microphone and I specifically did it off access so she wasn't speaking directly into the microphone to reduce some of those high frequencies so that we'd have a little bit more to play with in the EQ example now that we've boosted up a little bit of that high frequency material I mean it's not a lot I'm hearing some s's that are jumping out at me just a little bit it's it's subtle but to kind of exaggerate the point I'm gonna boost this up just a little bit and drop the frequency down Jeff a hair okay so this is gonna be too much but it's just to show you gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses those s's are just a little bit too loud they're just cutting just a little bit so I'm just going to jump over here to the de-esser and to make it really quick for yourself there are a few presets here that you may want to check out so if we want a de-esser if we want to D sure check those out and the frequency is for male and female are a little bit different so I'm just going to pull up the female de-esser which wants to look in this range and let's see if that's going to do the job for us gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lines' that's not really doing it for me let's check out the sibilance output no that's not really working so let's try the D sure it's gonna look a little bit higher let's check that out easy clean alright I'm hearing that more but I think probably even the male preset and basically all it's doing is adjusting the center frequency and the bandwidth which is how much around the center frequency it's going to be listening to and then reducing we can probably shoot for up here right there lenses somewhere in that neighborhood I'm hearing something kind of nasty let's try right here and you can see the amplitude of the frequencies as this plays back which should help you to be able to dial in and the frequencies that you're looking for you can hear safe alright so that it's actually just a hair higher it's right up here so now let's uncheck sibilants output only and listen to what this is doing been told lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses directions spray on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth so this is doing a really nice job at reducing those SS and making this voiceover here a lot more comfortable to listen to dental lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses directions spray on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth and that's pretty much all there is to it DSR is really pretty simple to use again it's a compressor that's only going to look at those frequencies that you point it to you want to be looking in that upper frequency area around five to seven thousand Hertz every time the speaker gives you an S or rush or two it's really going to cut those down and it's going to make them a lot more comfortable to listen to now that you know how to use at the s er you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn how to use noise reduction effects to clean up background noise in your tracks check that out coming up next a de-esser is a fantastic tool to have when you need to reduce the harsh sibilance of a speaker's voice without reducing clarity in this lesson you will learn how to use a de-esser to tame those harsh sounds sometimes you'll record some audio or you'll be working on a project and you'll have a dialogue track that sounds overly harsh sometimes s-sounds shales and other high-frequency consonants and syllables can be really harsh in a dialogue track if they're too loud now that doesn't mean the dialogue is too loud that means that those particular frequencies are too loud sometimes it can come from a microphone that has a lot of presence in that frequency spectrum and the entire situation can be exaggerated by the EQ setting that you use if you're boosting up too much high-frequency information that's going to make those s sounds sound a lot worse now fortunately there are some pretty fantastic tools to be able to deal with this and these are called des errs right over here in the effects rack I'm gonna pull up a de-esser and it's going to be listed under the amplitude and compression slot here because a de-esser is a compressor a de-esser is a special kind of compressor that only targets those high frequency sounds and this is a really simple effect this is a compressor that gets triggered by a particular range of frequencies and so by default it's set up to be a broadband compressor now broadband means it's going to compress all of the bands but the thing that's going to trigger the compression is what's selected here in the green so essentially you can think about it as this compressor is going to be only listening for these frequencies and when these frequencies break the threshold then the compressor kicks in and then it will do gain reduction now when it sets a broadband gain reduction it will compress everything so it'll compress the entire sound of this channel when we said it's a multi band it will only compress these frequencies in this range which is what we're looking for when we want this to work like a de-esser just to show you how this works I'm gonna play this track and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now let's push the threshold way down and listen to what's going to do this is compressing the entire signal here okay this is not just the particular part of the signal we're compressing this is the entire thing you can hear the the whole track gets quieter when it hears whatever's in this band and we can preview that by checking this output sibilance only so can you hear that that high frequency stuff there is what the compressor is listening for in this configuration this kind of works like a ducking compressor so if there were some kind of noise in the audio that we wanted to kind of hone in on and we wanted to target in every we heard that particular frequency in this track we wanted the whole track to get quieter we could do that that's not a feature that I use a whole bunch but setting it to broadband is basically doing that but what we want to focus in on is the multiband okay because this is going to make it work like a DSL and what we want to do is we want to find those sibilant frequencies and so when we click it over to multi band we can click and drag the area that we want to be focusing in on so let me play this right here I'm trying to target the frequency range whenever I say s's or T's or things that stick out a little bit too much now to make that a little bit more obvious what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adjust my EQ here I'm gonna give it way too much high frequency okay so starting at about 5,000 Hertz I'm just gonna ramp it right up and I'm gonna make it way too much and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive so we have a lot of high frequency material now maybe for whatever reason you need to increase the high frequency that much but you want to tame down those SS because they do sound a little bit hot with just a few parts this little connector here it's a little crispy in that region so I'm going to output sibilants only and I want to listen for those frequencies and see if I can find the range now it should be between five to seven thousand Hertz somewhere in that region okay so that sounds just about right and now what I want to do is I'm going to pull down the threshold here so we start getting some gain reduction and what you're gonna hear is those higher frequency s's are going to be momentarily attenuated so it's not going to pull out those frequencies altogether we could do that with an EQ this is going to listen for those frequencies when it hears them it's going to compress them now we don't have a whole lot of other controls over this de-esser but it is going to make an effective difference in how this track sounds and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online so you can hear big difference there right and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive all right if we wanted to cover kind of more of those high frequency areas we could just like this and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive now the reason why this is kind of a cool plug-in to use is because sometimes a voice needs a little bit more presence right if we were to take off this high frequency filter here I'll jump back to the DSR and I'll just turn the threshold all the way up to zero you can hear it's a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive if you just listen to the tone of my voice it doesn't have much edge it doesn't have a lot of brightness so if we wanted to get some brightness basically we'd give a boost now this is a lot of boost in the high frequency but this is just kind of an over-exaggeration so you get the idea of what's going on here and so now the tone of my voice has a lot more clarity it has a lot more bike in a lot more edge and it cuts through a little bit better and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive but those s's and T's and S H's are too much they're too loud so we can use this and we can really target where they are by clicking on this output sibilance only and then we can just have that be reduced a little bit now we don't want to go crazy and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and because then it's just going to be hammering down these frequencies all the time and we don't want that what we wanted to do is we wanted to do some when the esses and T's and s H's are hit we want some reduction but we don't want it to be reducing everything because that's going to be essentially doing the same thing as an EQ and this is a really cool project because it's very easy to do and it's very inexpensive with just a few parts this little connector here which costs five or six dollars online a little bit of spare wire sand heat shrink tubing and you can hear how that just sounds more pleasing to listen to now let's check out another track here this is from the EQ example again and this is my wife Rachel Allen's cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lunges now I recorded this little demonstration on a dynamic microphone and I specifically did it off access so she wasn't speaking directly into the microphone to reduce some of those high frequencies so that we'd have a little bit more to play with in the EQ example now that we've boosted up a little bit of that high frequency material I mean it's not a lot I'm hearing some s's that are jumping out at me just a little bit it's it's subtle but to kind of exaggerate the point I'm gonna boost this up just a little bit and drop the frequency down just a hair okay so this is gonna be too much but it's just to show you gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses those s's are just a little bit too loud they're just cutting just a little bit so I'm just going to jump over here to the de-esser and to make it really quick for yourself there are a few presets here that you may want to check out so if we want a de-esser if we want to D sure check those out and the frequency is 4 male and female are a little bit different so I'm just gonna pull up the female de-esser which wants to look in this range and let's see if that's gonna do the job for us gentle lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses that's not really doing it for me let's check out this sibilance output no that's not really working so let's try the D sure it's gonna look a little bit higher let's check that out easy clean alright I'm hearing that more but I think probably even the male preset and basically all it's doing is its adjusting the center frequency and the bandwidth which is how much around the center frequency it's going to be listening to and then reducing we can probably shoot for up here right there lenses somewhere in that neighborhood I'm hearing something kind of nasty let's try right here and you can see the amplitude of the frequencies as this plays back which should help you to be able to dial in and the frequencies that you're looking for you can hear safe alright so that it's actually just a hair higher it's right up here so now let's uncheck sibilants output only and listen to what this is doing until lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses directions spray on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth so this is doing a really nice job at reducing those SS and making this voiceover here a lot more comfortable to listen to dental lens cleaning formula quick and easy cleaning for all lenses safe and effective on all anti-reflective coating lenses directions spray on front and back of lenses gently wipe clean with soft cloth and that's pretty much all there is to it DSR is really pretty simple to use again it's a compress that's only going to look at those frequencies that you point it to you want to be looking in that upper frequency area around five to seven thousand Hertz every time the speaker gives you an S rush or two it's really going to cut those down and it's going to make them a lot more comfortable to listen to now that you know how to use a de-esser you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn how to use noise reduction effects to clean up background noise in your tracks check that out coming up next at some point you will have to deal with a track that has excess noise there are some tools inside your video editing app that can get you close but if it needs more help you're gonna have to use an external audio editing application to do a better job in this lesson you're gonna learn about some ways to clean up background noise in your tracks we're looking at this clip of my buddy Andy here doing some church announcements and as you saw in the expanders in gates lesson this clip has a little bit of noise on it I'm gonna normalize this up so we can hear what's going on here I'm just gonna normalize it to negative 2 decibels just so we can hear that noise a little bit more clearly as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those so we can hear there's a constant noise in there into my ears this sounds like broadband noise meaning it's very similar to white noise in that it occupies almost all the frequencies equally it's not a situation where we have variable background noise which would be you know a lawnmower in the background that's getting closer and further away from the microphone a plane flying overhead wind noise that type of thing this is a constant noise that's throughout the entire clip and if I remember correctly I recorded Andy with a condenser microphone but it was a handheld condenser microphone which is not very sensitive and so I had to push my preamps on my portable audio recorder up pretty far which caused this noise in the track now there are some tools inside a premiere that will help us with this if we come over here we can find the noise reduction in restoration effects and we have a few to choose from but the one that you're going to want to look for is D noise er we pull this up you can see that this is a pretty simple effect we have an offset dial and this sets an offset value between the automatically detected noise and whatever value you put in on this dial here so we can push that up more or less then we have a noise reduction knob this specifies the amount of noise that we're going to remove within a range of 0 decibels to negative 20 and then we have a freeze button right here which we can enable if our clip had noise in it that we needed to target specifically as in noise that was not throughout the entire clip we could play it back and freeze that portion of the noise and then we'd have the noise imprint kind of frozen in here but I'm going to leave that unchecked for now if we adjust these dials here I'm just gonna pull the noise reduction down to negative 20 and let's see what happens as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those so I'm hearing a little reduction it's not tremendous now to increase this I can push up the offset by 10 decibels as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of and for this effect that's pretty much the best that we're gonna get in terms of maximum noise reduction we really can't make it do any more than that now if this gets it done for you that's awesome but let's look at some other options for some more heavy-duty noise reduction I'm gonna get rid of this and if you are an adobe cloud member you have access to Adobe Audition which is a dedicated audio recording and editing application and inside of audition there are some much better tools for noise reduction so let's get this clip over to audition and take a look at the tools that we have to work with now there's a couple of different ways that we can get this audio clip over to Adobe Audition if we come up to edit which is just off the screen here we can come down to edit and audition we can do clip or sequence if we had a bunch of things that we needed to send over we could choose sequence and it would bring up this window here in which we have a bunch of options but for right now I'm just going to send this clip over to you audition so I'm going to do the same thing and select clip or you can right click and just off the screen here I have an option that says edit clip in Adobe Audition now what you just saw there let me jump back to premiere what you just saw really quickly before it opened up adobe audition is it did a render and replace if you look at the folder with these files in it this is the original audio and then what premiere did is it does a render and replace so it takes this audio and it renders it so we get a new WAV file and then it replaces that and links it with our clip and the reason is because we need another file to work with to make changes on so that in audition here we can make changes on this file and it will update in premiere that's just the way it works so we're in audition we have our clip sent over here there are two noise reduction effects that you're going to want to check out one of them is down here in the effects rack and you can find it right here adaptive noise reduction this is a real-time effect which means we can stack this effect with other effects compressors eq's gates reverb all that jazz just like we can in Premiere the other effect we get to via the menu here so we come up here to effects which is just off the screen we select nose reduction and restoration and noise reduction this brings up this big ole window here and if you're launching this for the first time you may not see this Advanced tab here but we'll go through a few of those settings you can see that initially it says noise print undefined and what we need to do is we need to find a section of this clip it has the good representation of the noise that's throughout this entire clip we don't want to select a section that has a breath noise or a cough or anything else we just want to select a section that has only noise so I'm just going to scooch this off to the side here and I think towards the end here I'm just gonna click and drag and select and I also have loop playback selected down here in the transport controls and so I'm just going to select this and play it and that sounds to me like it's only noise so I'm going to capture noise print and this is going to make an imprint of this noise and now we can start to use this effect if we play what we just selected we can hear what this effect is gonna do it pretty much gets rid of all of that noise except when it loops there's just a moment there when it doesn't so it sounds like this is gonna work pretty well we can select the entire file here and click this preview as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and explosions so the two main controls that you're going to want to pay attention to here are noise reduction and by default I believe that's set to 100% and that's totally fine and then the second one is reduce by and this determines the amplitude of reduction of the detected noise and values between 6 and 30 decibels are a good place to start so let's see what happens if we set this to let's say 30 decibels I had to set a little bit higher but let's check this out as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and so sounds like it's doing a pretty good job now we do have another option here we can change the scale from logarithmic to linear and see if that makes a difference for you as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of for finer control over low frequencies you may want to check out logarithmic but for more detailed high-frequency work linear is probably where you want to stick let's do a quick comparison to see which one sounds better and I'm just gonna select this portion right here as you can see a lot has changed in a year as you can see a lot has changed in a year now I'm going to switch it over to linear as you can see a lot has changed in a year as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those as you can see a lot has changed in a year linear sounds a little bit smoother on those upper frequencies so I'm gonna leave it set to linear for now now we have some advanced settings here and for a detailed explanation of what's going on here check out the help file that comes with Adobe Audition because this gets into some pretty complicated stuff the one thing that I do want to draw your attention to is this right here the FFT size the FFT size determines how many individual frequency bands are analyzed and this option causes the most drastic change in quality the noise in each frequency band is treated separately so with more bands noises removed with finer detail good settings range from 4096 to 8,192 higher FFT sizes might cause swooshing or reverberant artifacts but they very accurately remove noise frequencies lower FFT sizes worse all in better time response but they can produce poor frequency resolution creating a hollow or flanged sounds I had us at the 8,192 I'm gonna select the same noise and I'm gonna switch it to 512 I'm gonna capture the noise print again and then I'll select this portion of the clip as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those it sounds like the 512 size is reducing more noise and it is but it's doing so in a clumsy er way and the result is that we're hearing this kind of warble e weird sound in those high frequencies it kind of sounds like really bad mp3 compression I'm gonna stick with a higher FFT size you could try 4096 as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those or we can go all the way up to 16,000 and see if that makes a big difference as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those now that sounds fine to me I'm gonna crank up this reduce by and see if that makes the difference see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those now once you've made all the changes that you want in here in order to apply this effect you're gonna want to select all and then click the apply button and that's going to apply the effect to the entire clip as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of and that's all there is to it now when we save this in audition if we jump back to premiere this file is now updated and now we're hearing the processed file as you can see a lot has changed in a year now if we jump back to audition and we undo what we just did and then we're II save it we go back to premiere and it's the update as you can see a lot history and you can hear we're back to where we were before let's take a look at this other noise reduction effect now when you select this effect it says the selected effect may not be suitable for real-time playback because it is either CPU intensive or high latency to maximize playback performance press the apply button in the effects rack before playing back effects slots containing high CPU intensive or high latency effects are displayed in red don't show me this alert again basically that's saying if we cranked these settings up really high it's not gonna playback smoothly in fact it will definitely shatter so this effect is geared a little bit more towards variable background noise but you may want to experiment with it to see how it's going to handle a track like this with more of a broadband noise sound again we have an FFT size here and cranking this up and selecting high quality mode as you may cause your playback to chatter a little bit and so just like the other effect in order to get this to apply to the whole clip we're going to have to apply it here but for now I'm gonna reduce the FFT size to get a little bit more smooth playback here a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and explosions for more scholarly pursuits probably what you're gonna hear when you use this effect is that the noise is going to change a little bit throughout the clip now that may work and it may not but it's important to note that this is kind of always adapting to what it thinks the noise is again you're gonna want to pay attention to a few of these settings here FFT size is a big one you can experiment with this they do have a few presets so we can do you know a heavy noise reduction and that's going to jack up some of the settings here as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those now to my ears with these headphones on I like the sound of this noise reduction a little bit better than the other one so I'm gonna go with this I'm gonna ramp that up to 8,192 click on high quality mode and I'm going to apply this effect and this is gonna take a little bit more time than the other effect but then we're gonna hear the result as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those previous baser endeavors of shooting things and explosions now that may have been a little bit too much I am hearing a little bit of kind of swooshing in there but again this is something that you're gonna have to experiment with and find the right settings that work for you but just like before we're gonna save this in audition and when we jump back to premiere we're gonna see this file update as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those if you don't like this you jump back to audition B undo what we just did and maybe say I don't want this effect at all you can select a little part of our noise over here jump back to noise reduction and pull this up maybe set this to 8192 capture on noise print again select the entire file and apply it like save jump back to Premiere shibam as you can see a lot has changed in a year my friend Rob and I have decided to forego those and there you go combine this noise reduction in audition with a little bit of EQ a little bit of compression and expansion and it's gonna really clean up this track a heck of a lot now that you know how to handle some noise reduction effects in Premiere and in audition you're ready to move on to the next where you're gonna learn about some tools and techniques for dealing with mouth clicks so check that out coming up next mouth noises and mouth clicks are annoying and distracting but it's something that is a part of recording the human voice the effects designed to handle these noises that come with your video editing app are pretty terrible at handling this so you have two options manually edit them out or use an external application to deal with them in this lesson you'll learn how to do both so I have an audio example in premiere of a little interview and this little clip here has a lot of mouth noises in it check this out I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I do it in my own business Little Miss babycakes where I use although I create these you know beautiful diaper cakes for babies and gifts but I use technology for it completely so you can definitely hear there are some mouth noises and mouth clicks in this clip now mouth noises in mouth clicks come from a mouth that is dry now to prevent this you can have your speaker's drink something that is a little bit tart or a little bit sour like lemon water or some kind of sour drink that's lightly flavored what this will do is cause your mouth to water and that natural salivation or mouth lubrication if you will really helps to cut down on mouth clicks nevertheless if you have a track that has mouth clicks in it or mouth noises you need to deal with them because they're distracting and they're no fun to listen to there is an effect that comes with premiere you can jump right up to here and it's under noise reduction in restoration and it's called D clicker now the D clicker does exactly what you think it would do it's going to try to deke lick the audio but let's see if it's gonna work I literally - so to start we're gonna have to pull down this threshold here live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I do it in my own business you can hear though that something is not right as we start to pull down the threshold you can hear that it's really starting to degrade the quality of this clip this D clicker it may be good for some things mouth noises is not the thing that it's good for now D crackler is not going to help us either so we're gonna have to use one of two methods that I've found that works pretty good one is we're gonna get in here and we're gonna try and manually edit these out now if you have a piece like this with several clicks in it this is not gonna be fun I mean this is gonna take you a while to do but let's walk through the process anyway so you can see how it's done because maybe you only have one or two mouth clicks that you need to deal with our mouth noises let's see how to do that first thing we're gonna do is come over here and show audio time units because we are gonna have to get really really zoomed up on this audio clip next thing is we're gonna select down here in the timeline window and we are going to go fullscreen here we're gonna make this really really big so we're gonna kind of scroll up over here we want this really really tall because we want to see what's going on here so that's pretty much as big as I can make this clip at least as tall and then we are going to zoom in onto the trouble areas so let me see if we can find one of these here babycakes a in a lot of times from my experience you get mouth noises and mouth clicks while you're transitioning to another vowel or another consonant so it happens when you're changing the shape of your mouth so you'll often find them right before a word or as the audio is decaying in one of these audio blobs here so in the funny thing about this scrubbing audio feature in Premiere is you'll be scrubbing along here it sounds like we're over a click this entire time but that's not the way it works usually the audio is just ahead of wherever your playhead is so you can see pretty easily here there's a click and there's a click sometimes what can be effective is to keyframe this so I'm going to ctrl click here four times the first and the last keyframe are to leave the volume set to zero and the middle two are so we can drop this down and try and do a quick level drop here for this mouth click and we're going to zoom up on this and get really tight on it so because we really only want we want to get this only we don't want more than this click let's see if we can hear that baby cake baby cake okay let's let's try and get this one too while we're at it I'm just gonna click and drag draw a little shape here I'm gonna zoom up and just see if I can get these two were here looks like there's another one right there as well this clip has just a tremendous amount of mouth noises in it let's try this one right here sounds like it's right in here it looks like it's right there you can see this tightly bunched group of waves right there that's gonna be right where it is let's see if we can get this up so we can reduce them a little bit manually like this but it's super tedious and sometimes depending on what the word is sometimes this just cannot be done smoothly there's probably only a handful that we can get manually dropping them out so we're gonna have to look at another application now just like in the last video we're gonna try to fix this in Adobe Audition so I'm going to right click and right off the screen here it says edit clip in Adobe Audition it's gonna render and replace this clip so that we can work on it here I literally live and breathe technology and now we're gonna try the D clicker that's built into audition so I'm gonna jump here into noise reduction in restoration and automatic click remover and now this looks like a really simple effect we only have two sliders there's threshold and complexity let's just see what happens at the default value I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I do it in my own business little miss babycakes well okay so we have a section here babycakes I'm gonna make a selection here and I'm gonna increase that where I just that much right there and then I have loop set here so it's gonna just loop this so Miss babycakes where I use Little Miss babycakes where are you okay let's turn this off little miss babycakes where I use so it's sounding like it's reducing them a little bit in intensity little miss babycakes where I use I'm gonna turn up the complexity up to 100 cakes where I use Little Miss babycakes where and then I want to turn the threshold down so the default value is 30 I'm gonna try 20 I use Little Miss babycakes where are you a little bit better let's go down to 15 this Little Miss babycakes where I use it is sounding better let's toggle this off Little Miss babycakes where are you it's definitely reducing the clicks which is a step in the right direction so now we're set to a threshold of 10 and the complexity of a hundred Little Miss babycakes where I use and I'm hearing a really pretty big reduction in those clicks so I'm going to drop this down to about 10 and 100 which I believe is the same as the heavy reduction yeah it's pretty close complexity 95 13 let's just check out what that preset does so don't miss babycakes where I use I'm gonna leave it on there for now I'm gonna leave these values here of 13 and 95 and what I'm gonna do is select the whole file here and I'm gonna click apply and you're gonna see the effect disappear here because now the wave has been rewritten I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I pro diaper cakes for babies and gifts but I use technology for it completely so that sounds like it's made a really pretty big difference I'm gonna save this and then jump back over to premier and this is gonna update over here I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I do it in my own business it's already sounding a heck of a lot better let's listen to the original here I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I mean just in the first few seconds I think I heard six clicks I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I do yep so you can hear I literally live and breathe technology I do it every day I work I only heard one click in the processed version now did he get everything no it didn't get everything but it made a huge huge difference it probably were used the clicks by 85% so really really big difference and a really really fast workflow we throw it over to audition we process the clip in audition we hit save and it updates in premiere now the cool thing about doing this is our original file is not touched it's not as fast as using plugins that are built into premiere but those plugins are not going to help you get rid of these mouth noises we're gonna have to throw it to something like audition or isotopes rx or another external audio editing application to deal with those now that you know how to deal with mouth noises and mouth clicks you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're gonna learn about dealing with multiple dialogue tracks check that out coming up next when you get two or more dialogue tracks that were recorded at the same time such as a two microphone interview setup it can be really tricky to manage one speakers voice will pickup in both mics and this is not what you want to hear in this lesson you will learn how to use plugins and some track volume automation to deal with this so in this example I want to walk you through some of my workflow for dealing with this type of situation what we have here is a video clip and an audio clip just like we've seen before in this course and so the audio that goes with this video is on camera audio such as not very great sounding and it's got to go and then we have two microphones that were used to record these two guys it's my buddy Rob and my buddy Andy doing some more church video announcements here there's a microphone over each one of them but it was recorded on a two-track stereo audio recorder so one side is my buddy Andy here something else we have discovered and the other side is my buddy Rob so the first thing is I'm going to unlink this clip and I'm going to relink it right here okay and so now you can definitely hear the stereo problem that we have here something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words now I'm going to normalize this track here just so that it sounds a little bit louder for us to be able to hear what's going on here so the problem with this is this is not going to sound right we can't just work with the audio like this for one we don't have a lot of great control over the level of each individual microphone and we don't want to just use the clip like this because this kind of super hard panned stereo voice where Andy's only coming out of one side and Rob's only coming out of the other side does not sound right that's definitely not what we want to hear we want to hear them kind of with equal intensity coming out of both speakers if we want to do a little bit of panning to give some spatial awareness we can but we're going to lose a lot of volume intensity if we leave one microphone just in the left channel and the other one just in the right channel so what I like to do to deal with this is I like to create two tracks and put one of these microphones on one of the tracks and one of them on the other tracks now now in other audio applications we can do this by exploding this stereo track into two mono tracks but we don't really have the option to do that in premiere but there is a pretty easy workaround what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this audio track and I'm going to alt drag it down to make a copy of it so now I have the audio track right here and I have the same track down here this one happens to be linked with this video track here I'm going to unlink it from the video for just a second and on this clip I'm gonna come over here to the effect one note and I'm gonna look for a fill left and what this is going to do is it's going to fill both the right and the left channels with whatever's on the left so let me just solo this so this should be Andy's microphone B I've discovered is books so you can hear that sounds nice and clear and then when it goes to Rob such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up that is working pretty well now in the other clip I'm going to put the fill right effect now we could leave it like this but sometimes I find this a little bit confusing to be able to mix because I can't tell which one I'm looking at here is this Rob's is this Andy's mic I don't know but a really easy way to be able to tell is to do this we can come up here we can solo this track and then we select this clip we come up to the menu and it's just off screen here but it's under clip audio options render in replace now what happens is because we have this so load it's going to render this out and it's going to replace this and the fill left effect that we had on there is gone but you can see what's happened to the wave it's filled both channels with that left channel so it's basically just rendered that out and now we have a new audio clip that both the right and the left channels have what the left channel had on it before now if we come down here to audio track number two and we select this clip and we come up here to clip audio options render and replace its gonna do the same thing to this clip you can see this has just Rob's mic on it now do you need to do that no you don't you can technically manage both Clips the way they were before I like to go through this extra step because it looks a little bit easier to read for my eye now I can see when Rob's talking is right here and when Andy's talking it's up here because these waves here the amplitude on this track is bigger so I know that Rob's not talking here in the thing that we want to avoid is this right here such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st what's happening here is we're getting Rob's microphone which sounds pretty clear such as Higher Education and I'm also getting a heck of a lot of Rob's voice in Andy's microphone which is up here such as higher education now I don't want Rob's voice in Andy's microphone because it's way off access right Andy's microphone is up here because it's a little less sensitive because it's not as directional as the microphone that I'm using right here it's picking up a lot of Rob's voice and I don't want that we don't want this such as super reverberant sound plus Rob's voice is arriving in both microphones at two different times so we're getting phase cancellation okay Rob's voice is picking up here in this microphone you know at about two milliseconds it's reaching Andy's microphone at perhaps five or six milliseconds a small difference but it's enough to shift the waves so that they're not perfect if we jump to audio time units here I'm going to click down here and then click tilde and zoom way up in here let's see if we can see what's going on we should see that these audio waveforms are not in phase in fact you can see that Rob's voice landed here sooner than it landed here so the same frequencies that are going to be happening will be somewhat cancelling each other out now we don't get full cancellation but we will get some frequency cancellation or comb filtering it basically makes the audio sound weird it sounds Phase II it sounds like someone shot holes in it with a shotgun and it doesn't sound good so what we want to do is we only want this microphone when Rob's talking and I only want this microphone when Andy's talking Plus listen to this we have noise here we have a little bit of Andy's voice I don't want that when Andy's talking so we need to be able to deal with both of these fortunately this is not very difficult what we can do is first throw an EQ on both of these tracks then I'll come over here before I forget and I'll put a dynamics processor and I'll turn the limiter on I'll take the compressor off Wever EQ here I'm just gonna throw in a low-cut filter on each one of these and that's pretty much all I'm gonna do no fancy EQ just make sure there's a low-cut on here the next effect that I'm going to throw on here is going to be this dynamics processor right here it's not so much to compress but I want to try and use the expander and maybe the auto gate to try and get out and expand some of this stuff on Andy's track when Rob's talking and I'm gonna do the same thing on Rob's track here when Andy's talking now on Rob's track that's gonna be a heck of a lot easier because this was a more directional microphone this might have been a shotgun microphone and so it's really doing a fantastic job of rejecting Andy's voice where the microphone used on Andy did not do that but if you're using two omni labs and you have two people who are sitting close together you're gonna get the same exact thing because if people are four feet apart you're gonna get a lot of you know subject number one pleading on subject number two is microphone it's just the way it is what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to really quickly set this compressor up and with solo up his channel something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words such as higher education in fact so this is gonna be pretty hard to get out and to use the expander to kill this but we can definitely reduce it so I'm gonna start with the gate reading and other things involving words such as higher education in fact what I want to do is I want to make sure all the time the Andy speaking we're getting all that stuff so I'm gonna set this you know pretty low something else we have discovered is books then I'm gonna set the expander I'm gonna really crank it up here reading and other things involving words something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words such as higher education that's going to reduce this stuff here a little bit it's not going to do everything for us let's jump over to Rob's channel here I'm gonna do the same thing now this is gonna be a little bit easier like I said so I'm gonna solo this up and actually need to unsolo this track up here such as higher education in fact such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st the connect class at 6:00 p.m. that's gonna be my general starting point now at this point what I want to do is I'm gonna keyframe the volume when these guys are talking and I know this sounds a little bit tedious and if this were a really long thing it would be but we can do it pretty simply if Andy's talking here and there's no interruptions from Rob something else we have discovered is books reading and other things and that's gonna drive me nuts I'm gonna turn this gate down a little bit and I'm gonna turn this down a little bit involving words so at no point during this first section here did rob say anything so I'm gonna put two keyframes here ctrl click ctrl click and then I'm just gonna pull this down all the way and then Rob talks so because I know that Rob's gonna talk here I'm going to anticipate that and I'm gonna drop two keyframes and then I'm gonna play it from here such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st the connect class at six people I'm also gonna jump in here and just lower this down a little bit because it's driving me nuts this next chunk when Rob talks and he doesn't talk so I'm gonna throw two keyframes right here and in this little bit I'm just gonna completely get rid of and then Andy goes again so I'm gonna throw two keyframes down here I want to play ahead in classes open to anybody who has taken to discover class I would like to pursue membership at Elam gospel church Rob didn't talk at all in this section which is pretty easy to see that's rich yes all right now here we have an end section here where Rob says something and then Andy comes in right at the very end so when Andy's done with this little bit Elam gospel church I'm going to throw two keyframes right here that's rich and then just as he's saying this word two keyframes here and then I want to throw two keyframes down here and drop this out and so now at Elam gospel church that's rich yes now we get something that's much tighter sounding so let's play this down and listen to the difference something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st the connect class at 6:00 p.m. this class is open to anybody who has taken to discover class I would like to pursue membership at Elam gospel church that's rich yes so you can hear that tighten up a heck of a lot basically the technique is whenever andis talking I need to pull down the volume on Rob's mic and whenever Rob's talking I pulled down the volume on Andy's mic now when they kind of get overlapping I want to really tighten up these key frames so that I'm just getting yeah yes just getting andis words just getting Rob's words down here that's rich all right you see I I cut off his CH there that's rich and maybe feather that out just a little bit more like that that's rich yeah and he got a little bit of an D in there but that much is really not a big deal that's rich yes this is the original audio down here and listen to the difference something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words such as higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st so that's where we started this is where we ended up something else we have discovered is books reading and other things involving words so is higher education in fact we just signed up for a class that's coming up on June 21st this is how you want to deal with multiple microphones you want to mix them in and mix them out so you're not getting this microphone bleed happening that's no good that's not the sound that you want that causes phase cancellation it sounds weird and it's not good so you're gonna have to do a little bit of work a little bit of clip automation here drawing some keyframes but once you get it down a little bit it's really not going to be a big deal and you're gonna have some great sounding tracks now that you know how to deal with multiple dialogue tracks you're ready to move on to the next lesson what you're gonna learn about working with sound effects and what tools you may want to use to control the level and add some spice to your sound effects so check that out coming up next sound effects are a wonderful tool to add dimension and depth to your audio but sometimes it can be a trick managing the levels against the rest of the project in this lesson you will learn how to use sound effects and keep the levels in check so I'm going to drop some music into my project here and then I'm going to throw some sound effects in here now before I go too much further I'm going to come over here and I'm gonna throw dynamics on just like I have in previous lessons because we're gonna be working with levels that are pretty hot so I'm gonna pretend here that I'm making a promo video I got some music and we're just gonna imagine that there's some awesome video here some sweet motion graphics some stuff blowing up it's gonna be cool and pretty much all I need for this promo is this great music track which I composed myself and some sound effects alright we want some impacts we want some whooshes we want some rumbly low stuff and some other wacky zany stuff this music track here gets pretty bumpin right [Music] you can see that big big waveform [Applause] so there's not a lot of room for sound effects to live and by default a lot of sound effects let me pull some in here just chuck them all right here let's just look at these waveforms for a minute a lot of these have been normalized so if I just Solo up here audio to my sound effects right a lot of those are hitting really really high so we combine that with our music and it doesn't give us a whole lot of punch above the music so a lot of times when we're dealing with multiple audio sources like this we really have to manage our levels so to start you can probably bring this music way down at least I don't know 6 decibels or so to start because that's going to give us a little bit of room to be able to work otherwise we're just going to be pinned up against the ceiling in terms of our audio level here [Music] [Applause] still I mean we could even probably drop this down a little bit more and maybe we start there so now our sound effects are gonna have a little bit more impact [Music] [Applause] all right now that's not all there is to it right because still our music sounds too low in our sound effects sound kind of crummy so we can utilize a couple of things here to make our mix a little bit better and handle these sound effects for one sound effects don't always have to be just kind of dropped into your project and that's the way there are a lot of times what I'll do is massage the volume of these sound effects so that they work better for example a lot of times I like to use rumbly stuff and I'll drop in like a big long rumbly thing here the default volume of this clip it's probably too loud so I almost always kind of keyframe these and do some fades here like this I really like this effect here you can see that this has got some really loud stuff in it and so often I'll use an effect like this to make myself like a whoosh but I don't need it that loud so what I'll do is drop some keyframes like this now sometimes I'll get in here and I'll change these keyframe values so by default when you drop a keyframe in here this is a linear keyframe you can see it draws a line between point a and point B or this keyframe and that keyframe linear and in order to change this we can right click on these keyframes and then we have some different options there's a couple right off the screen here one is ease out and ease out kind of draws a Bezier curve it gives us a little handle here which we can pick up and adjust sometimes these are helpful to use I'll I'll use one called ease in over here it gives me another Bezier handle now I can really get a nice busy a volume sweep happen in here so a lot of massaging of these sound effects is in this keyframe stuff but we can also utilize some of our processors here to help us out in that department as well I like to keep all my base type stuff on its own track very similar to how I loca all of my dialogue tracks I look all of my sound effects that really don't need a whole lot of bass in them because I want to save the bass stuff for the tracks and the items that need it and so a lot of whooshes and sweeps and sometimes even impacts and other sound effects don't need a whole lot of bass so if we get rid of it we can make room for the bass and the music to live and the bass and other sound effects to live otherwise we'll just have way too much Low Energy and it just sounds like mush [Music] the other thing that I like to do is I like to compress these sound effects a little bit now for this I'm going to use the tube modeled compressor because I like them the way the meters work here so I want to solo up these sound effects I want a really fast compression so I'm going to take the attack and I'm gonna pull that down to like five milliseconds and then I'm going to pull the release way down to like seven and then I'm gonna put the gain at zero so I'm not having any makeup here all I'm doing is taking things that are really fast and I'm just gonna squish them down and I'm gonna squish them down by a small amount like 1.5 okay let's just see what happens to this group of kind of hokey sounding impacts it shows me I'm clipping I may have to actually decrease this attack here I might be able to just normalize these two negative two which will probably turn most of them down a little bit they probably are a little bit high anyway so reducing them down to decibels not a bad idea so you can see maybe we drop the threshold a little bit more and what I'm looking for is I'm looking for a pretty good amount of gain reduction here right now I'm at like negative eighteen it's really doing a pretty nice job at taking those really loud spikes and just smooshing them down a little bit I mean we're getting I don't know between three and maybe five maybe six decibels of compression but it's happening so fast and the release is so fast and because we aren't doing any makeup gain it's happening in a subtle way certainly if we were to crank this down more it's gonna be much more drastic but we still want some impact of these but we just want to reduce a little bit because it is pretty intense so that's gonna help the other thing I like to do to give my sound effects just a little bit more presence is occasionally I'll throw on a reverb here and in Premiere we have a couple of options for reverb it used to be just one it was reverb and now we have a convolution reverb we have a reverb which is kind of an algorithm based I believe and then we have a surround reverb you can just stick with the regular old boring reverb which to me sounds okay and usually what I do is turn up the size to a hundred percent pull down some high-frequency dampening that's that real high sizzly stuff you don't want that and reverb a whole lot [Music] and so that can sometimes help to massage the way that these sound and then other times you just kind of have to get medieval on these key frames and just draw some key frames so that they work a little bit better with you know what else you have in your mix you may have dialog in here you know you might be stacking some sound effects you know we may take a woosh here here's a whoosh and then I'll stack that on top of like a base thing so I get this base thing or ramping up here and so that's this is probably a lot I probably just take this whole clip volume and just turn that down so we get something like that and then making sure that stuff has a little bit of compression on it to just even out those spikes so to do that I like to set this really fast in a really fast release time really low ratio one point five to one and then making sure your threshold is up enough so that we're only really affecting the spikes that's what I usually go for for a lot of these sound effects stuff that or I'll just work to mix them to make sure they're sitting in the mix properly because you want to hear the impact but you don't want it to be a sound effect show that's all there is to it a little bit of EQ you know sometimes sound effects need a little bit of EQ occasionally you may want like a whoosh like this you may want that to have a little more punch so you throw maybe an EQ just on that come over here to the effects controls and a pull up this guy here and pull this down so we're getting pretty tight q and put this at like 70 Hertz maybe maybe get down a little bit more and that'll have a pretty dramatic effect whereas if we bypass this you can hear we're getting a pretty big bump in the bass department so if some of your sound effects do need a little bit more juice you know don't be afraid to throw on some EQ and really go nuts with it if you have an effect that you really want some low impact you know throw that EQ on there make sure you do it on the clip level so that you have you know some global control up here I wouldn't throw that EQ on here boost up a whole bunch of bass frequencies and then throw it up here or I'm just cutting almost all of that out you want to put that on you know a channel here where you don't have as much kind of low cut going on so you still retain some of that low-end punch on there that's really all there is to it it's a lot of clip level and keyframe management of these sound effects and taking advantage of some of these compressors in here I just use this tube compressor here because it's got a nicer meter on it but you can definitely use this compressor as well [Music] and this should do just about the same thing the compressors in this case can do a lot to really manage those superfast really intense volume spikes that you get with a lot of sound effects now that you know how to approach managing sound effects and what effects you can use to sweeten them up and keep them in control you're ready to move on to the next lesson well you're going to learn about mastering plugins there are many mastering plugins out there but in this lesson you're gonna learn about a few essential tools to manage the overall tone and level of your project this is a critical step in making sure your audio sounds fantastic so for this lesson I want to look at a project that has a lot of stuff going on in it now this isn't a crazy amount of audio it's only got you know six tracks but we have music we have a voice track we have four tracks of sound effects what I want to go over in this lesson he's using some final effects processors in plugins on the master buss here to control the overall tone and level of what's going on in our project now typically mastering plugins are things like eq's compressors stereo enhancers exciters multiband compressor x' sometimes a reverb if you're working on a music project and a limiter now we already talked about putting a limiter on your master buss here which is a great idea now before the limiter we can put a few processors and effects to massage the overall mix of what's happening here you can see for this project I don't have a whole lot of other effects processors in the rack here mostly for my dialogue track a lot of the other levels for the sound effects and the music are controlled with just keyframes and there may be some EQ living on some of these individual effects right here so to make this relatively simple we can go down here and pop in this mastering plug-in let's take a look at what is in here we have a really simple EQ now for mastering EQ this is not something where we're going to want to carve out a lot of frequencies this is usually very very subtle EQ stage because if there are any problems that need more than a few decibels of correction you're going to want to take care of that in the audio track mixer here or by throwing eq's on the individual clips to take care of any kind of frequency anomalies that you may be hearing so subtle EQ is part of the stage and then you can see there are several little processors here we have a reverb and most of the time I never use that there's an exciter here this is an effect to just make everything sound really hyper let me just reset a couple these other guys here listen to when this is set to zero who at some point wasn't excited by visual effects this was my initial interest in After Effects this type of effect makes the high frequency and the low frequency stuff more exciting and it does that by some EQ and some compression to make it more exciting most of the time I don't use that then we have a stereo Widener this can help to increase or decrease the stereo imaging I don't use that a whole lot then we have a loudness Maximizer this essentially is some kind of compression with some make up gain okay so as we push this up who at some point wasn't excited by visual effects this was my initial interest in After Effects but that's going to increase the gain and kind of do some automatic compression for you and then you have a final output gain master stage here and this is probably a limiter poking around under the hood I began to expand my skill set into advanced title treatments now I have never used this as a mastering plug-in but that doesn't really mean that it's bad it's just I prefer to use some different effects this would be a good place to start to get used to using these final kind of polishing effects and plugins let me show you some other ones that I like to use so I'm just going to get rid of this guy here because I try and get a lot of the EQ done on the track level or on the clip level I don't usually use an EQ on the mastering buss but what I do put on here is a multiband compressor which is kind of I like to think of it as a little bit of a magical device because it's really pretty neat the multiband compressor works very similar to the other compressors that we looked at you can see for each individual band we have threshold a gain a ratio an attack and a release but the cool thing about this is this compressor breaks up the audio signal into four separate bands and compresses each one of them individually so this can be a great tool to manage the overall frequency content of your project because if you think about it an EQ is going to make global adjustments right if we push up the high frequencies in the EQ the high frequencies are going to be pushed up no matter if they're down here or if they're up here everything gets pushed up the same it doesn't matter what the amplitude is but this works dynamically which means if we push up the high frequencies which right now are set at around seven thousand Hertz to 20,000 Hertz these are being pushed up three decibels which means all of the audio that's down here is pushed up by three decibels when it gets up here in the area where the threshold is set it gets pushed up but it's also being compressed so at this point we're kind of controlling that high frequency material and still giving a little bit of a boost and so what that's going to do is it makes the quieter stuff a little bit brighter and a little bit nicer sounding and when the material gets a little bit louder it's not really going to get that much brighter it's going to be compressed and it's the same with all the other bands and so the effect is that we can use this to keep a really good handle on the frequency content in our projects now by default this is set up for this broadcast preset which uses this limiter here which is set I would say pretty aggressively we're doing some gain makeup here on the high frequencies and the low frequencies it's one decibel which really isn't that much and then the middle two frequencies the lower mids and the upper Ms here we're not really doing any makeup gain at all if we jump over to the classical master we can see that across the board there is no gain make up and also the ratios are set lower these are really really light compression ratios 1.4 1.5 1.6 2 1 whereas the broadcast ratios are all three to one which is much more aggressive also the attack time here is set lower before in the broadcast preset they were set to 1 millisecond here this after 10 milliseconds which is a little bit more subtle the brick wall limiter here not being used in the limiter here is set to a really subtle value so this is going to be more of a subtle effect but I'm going to switch back over to the broadcast preset and let's just see what this is gonna do first I'm gonna bypass all of this sometimes premiere does not like these newer type effects bypassed right here by this power button I've seen this I've seen this phenomenon on Macs and PCs that when some of these newer effects to premiere are bypassed right here and then you play the audio it will crash premiere it's just some kind of bug that's in Premiere I'm sure they'll get that worked out so for now I'm going to just bypass each individual item here and then I'm gonna play a little portion of this clip ending motion tracking rotoscoping and integrating cinema 4d into After Effects chroma keying editing motion tracking rotoscoping and integrating cinema 4d into After Effects now you're hearing a number of things happen at the same time we're hearing this limiter here which is boosting the overall level so let's just focus on what's happening here with this multiband compressor so for now I'm just gonna turn the threshold up and bypass it motion graphics and positing chromakey editing motion graphics compositing chroma keying alright it's a subtle difference but we're hearing some reduction here in the mid-range frequencies in some of the lower frequencies and a little bit in the higher frequencies motion graphics compositing chroma keying let's jump over to the classical master motion graphics compositing chroma keying editing motion tracking rotoscoping and integrating cinema 4d so you can hear it's a really subtle difference usually what I'll do is I'll use settings similar to this classical master here what I like to see is the area between 500 and 100 being managed just a little bit and then I like kind of this area to be managed above 5,000 Hertz that's where a lot of those harsher sounds are going to come from so I like to set it like that sometimes I'll do a little bit of gain makeup on the top here but before I do that I want to see how much is being reduced motion graphics compositing chroma keying is a little bit sweeter it's a little bit nicer sounding so one of my favorite plugins is this multiband compressor now the cool thing about this is it does have a built-in limiter and a brick wall limiter so the brick wall limiter is not gonna let anything past zero decibels and then we can use this limiter here to massage where we want our overall limiting to be so if you wanted this not so hot we can turn down the margin which is basically the ceiling and now it doesn't matter what we set this value to it will not get above negative 5 decibels watch the meters here motion graphics compositing chromakeying pretty cool limiter there you can see that the attack in the release times by default are set a heck of a lot slower than when we looked at the limiter in the dynamics effect back earlier in this course but those settings right there obviously didn't sound that great if you wanted to do a little bit of gain make up with this limiter what you want to do is play your project and then slowly turn down the threshold until you hear the gain come up motion graphics compositing chroma keying editing motion tracking rotoscoping and integrating cinema 4d into After Effects I'm experienced in using the stock effects in After Effects as well as third-party plugins like plexus for me I would probably keep that pretty subtle so it's bringing it up about 5 decibels but much more than that it's starting to sound a little bit too loud in the big sections here when I have a lot of sound effects and when the music comes up quite a bit so again subtlety is the goal here let me just reset this here now you may want to turn the threshold up here so we're not doing any makeup gain with this limiter and you could put this tube modeled compressor before here and have this through some very very light gain reduction and makeup gain motion graphics we'd set this pretty slow like 300 milliseconds we set the attack time a little bit slower compositing chroma keying editing motion tracking rotoscoping and integrating cinema 4d into After Effects using the stock effects in after-effects as well as third-party plugins this might be a little bit smoother of a sound for you because we have this adjustable ratio where the limiter is essentially the same as a compressor except that the ratio is probably like thirty to one which essentially is like a limiter and that's the way this limiter is going to work it has a really high ratio of compression so it's perhaps not as smooth as using a regular dynamics processor before the multiband compressor and the limiter and then we can do a little bit of gain makeup here to compensate for what's happening generally in the mastering stage you don't want to see a whole lot of gain reduction happening on the compressors you want to see a little bit you know one to three decibels maybe four decibels at the most anything past that is something that you probably want to address down here with your keyframe volume levels and get the mix dialed in a little bit better because we just want this to kind of overall just kind of smooth out some of those bigger hits just a little bit to just manage the overall levels so again always want a limiter some kind of brick wall limiter as the very last thing in the chain and before that things that work really well eq's exciters compressors to give again an overall level management and we're looking for very very small amounts of gain reduction in those compressors and a multiband compressor is good to use you don't have to use everything and take care of the gain reduction before that with a simple compressor as long as it's doing just a little bit of compression you're going to be fine now that you know which mastering plugins you want to use in your projects you're ready to move on to the last lesson in this course where you're going to hear some final tips and tricks about making your projects sound great thanks so much for checking out this course in this last lesson you're going to learn about some final tips and tricks and recommendations for getting great sounding mixes for your projects so one thing that I want you to take away from this entire course is that getting good sounding audio is not achieved by following a particular formula okay I know a lot of the things that we talked about in this course kind of seem formulaic you know start with this compression ratio and look for this amount of compression but the reality is that what works for the demonstrations that I showed you in this course may not work for your particular audio tracks you're gonna have people recorded with different microphones in different environments so you're gonna have to be a little bit flexible a lot of times when people are getting into audio processing they will ask questions like what compression settings will work for fill in the blank and it doesn't always work like that you're gonna have to experiment the concepts and the ideas that we talked about in this course are a great place to start lower compression ratios slower attack slower release times you know look for a little bit of compression to be on the more subtle side but sometimes you're gonna have to really get in there and crank up the settings and find out what does what it's also a great idea to experiment throw some audio in a project pull up an EQ and start a queuing the heck out of something you know push it way too far and then identify that and then from there pull it back to someplace that sounds reasonable a lot of times that's what I do you know you get kind of tunnel vision when you're working on a project and you keep pushing the settings because your ear and your brain kind of identifies on something you'll you'll hear this weird noise and so you keep pulling out frequencies and pulling out frequencies and then you give it a little bit of time and you come back to it and you go what in the name of all that is good and holy happened to that audio track cuz it sounds ridiculous don't be afraid to push stuff around with these effects to find out what they do especially compressors you know I think there's a lot of mystery associated with compressors but once you start pushing around the values the threshold the ratio the attack and release times you're gonna start to hear exactly what it's going to do and when you do it's going to help you to better understand how to use them for different situations may it's a dialogue track maybe it's some sound effects maybe it's some natural sound or the on-camera microphone whatever it is if you play around with the settings and you find out exactly what the tools do you're going to be in a better position to be able to use them to your advantage I would recommend experimenting along those same lines with different effects and plugins in these EQ examples we looked at trying to manage the tone of these two clips with an EQ you can also do some more processing with a multiband compressor and we're not going to walk through exactly how to do that but I want to encourage you to experiment now if you do you know you're probably gonna want to take off the limiter here and just focus on this because if you think about it this is another tool to manage frequencies and a lot of effects and processors can work like that you know maybe an EQ doesn't work there you want to throw in a multiband compressor here maybe you don't like what the de-esser is doing this built-in de-esser well guess what in this multiband compressor there's a de-esser preset maybe you like the way this works a little bit better you know don't be afraid to experiment there's a lot of plugins here that you can experiment with not all of them are going to be super useful you know modulation effects I'm probably not going to be super useful in your projects except for adding kind of wacky sound effects but a lot of these other effects you may find useful and so experiment find out what works for you another recommendation when you're working on these projects is to listen at low levels you know it's very easy to damage your hearing I want to recommend that you are listening at reasonable volume levels you know you want to err on the side of being conservative with that volume so you don't damage your hearing but it is good to check ad aloud or level from time to time now speaking of low frequency content you want to watch out for rogue low-end frequency content in your mixes so again make sure you are listening to your mixes on a full range system if you don't have full range monitors maybe you only have a set of monitors that has a tweeter and a 6 inch woofer I'm guessing that that's not going to produce very much content below 50 Hertz you know and may fall off and around 45 Hertz and you're not gonna get anything around 30 Hertz and below there may be audio lurking at those frequencies that could be a big problem so if you don't have that capability to check those mixes at your edit station you know render out a mix and go check it on your home theater system where you have a big giant subwoofer and make sure her that there's no rumbles and woofs and low frequency stuff that's lurking in the low end department and finally my last bit of advice is if you can't get the job done in premiere don't be afraid to use other tools you know we looked at using some of the tools in audition but audition has a whole host of processors and plugins and tools for you to be able to use to really do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of audio processing we could have spent the entire course talking about processing audio inside of audition but I wanted to keep things focused on what you could do in premiere because I think that the more time you spend in premiere and the better you can make use of the built-in effects here the more time you save and ultimately that's the goal you want to be able to finish projects and do them well in the least amount of time possible so if you can do the same job as you can do in another application right inside premiere you're gonna be better off but there are times that you may not be getting the results that you want using the effects and processors that we talked about in this course you know most of the ones that are built into premiere so at that point you may want to bounce out to something like audition so my motive operation is I try and push the tools as far as I can inside a premiere and then when I have to I'll go to audition and that pretty much solves almost anything that I come across again thanks so much for checking out this course I hope that you learned a whole heck of a lot about how to process audio how to EQ it how to compress it how to use some of these other effects and processors expanders gates des errs nose reduction D clickers multiband compressor z' limiters using these tools and using them in the right way is the key to getting great sounding mixes for your video projects thanks again for watching this course my name is Dave bode for tuts + and we'll see you around you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 258,732

Keywords: audio processing for video, audio recording, processing, audio, daw software, how to edit vocal, microphone, audio processing, audio for video, how to post process audio, how to edit audio in video, how to use a compressor, how to edit voice in video, make your voice sound better, better audio for video, audio processing for dialogue, how to use a compressor for dialogue, how to process audio dialogue for video, audio for video production

Id: 8xC--tPL3-o

Length: 217min 26sec (13046 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018