How to Use a Compressor in Premiere Pro

all right what's up guys in today's video we're going to be going over how to use the single band compressor in premiere pro to help level out your audio if you've never used a compressor before and you do interview work or anything that involves a lot of people talking in your audio then this is going to be an absolute game changer for you before i knew what a compressor was i did so many stupid things to try and make my audio level and it was an absolute nightmare and if i had just learned what a compressor was i could have saved so many times i think it took me like three or four years into my video career before i learned what one was so please don't be like me and wait that long now i just want to say this video is sponsored by epidemic sounds so huge shout out to them for sponsoring this video and if you haven't heard of them before they are a music licensing platform that owns a hundred percent of all their music if you're a freelance filmmaker or even just someone making videos 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you would like to hop on that deal click the link in the description and then use the code chriso90 so thanks again to epidemic sound now let's get right back to the video so let's get right into it what a compressor does is you give it a threshold and you say if anything goes louder than this decibel i want you to lower it by this amount so essentially what you are doing is you're trying to take your loudest parts of your audio and bring it down closer to the quietest parts of your audio then when everything's closer together you can raise the gain of everything at once and bring it all up a compressor is an absolutely invaluable tool it can save you so much time and make your audio mixing life way easier so let's get right into how to use this tool in premiere there are two types of compressors available you have the single band compressor and the multi-band compressor in this video i will be focusing on how to use the single band compressor go into the effects panel and search single band compressor and then drag it onto your audio and then go over to the effects control panel and click edit to pull up the menu for the compressor now you'll see this menu which can look pretty confusing but we're going to simplify it and make it really easy to understand you really only need to look at three things that is the threshold ratio and output gain the threshold is telling the compressor hey when the audio gets louder than this i want you to turn on and do your job so if the loudest part of your audio is peaking at negative 10 and you set your threshold to negative 5 the compressor is never going to turn on because the audio isn't crossing the threshold that you set so what i like to do is listen to my interview audio and figure out where the average loudness is once i've found a ballpark of where it is averaging i set my threshold to that number that way most of the time the compressor doesn't have to kick in but if things do start to get a little bit louder it'll bring those parts down you don't want it to be squishing all of your audio down all the time now the ratio is how much the compressor will squish the audio down if it does cross the threshold because remember a compressor is taking the loudest parts of your audio and bringing it down closer to the quietest parts of your audio the ratio numbers you'll see will look something like two to one four to one six to one or eight to one or any number you want to pick if you picked two to one this would mean however much the audio goes over the threshold i want it to be lowered to half the size that went over the threshold if you picked four to one this would mean when the audio goes over the threshold you want it to get brought down to a quarter of the size that went over the higher the ratio number the more squished the audio gets when it crosses the threshold so if your threshold was negative 20 db and your audio hit negative 10 db this means that the audio went 10 db over the threshold so half of negative 10 would be 5. so your audio would be squished down from negative 10 db to negative 15 db this is because the audio went over your threshold by 10 db so half of 10 is five now if you did a four to one ratio in that same example the audio would be brought down from negative 10 db to negative 17.5 db because 1 4 of 10 is 2.5 so only 2.5 decibels is being allowed over your threshold so basically as you can see the higher that ratio gets the more the audio gets squished down this concept can honestly be a little tricky to grasp but don't worry too much about it when setting a ratio for an interview i almost always do four to one and this is because if you set the ratio too high you might start to introduce some weird sounds into your voice that you don't want because the compressor is trying to squish the audio too much you can always experiment but four to one is probably what you're gonna use most of the time i find that for a voice two to one doesn't squish the audio down enough and four to one is kind of in that sweet spot now finally you have your output gain output gain brings up all of your audio however many decibels you tell it you use this because once you've set your threshold and ratio your audio is going to become quieter because all your loudest parts just got pushed down now that the loud parts are closer to the quiet parts you can bring everything up at once so i'll typically adjust my output gain until i'm hitting around negative 6 db on average just make sure that your audio isn't peaking if it is dial your output gain back down just a little bit you really don't need to change these settings for the most part but just to cover what they are attack and release are how fast the compressor is going to kick in once audio goes over the threshold and release is how quickly it's going to turn off after it's crossed the threshold i always just leave these at the default and if you're new to audio mixing you can totally just do the same thing now that you have an idea of how this works let's walk through some examples all right so now we're inside of premiere and we've got our effects panel open and we're going to go over to the single band compressor and then drag that onto our audio go to effects controls scroll down and click edit and now here is our compressor menu so i'm going to go ahead and play the audio and just kind of take note of where the audio is averaging right now since the first thing we need to set is the threshold what that had the like really critical thing that came out of that is that my coach was a guy named matt kunkel and um he was just really smart guy worked for the air force you know engineer knew all kinds of stuff but back in the 80s when he was so it's kind of all over the place it was kind of bouncing between negative 9 and negative 18. so just to be on the safe side i'm going to set this to negative 15 for right now you don't have to be super exact but you don't want the threshold to be set to like negative 30 where all of your audio is always going to be crossing that and you don't want to set it too high because none of the audio would hit it otherwise so for now we're going to use negative 15. we're going to change our ratio to 4 to 1. you can leave attack and release as they are and then we will raise the output gain as we need so what i'm going to do is play this audio back and then i'm going to raise the output gain until i feel like it's at a healthy level what that had the like really critical thing that came out of that is that my coach was a guy named matt kunkel and um he was just really smart guy i worked for the air force you know engineer knew all kinds of stuff but back in the 80s when he was a kid so right there for the most part is a pretty healthy level you can see we had to bring that up 13 db but now you can see that the interview sounds much better than it did before so i'm gonna toggle this on and off and let you listen here's with it off what that had the like really critical thing that came out of that is that my coach was a guy named matt kunkel and um he was just really smart guy worked for the air force you know engineer knew all kinds of stuff but back in the 80s when he was a kid he saw the rubik's cube on his own so he like bought so as you can see we brought all of the audio up but had we just raised the gain our loudest parts would have been peaking really quickly and our quietest part still wouldn't have been loud enough so our compressor has balanced everything out and kind of brought it all up at once so as you can see setting up a compressor is honestly pretty easy and they even have presets that you can mess with personally i don't like to use these because presets don't always match the voice that you have going on so that's why i think it's best to set your threshold based on the average loudness that you're seeing ratio at four to one and then adjust your output gain as needed so now we're going to move over to one more clip and try another one all right so we're on our next clip and we've got the single band compressor here and now we're gonna play back the audio and figure out where our average loudness is so we can set our threshold their own but i did get to see those three boys be born and it was very special and they were all born before i had kids so i just i became a mom at 26 and an at 19. so i got to spend a good chunk of time loving on my nieces and so to me this is averaging somewhere between negative 18 and negative 15. so i'm going to go with negative 17 for now set the ratio to 4 to 1. all right so now that we've got those set we're going to listen to our interview back and raise the output gain while we listen and make sure that everything goes up to a healthy level their own but i did get to see those three boys be born and it was very special and they were all born before i had kids so i just i became a mom at 26 in an at 19. so i got to spend a good chunk of time loving on my nieces and nephews and so right there's a pretty healthy level and now we'll play it back so you can hear the before and after their own but i did get to see those three boys be born and it was very special and they were all born before i had kids so i just i became a mom at 26 and at 19. so i got to spend a good chunk of time loving on my nieces and nephews and being the fun aunt before i ever had kids of my own to keep me busy so those were special years so as you can see we have leveled out our audio perfectly and things sound much better than they did before so now just really quickly i'm going to show you what happens if you set the threshold too low if i was to set the threshold to say negative 35 and if i turn this off really quickly you can see that all of our audio is well over negative 35. it's going way over that so if i turn this on it's not going to sound very good those three boys be born and it was very special and they were all born before i had kids so i just i so what's happening here is since the compressor is always being turned on it's squishing all the audio all of the time which kind of makes the voice lose all of its dynamic range and it just starts to sound really compressed and kind of like it's inside of a can so i would never recommend setting your threshold to the point where the compressor's always on you only want it to kick in so that it takes down those really loud parts and for us that was right at about negative 17. so there you guys go that's really all there is to a compressor you just need to remember to set the threshold to your average loudness set the ratio to about four to one you can always play with it and see what sounds better for you but four to one is what works for me and then listen back to your interview and raise the output gain until things are hitting a pretty healthy level if you guys have any other questions feel free to let me know

Channel: Chris Olson

Views: 458

Keywords: Chris Olson Films, Premiere Pro Guru, Premiere Pro, Adobe, Creative Cloud, editing, video editor

Id: Hmyy1I1qhE4

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021