How To Use A Noise Gate/Downward Expander

okay so just holding that position for a little too long all right what's happening how is everyone today it looks like we are live so good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world my name is Jason Levine thank you so much for joining me on the premier Pro Facebook page twitter periscope and youtube mmm today's topic we're going to cover customer requests actually something that I just got asked not about a few days ago on Twitter about leveraging a noise gate slash downward expander specifically if you're doing dialog recording podcasts Skype recordings or really just in general how to sort of get the most out of your audio and to really just improve sometimes in some cases dynamic range but also just to eliminate a lot of that background noise in between spoken passages is just a really fast and effective way to clean up dialogue easily and we have a new effect in both premiere and after effect but premiere and audition that does this for you natively so you don't even need a third-party plugin to do this you've always been able to do this with the dynamics processing effect in audition but it's way easier now so quick couple of shout outs here what's up Desiree Taryn jeet hello how are you months or ROH hey leo all right Ali Khan how are you doing Stan Arthur what's up Mansoor great to see everybody let's see if we've got some in YouTube as well Pierre's Julianne how are you Gilbert Tang David Lewis Oh juice for this one nice Hakeem Leonardo fava reto great to see you all all right so and for those of you joining on periscope as well thank you trying to watch all three chats really hitting my the edge of my multi multitasking capabilities here so David Lewis can you use the expander to eliminate mouse clicks yes in fact you can and I've got a little example recorded right here we're also gonna do it live to show you just that David know if it was you who asked me that on Twitter but yes that is that is partially why I'm showing this what is up and pruitt how are you doing my friend okay cool well let's go ahead and get started here this is again something that is super useful no matter what kind of stuff you're doing if you're recording dialog you want to clean it up you want to get rid of background sounds whether recording live over a podcast or Skype and you're dealing with not just background noise but maybe things like mouse clicks or taps or using a you know some kind of control surface and you want to sort of eliminate all of those background noises and really focus on just the dialog it's an automatic process and it's just a matter of really understanding two main settings basically threshold and attack and then the rest I'll show you they're really super easy as well we're going to use the dynamics effect not the dynamics processing effect so let's go ahead and switch over to my screen alright and we'll start first I'm going to show you this in a pre-recorded context and then I'll show you how you can implement this live which again might follow something that you might use if you're doing sort of live recording of podcasts or you know recordings where you're a Skype audio is involved or any kind of VoIP type audio this process can be very very useful and I use it all the time of course What's Up boy tricky cigar art Fitzsimmons please someone at Adobe post NAB schedule art I don't know if we have our boot you're talking about the boot schedule I don't know if it's been finalized yet as soon as we've got something to share I'll try and post it up on Twitter as well if I can bake like a pro what's up ok so I'm going to put headphones on so that I can hear what I'm doing and this is just a little voiceover that I recorded just a few minutes before we started now just a quick caveat here so I recorded it just with all of this stuff going I've got a hard drive mounted on the edge of the desk here which I don't normally have running when I'm doing voiceover so there's some other inherent noises in here that I wouldn't necessarily want I'm just pointing this out because someone over the stream might go well hey I still hear you know hum when you're talking but when you're not talking so this is a separate process of getting rid of things like this low frequency hum here and actually this is not a 60 or 50 cycle hum you can see this is centered right around 100 Hertz again with the harmonic being a little over 200 as well that is the sound of my 12 terabyte raid firing away separate stream denoising all of that we're not worried about that this is more about silencing in between spoken words okay and if it's driving everybody crazy I can actually get rid of that too but let's just start with this kind of as it is so let's start by taking a quick listen to this native sort of raw and hear what it sounds like and I on purpose left space in between speaking here so that you can kind of hear what we're trying to get rid of take a quick listen alright so this is just a brief example of how we can use a noise gate or downward expander to get rid of all background noise now in the environment I'm in I've got some hard drives and some I'm gonna skip ahead here because I think I've got some mouse clicks right about here at the end of this one as well as the whole door release time okay now I'm just gonna amplify this just for a quick second it's gonna amplify all that hum as well you can see there's a lot of it but you'll hear that of my mouse cuz I did a little punch in right here on purpose so I could capture some mouse clicks alright and that's just the just that right I don't know if you could take out my little mouse here okay those little clicks those little things sometimes are the most annoying and if you've ever done any dialogue editing you know that's the stuff where if you're not using a noise gate or a downward expander probably spending a lot of time manually going in there and either drawing keyframed envelopes right so volume envelopes to like get out the little key clicks and things or maybe it's glottal sounds right maybe you're doing some voiceover work or you're doing podcasting and in between you speaking you've got some a little ASMR lip smacking going on very common you know if you don't know about noise gating or how to set it properly you're gonna spend manual time doing that and the truth is you can really knock all of this out with a single effect inside of audition natively alright David it was you oh awesome okay thank you Chris thank you grungy good to see you Vika nice to see you as well Jakob from Turkey all right you know how much I love saying hello all right Annelle roberts todd sweet this is perfect yes indeed okay Amy how are you it's my pleasure all right so let's kick into it here's how you got to make this work so we're gonna go up to the effects controls now by the way I always point this out just because audition has many ways to do things we can also add the effect to the effects rack people ask me this all the time you always get more info than you need on these on these live streams if we simply apply the effect here by going to the effects menu and come up to dynamics this will destructively apply this immediately after we click the apply button okay if I wanted to say stack a bunch of effects or kind of audition what might happen by using different effects and processes then I could apply them here in the effects rack and then once I add them to the effects rack they'll run in real time and then I can apply them with this apply button which you can't see right here there it is hold on let's just above my head right there there it is you can apply them after the fact so we could do it like this as well and again it just kind of runs in real time there's no yes do it this way or the other way whatever however you like doing it I'm only going to use this one effect I'm not trying to process the rest of the vocal at this point so I'm not gonna stack things so I don't need to keep it in the effects rack it just depends on how you want to do it alright just pointing out that you've got as always multiple ways to do the same thing okay so we're going to come into effect amplitude dynamics okay this was a reimagined dynamics effect we added to premiere and then added into audition I think about a year ago or so and in here we have the auto gate all right now gating and downward expansion are effectively the same thing effectively what you're really trying to do is not just simply it's it's the opposite of compression basically right so you're you're squashing down quiet sounds that fall below a particular threshold right and in the case of downward expansion really the fundamental difference between that and noise gating noise gating is basically it's sort of like an honor off kind of thing where if you're using a true noise gate the gate is open sound passes through and then when sound stops and falls below that threshold all sound is eliminated to to silence theoretically with a downward expander because it's also dealing with kind of maximizing your dynamic range theoretically you have then arrange control that allows you to leave some of that background in there or just soften those quieter sounds for all intents and purposes they're the same same thing and in fact many times they're really confused it's just kind of the the degree of of silencing that kind of determines downward expander versus a noise gate again theoretically really the same thing and you'll notice that in some third-party plugins you'll have a range control under gating that's really what that's for so like for instance if you are gating drums right you have a drum set and you have you all your Tom's it's really common to gate or downward expand the Tom's when they're not in use that you don't just have all the bleed of all the other microphones happening right but you don't want to necessarily silence it completely maybe if you're going for a slightly more ambient sound so you can set that range really really low so that just a little bit of the background kind of percolates through and only when you hit that attack does it open up that gate and you really hear the full sound of the TomTom again that's what the range control is for now with this simple auto gate and dynamics we don't have that we've got four basic controls here threshold attack release and hold and as I told you the first two that you need to be concerned with or the threshold and attack the threshold is going to be the point at which the expansion downward expansion or noise gate will kick in when the signal falls below that threshold it's going to kick that gate in meaning that it's going to close meaning that it's going to start silencing and the attack is how quickly it reacts to opening that gate all right so when you're talking about voice for things like podcasts you typically want a pretty fast attack because otherwise you can often clip the very beginnings the very the first transience of your speech you know like hey there how are you might sound like hey there how are you right and if it's too aggressive in terms of your release how quickly that gate closes again you can really start to clip your speech so it's a it's a combination of playing with these things carefully that sounds daunting that sounds intimidating it really isn't I promise you it's super easy to set so the first thing is before you do anything we're gonna set our attack time now again this goes all the way down to 0.1 millisecond and I think up to 10 milliseconds all right for most dialog I'm gonna say start this at around 1 millisecond now you might say why not set it at the fastest well you can again sometimes it might be a little too reactive it kind of depends on the pacing of the speech how they're on mic 1 to 3 milliseconds is usually a pretty safe bet okay even when you're setting regular compression for a voiceover or podcast regardless of gating three to nine milliseconds is typically where you want to be for the average voiceover in terms of an attack setting all right and then we have our threshold here now again the threshold is going to determine when that signal falls below the threshold how that gate then reacts okay so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna start playing this back from the beginning all right and you're gonna notice that we're gonna see red here what I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust this threshold until sound starts passing through and then you'll hear what it's doing as I stop talking okay doctor let me go to some of the shorter sections right around here all right let's take a quick listen when the environment I'm in I've got some hard drives and some spinning fans very close to where my mic is and that noise just persists carefully setting the threshold as well as the hold or release time will allow us to have a very the mezzo al so you notice when the threshold was kind of right at edge there even that threshold it was sort of clipping off my speech because signal was falling below -16 and it sees that it's like up close the gate so it was cutting off the ends of my words that's wonderful carefully setting the threshold as well I'm allow us to have a very smooth right so if you hear that happening you set your threshold incorrectly you got to back it off even more so probably somewhere around minus 27 for this carefully setting the threshold as well as the hold or release time is where we want to be now hold on I know you might say oh but I hear those clicks just wait just wait a second all right so the key is with a threshold of around minus 27 attack of 1 we're not getting any weird clipping the audio sounds pretty natural carefully setting the threshold as well as the hold or release time okay now we're release and hold come into play is how long you want that gate I talked about a gate think of it it like a window alright you open the window you stick your head through you say what you want pull your head back close the window alright release and hold so the hold is before it shuts the window give it a little extra time okay it's almost like a temporal interpolation if you've worked with key framing and After Effects and easing think of this as the ease out right or I guess it would theoretically be easing in so you you you you you're talking your signal falls below the threshold rather than just clamping it down that's the release how quickly it slams the window shut we're gonna give it a little time just to breathe this is good particularly if you want to sound really natural if you have no hold and a short release time again it might clip things off a little too subtly so or a little too aggressively rather so let's do like no hold and I'm gonna adjust this release time and take a listen to what this is doing all right set a super fast release here carefully setting the threshold as well as the hold or release time will allow us to have a very smooth sounding so again it's kind of mimicking what we heard when the threshold was set incorrectly where it's it's trying to close every time the dynamics of my speaking change and because it's such a fast release time we're not giving enough time for some of those other words which can sometimes trail off a little bit this is something that I teach and I'm doing a speech speaker training class at Adobe you know people tend to to kind of trail off at the ends of it you don't necessarily hear the very end ISM because we get loud at first and then we kind of cuenta so particularly for setting a gate or a downward expander it's really important that you set that release time accordingly having said that hold is also your friend okay tomahawk could you export straight to libsyn for podcasting you mean in terms of file format yes and you can see if you go into the file export menu you've got tons of you know various codec options so yeah if you're losing one of those like library codecs why not okay so let's now take that same thing and let's do a slightly longer release and then we're going to increase the hold as well carefully setting the threshold carefully setting the threshold now that isn't really too bad you're still kind of hearing the end of my threshold but if I just add a little bit of hold in there let's say around 40 milliseconds carefully setting the threshold as well as the hold or release time will allow us to have a very smooth sounding gate and you could actually see it on the level meter how that level meter holds for a moment 40 milliseconds approximately and then releases over in this case a quarter of a second all right what is the optimal setting for release time there isn't one all right it really depends on the pacing of the speech all right now just for giggles all right let me in the meantime here I think this this may hold my settings if not it's fine we'll just reset it again I'm going to come in here just to real quickly get rid of that offensive noise here so again if I wanted to get rid of this hum the easiest way really for me and I think this is the best sounding way capture noise print of this I'm just gonna do this real quickly so that you can hear just how clean this will sound once the gate is implemented select the entire file reduce this by 40 decibels no spectral decay again I'm just doing this because I'm trying to get rid of that noise we can do like a hundred percent on this at 100 Hertz you can see that's entirely gone and then we have these additional harmonics squeeze that down I would probably do these individually if I was trying to be very careful let's capture a noise print of that go in here noise reduction alright we'll do about it's already very very quiet let's do about 65% we can reduce it by 20 decibels maybe like a 2% spectral decay select everything apply okay and that's not going to affect the voice at all so now we've gotten rid of just that hum and stuff I did that primarily and you can see it actually it changed over time it actually got louder over time it looks like it dropped out there for a second this is just that this is the hard drive spinning oh and some of it even came back here at another frequency which is interesting alright yeah I'm crazy we can also just hit delete to get rid of that alright but basically now alright so that's gone right we're not hearing that I so I just did that just to make this even cleaner for you so now if we go back up to our dynamics our settings are still here let's take a listen so this is just a brief example of how we can use a noise gate or downward expander to get rid of all background noise right now let's come over here to where those clicks are as well as the hold or release time I see lift release time the release time will allow us to have a very as well as the hold or release time will allow us to have a very smooth sounding gate carefully setting the threshold all right so with the threshold at around say minus 29 as well as the hold or release time now it's the least time I see lurked the release time barely hearing those clicks if I bring it up even more as well as the hold or release time okay you can hear we're starting to introduce a little bit more of those so you can use a combination of shortening the release and adjusting the threshold to get rid of those clicks now how are you gonna know where they are well this is where if you're doing this or monitoring this live it's a lot easier than this was sort of punched in after the fact so I've got a multitrack setup here same situation I've got my mic coming in now this is gonna be a little tricky because I'm gonna change the way that this is monitored through the stream so let me go ahead I'm going to turn off my mic here bear with me for a second okay so now you should be hearing me monitored through the software but at present I don't have the gate on you can see if you look up here the dynamics have been turned off okay and this is again something that you can use if you're doing live monitoring for recording podcasts you can actually monitor with the gate enabled to ensure that you don't get any of those click ease or even from here which are so subtle right now we're gonna have to set this threshold because the the level is much lower going directly into the multitrack here we're gonna have to play around with that threshold to get this to sound good but what we're trying to do is find that sweet spot to eliminate the mouse clicks so let's take a listen I'm gonna keep talking and start adjusting parameters we're not recording anything I'm just monitoring live so you can hear it take a listen bop bop bop bop bop-bop-bop sound sound okay so you can see right now at -38 the kind like this is okay I think it's alright of course you're hearing all of that background noise behind me so this is where you might actually want a slightly shorter release that there's less of that it doesn't sound quite so bumpy but then again maybe that's better you know if you've got a music bed or something going underneath this is not how I would record a podcast right there's just a lot of ambient noise that's kind of the key to of using something like this but what we're looking for here is where do I stop hearing mouse clicks okay so with a threshold at its lowest settings right the signal has to get really quiet right - 60 before it closes the gate you're hearing the mouse clicks so we're going to keep moving this up by 10 and already at minus 50 okay I'm closer to the mic but when it's down on the mousepad no mouse clicks all right so again nothing too aggressive all right wide open hearing the mouse clicks let's go up by about 10 or so not doing it alright so you can eliminate those entirely so this is also a good way to audition exactly where that should be alright like where that threshold setting should be so in the case of something like this let's go ahead and actually record that I'm gonna I'm gonna click these ok so let's go ahead and kick this into record hopefully this doesn't do anything weird alright there we go okay now remember this is not printing the effect to the track this is just running in real time but if I were to click you shouldn't this you're you may see them in the waveform you're not going to hear them because we've got this live noise gate on alright I was really beating it there bang-bang okay so let's go ahead and stop all right turn our monitoring back on and now again if we let's go ahead we can close this okay here it is with nothing this is just running in real-time but if I were to click all right and just to show you again on the native recording you can even see you can see the clicks all right you can see all the clicks there let's go back to the multitrack where we have this dynamics implemented right there we go okay now remember this is not printing the effect to the track this is just running in real-time but if I were to click you shouldn't this your you may see them in the waveform you're not gonna hear them because we've got this live noise gate on okay alright I was really beating it there okay so that's it the magic of eliminating clicks glottal sounds all of that threshold that's the point at which it which you can begin to again eliminate those quieter sounds or really soften those quieter sounds I just want to point this out one of the other things that you might see if you're using third-party plugins let's see if we go into something like where do we have them what am I looking for oh yeah SSL so I think oh no not this one not that one so it may be here trying to remember Oh SSL it's the EQ or G channel either one of those okay does this yes this has a range control so again in the case of just using something like a third party so this is mimicking a g series SSL console that has built in compression gating in the channel strip you can see that this has a range control so again the idea with this if we were to use this one here is that this is allowing you to not have to go completely to silence okay when it gates that sound right so you're actually setting what that sort of noise floor is going to be so if we go ahead and turn this let's take a listen here this has already got some other settings I don't want any compression on this at all and what the dynamics but let's bypass EQ I'm try there's already stuff kind of on here but let's take a listen to this and see if all right there we go okay now remember this is not printing the effect to the track this is just running in real-time but if I were to click you shouldn't this your you may see them I'll see that we actually need a little more signal here for this particular one because the the amplitude is so low all right there we go okay now remember this is not printing the effect to the track this is just running in real-time but if I were to click you shouldn't this your you may see time but if I were to click well that's weird this is doing something really weird running in real-time but if I were to click this isn't working this isn't doing that it's supposed to do interesting is this still working it's running in real-time but if I were to click that's working huh I wonder if there is something going on with a u uh I don't have time to troubleshoot that down it doesn't matter that's a third party effect in any case back to dynamics again removing those auto click E's how do we do that threshold when you're working with voiceover how fast you want the attack fast if it's too fast as well by the way sometimes you can get digital artifacts you might actually get a little digital something like that if the attack time is too quick release time again after that window closes how long it takes in this case approximately a quarter of a second and then the whole time is before the window closes it lingers in this case for about a tenth of a second and then the window shuts then the gate closes alright so that is effectively using dynamics or downward expansion to noise gate or clean up your audio for podcasting Skype recordings anything like that now the very last thing I'll just show you here before we just bounce into some questions you can also use the traditional dynamics processor to do this as well so you could set a control point say it like minus 25 and you could draw a curve something like this okay something like this where oh no this is like super loud where we've got this the threshold setting at around minus 25 which is about where we were with the other one right around minus 27 or so you've also got independent attack and release you've got your level detector and your gain processor here I haven't really played around with this recently and let's take a quick listen to this yeah see this is barely even doing anything because of course our level is way off here right that the audio is so quiet here that it's really gating everything at this point so we'd want to we'd want to modify these a bit more I tell you to be careful with this one because this one is very very very aggressive all right I don't really love the sound of this for downward expansion as much you've got some presets in here by the way for noise gating and maybe this is something like this might work a little better yeah we really need to increase the amplitude on this it's just super quiet this one is just it's a little aggressive and mmm I don't know I don't think it sounds as nice or as musical to my ear versus the limiter effect or rather the dynamics effect this is just it's just easier to set you've got your reduction metering here threshold an attack release and hold real simple you don't ever have to go to that second tab I'm not a fan of that graph I never have been I still don't exactly idea it just mmm eh not for me so that's it alright friends that is all the time we have talked about a wrap-up that's it way to go okay well I hope you've enjoyed the stream you'll of course be able to watch the replay on Facebook periscope Twitter and YouTube just bouncing over for some questions here real quickly see if there are any all right okay Oh Amy oh that's cool you just have that happen or the mic rub - guess shirt yet very common Bruce from Madison how are you aunt car Diego Duke here Stephanie always editing who in snowy Cleveland hey it was snowing in Phoenix last week how nuts is that Carmen oh I know I so many have asked for Spanish subtitles you know for my own channel I've been thinking maybe for future for future streams I'll I'll actually pay to do those I know the English ones are pretty good but I know multi language would be preferred so I appreciate your patience there Carmen hey Jared yep what's up super cool all right Joyce - how do I conduct these lessons so that you can see your monitor so clearly ah yes so it's it's through a separate streaming machine so this is all being captured into an application called Wirecast you know the cameras and everything else it's just it's just like there's also a free broadcast software OBS which we're going to do your own kind of live streaming to YouTube or anywhere it's a great solution for that um either one of them work but it's being fed on two different machines Abdul cool obba Romell thank you oh you're very welcome all right ant you got a call during the live stream thankful for reruns indeed okay RC on from Pakistan how are you hmm all right David you use rogue amoebas hijack to stream can you use dynamics and that I don't I'm not familiar with hijack David so you know it's interesting is a Wirecast most streaming software's have audio filters they usually have some kind of gate end or downward expander so yeah theoretically you could tomahawk you're very welcome I don't know that one so I'm not sure granted of course one of our former twitch streamers a friend of mine sign apps if you know sign apps amazing cinema 4d motion artist 3d kappa i mean he's he's incredible and after effects in cinema 4d and premiere and audition he did a whole tutorial on doing live streaming where you actually are monitoring the whole thing through audition so that you can use auditions effects instead of the streaming software's effects which in many cases I would recommend because frankly they they're better you know not to say that the Wirecast ones aren't good they're okay you know are the dedicated audio app they're just better atomic luck you just bought the blue Yeti caster so here we go alright we'll go good luck that is a popular one CESO from Slovenia alright alright and that looks like it alright well hey awesome thank you so much I may reappear today on the stream again talking a little bit more about audio tomorrow it's gonna be all about After Effects so thanks again for watching have a great rest of your day wherever you are in the world and we will see you again next time take care thank you Michael thank you everyone for watching alright everybody bye bye

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 2,909

Keywords: compression, limiting, expansion, expander, downward expander, gate, noise gate, gating, voice over, podcast, skype

Id: Cw4Vi5ED_bU

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019