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Lesson Info

Working with Audio: Overview

Clapping. Sound. That's what were going to be working with today. We're going to be working with sound in this lesson. And sound is one of those things that can be actually, very confusing in Premiere. And I apologize for that. The reason it can be confusing is because it's very powerful. Hopefully, we'll kind of simplify things. Just, have you learn the things that you need to. And realize that there's a lot of complex things that you can literally mix an entire theatrical film. Five.One Surround. 24 channel mixes. Most of us do not need that. We use a handful of channels, we put out to stereo. We want to keep it simple. This is some of the skills that we're gonna be working with. We're gonna understand working with audio levels and meters. Key framing audio, which is being able to change the volume or the loudness and softness of audio over time. Specifically, maybe somebody speaking too loudly and you need to bring down their audio levels. Or visa versa. If you need to record a scra...

tch track directly in to your computer, just to use as a reference. You don't have to go out and get your camera, recording with the camera and ingest it. So, it's a nice little feature there. If things go out of sync, we talked in a previous lesson about, sometimes you might move your video and your audio separately and suddenly, now people sound like they're in a poorly dubbed film. We'll show you how to fix that. Modifying audio channels, the big things is sometimes you'll record things, it'll be stereo, sometimes it'll be mono. Sometimes, you think its ... not you think, but the computer thinks it's stereo because you have two mics going in to the camera. And really what you have is you have one person on the left side and another person on the right side. You want to be able to control that, so, you may need to modify your audio channels. Or maybe you have a situation where you have no audio on a channel. And you just want to get rid of it. We'll look at merging video and separately recorded audio. One example, which we'll be using in this interview footage, is we had a separate clean mic that just recorded the audio. In some cases, just had the camera and the camera mic that's built into the DSLR. It's kind of echoey and so, what I want to do is, I want to merge those. So, I don't have to sit there and go, ugh, now I have to go back and clean the audio up and all that. So, we'll look at doing that. Adding some music, basically, bringing music and then fading it up and bringing it under when people are talking. Same with sound effects, we'll do a little bit with that. Then, a little bit of how you can mix, either, add a clip level or actually add a track level for the volume of an entire track of audio. So, with that, let's get started and look and listen to our audio. So, the first thing we want to do is we wanna just look at audio levels. If I go ahead and I hit play on here. You'll notice on the far right side I have these meters. You'll notice on the far right side I have these meters. That tells me the volume or how loud something is. So, as I play it in this case, this is a clip that was recorded that was stereo, or what had thought was stereo and Mike's mic and my mic are in separate channels. which is one of the challenges. If I look at some of these other clips. As a matter of fact, here they're even. I wanna bring in the original interview clip, so I'm gonna step into this. I'm gonna open up each one. I'm gonna open up the audio side. So, here we have equal audio on both channels. So, that looks like a two channel, mono mix. If I open up, the over the shoulder shot, that should also be a two camera mono mix. But, if we look at the individual ones, Mike's close up, you see that there is only one set of wave forms, right? So that's mono, and if I hit play the levels still go up. But, you'll notice when I switch between them, one had two bars and one, it's a single bar. These are the different variations of what you may come across with the media that you're given. As a matter of fact, if we go ahead and we look at a piece of music, music is almost always gonna be in stereo. The thing about working with sound is it never wants to shut up. There we go. Get our music. These are just audio only files, so if I double click to load them in, I think what we're gonna actually use, is we're gonna use this, cut here. (presentation music) That's obviously stereo. So, Premier is smart enough that when you bring a clip in from your source monitor or from the bins, in to your sequence, whether it's stereo or mono, it puts it on a single track. Don't think that, you know, if you come from another non-linear program, some people have used other programs, each track was left or right channel, okay? Some of the legacy programs that you might have used would have like, left and then this would be on right. What the folks at Adobe did was they said, you know something, I don't care whether it's mono or stereo. It just goes into audio track and then you can work with it as you please. If it's music, it's still stereo. And it comes out stereo. If it's mono, they just put it out on both channels, so, it's coming out of the center. That's really the big thing you just need to get your head wrapped around, are the stereo and mono situations. When you ultimately export and finish, if you wanna take it to the next level where your panning things to the left and right, that actually comes at the final finishing step, where you're really tweaking. If you're creating, kind of, a sound stage. Where you have stuff from the left channel to the right channel. I recommend for most purposes, put out, what I define as dual-mono or mono. Which means everything is coming out of both speakers the same. Because a lot of times people will be listening to things through one ear phone, so, if you have stuff coming out of here, they may not hear it. Or, they may not have their speakers on their computer set up right. So, my recommend is export everything mono which actually solves a lot of problems. So, let's look at our interface. This is the standard editing interface. We can modify this. If I wanted to see a window bigger or smaller, I can hover my mouse between any two of these panes and stretch them. So if I really wanted to see my audio bigger, I can do that. I can go ahead and say, you know what, I want the audio to be on it's own section, so I can grab it and I can move it to another section or just move it all the way to the right here. That's really big. But, now I see a lot more detail into my volume levels. The way it works is, you have a level here called zero DV. That is the loudest you ever want anything. You really never want anything that loud. Generally, this is your volume levels, you want things to hover at about minus 12. That should be average for voice. It's kind of an industry standard. Occasionaly, you can peak up above it, but as soon as you go above zero, because it's digital, all you have is noise. If you came from an analog audio backgroud, we're going back to the days of like tape. People have cassettes and what not. You could go above zero because there was something called head room on tapes. It just allowed you to have a greater signal to noise ration. Which was, the acutal sounds you wanted versus the sound of the electronics or the tape. So, you'll hear term called noise floor. Well, in digital, which is what we all have now, the noise floor is so low that you can actually bring your levels down to here. You're gonna target things visually to a certain level. But, it's not just visual, it's also, you need to use your ear. Because we perceive sounds differently depending on if they're very high or low frequency. For instance, if something's high frequency, it's gonna cut through even if it's quieter. Like a siren, you know, you hear an ambulance come. The reason it's high frequency is because you can hear that through the den of the noise. Bass on the other hand needs to be louder to be heard. So, you can't just trust looking at your volume levels of your meters, but, you're using that as a guide to make sure things aren't over modulated. Still, a good set of speakers or a good set of headphones. What I highly recommend is, when you finally listen to your sound, is to listen in an environment that your viewer is gonna listen to it in. If you listen to it on $3000 speakers and everybody is listening to it as a podcast on their phones, it's not gonna sound the way you expect it to sound. Listen to it on your phone. Get a cheap speaker. A little blue tooth speaker and send it to that. Try to emulate the environment that you're going to have your viewer be hearing and watching your show in. We'll get to that. I do like to make a change here. This is nice if things get really loud and this was recorded properly. I'm gonna temporarily make this really loud. I'll show you how we adjust it. I want you to look at this meter here. It's peaking in to yellow. It'd be hard to make this really. That's the challenge of working with good audio. I'm gonna get something that is over-modulated. The music actually tends to come in and then, we're gonna bring in a cut of music here. If I go ahead and I play that you can see over here it gets a lot hotter. It never goes, music that you generally purchase are licensed won't ever over-modulate but it always will hit right below zero. Because they want it that when you play this music, you put the CD in, remember those things? That's pretty bad that that's considered old technology. When you put your Ipod, that's old technology. When you listen to your Iphone, kind of okay technology. They want it to be as loud as possible, okay? So, they definitely bring this in and you see it, this will peak a lot higher. I find this is very pretty, seeing these gradients. But, it doesn't tell me my warning stuff. If you notice, when I'm playing this, there are points where it gets into the red, and points where it gets into the yellow, and the green. If I go ahead and I right click, just in that audio area I can change a few things. First of all, I can add something that says Show Valleys. I usually turn this on. I'm gonna explain to that what it is in a moment. I turn off Show Color Gradient. That's that pretty gradient. The other thing, this is not an issue for you to worry about. You can even say what's the range of the quietest to the loudest? The defaults fine, you're not doing theatrical movies with huge dynamic range. So, you can leave everything the same. Once again, all I did was Show Valleys, turn that off. And I'm gonna turn on Show Static Peaks, that will help also. I want you to see how this looks a little bit different and is a lot more useful for when you're dealing with working with sound. Now I can see what's getting too hot. I can see what's marginal and this is a good target area. Also, this is turning the gradient off. The other thing you can see here, is you have static peaks, which, as it's playing, instead of me having to see, oh what was the hottest point? They actually freeze in that position. They'll reset as soon as I play this again. They should reset. This is my valleys, that's my peak. I just find this more useful for when I need to make sure that my levels are okay. That's just kind of like, oh, how do i work with these audio meters? You saw that was two channels. I'm gonna go back to the voice overs. Matter of fact, let me grab this, and I'm going to, uh, it's in my shelf, we'll be good with that. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna listen and look at my audio. I have a variety of different sources. You can see even the wave forms have a different feel to them. As I said, you can rearrange this. So, if I'm really caring about my wave forms, maybe I'm gonna shrink this up a little bit and I'm not bringing anything in. So, I want as much real estate as possible. I can reset this. This can be a new workspace. We haven't talked a lot about workspaces. But, there are some pretty defined ones. You'll see them along the top, here. You'll also get to them from this drop down window. I'm going to zoom in and show you the variety of workspaces that are available. Also, resetting and customizing them. You get to them either from that drop down, and you see the same ones here. But, there's like editing, which is what we're in. They make one that's a layout that's better when you start doing effects. There's one when you're just looking at your libraries, maybe working with titles. Specifically, the ones that I usually use are audio, color, editing, and effects. But, these go to presets. If I'm gonna go back, this is gonna change everything. If I go over here and I say, oh, I'm working with color correction, which we'll do, it's a different layout than I'm working with. I can also get to that from these little buttons here. So, I'll say, oh, I'm working with effects. Slightly different layout. I'm gonna go back to the editing one. What's interesting is, remember I modified this? So, when I go back, it remembers my layout. The important thing is I can save this layout as something custom that I may want and I can also reset it. I'm gonna go ahead, let's say I like this for my audio work. I go to Workspace and under Workspace, I say, save as a new Workspace. I'm gonna call this Habba Mix. So now, there's a new little window there Habba Mix. I can come back to all my different layouts. The interesting thing is, you notice my editing layout is still messed up, it looks like my audio layout. On any of these layouts, if I wanna go back to the default. I simply go to my Window, Workspace, and I say, reset to save layout. What that will do, is it will go back to the default that you created. So now, this is the default editing workspace. I think I just reset Effects to the default, as a matter of fact. So I'll go back here under Editing. There we go. There's my editing. But, remember I had actually saved my custom one of Habba Mix. So, I can still get to that. You can custom design any layout you want. This is, kind of, an important thing. I'm bringing this up in the audio section. Of course you can start with this at the very beginning when you're starting to create the way you want things to be arranged. I want to go a little bit deeper into this since we've opened this Pandora's Box of resetting things. How versitile this is. You saw that I could easily grab between areas and make them larger and smaller. If i wanted to, I can also relocate any of these little tabs, we saw I can move them left and right. But, if for instance, I said, you know something, I really want my media browser to be up here, along side my source window. You'll notice that when I drag it up I have two options. If I leave it in the center, the center is highlighted or I could go to one of the flaps. The difference is, if I let go of it in the center, it's going to place it inside that panel. Now, it is a tab within that panel. Now, undo, by the way, if you say, oh I didn't like that, you hit undo. Guess what? It doesn't undo. This is an important thing about undo and redo with a non-linear program. It doesn't care about your interface. Your interface is visually how you're looking at something. The only thing it wants to undo or redo are edits. You can sit there and go, oh I messed up my interface and your hitting undo hoping that you're getting back to your window layout that you want. All you're doing is erasing the work that you did, without knowing it. It's an important thing to realize. Undo and redo, not anything in the way you view things. If I wanted to change that back, I would literally have to grab it and drag it and move it back. You noticed, I dropped it in the center, if I wanted this to be it's own pane, that's when I would drop it on any of these flaps. At that point it actually creates a separate pane, exclusively to this. You can rearrange these any way you want. If you have two screens, you can set it up for two screens. Then, you simply save your workspaces. These are one of those things that I briefly mentioned on Days one and two about the creative cloud, is you can actually save this to your cloud account. So, if you go to another computer, you can download all the workspaces that you're used to, if you're on a completely different computer. That's one of the beautiful things about the workspaces.