Make an impact with your audio mix.
Ask any professional videographer and they’ll tell you that great audio is at least 51% of your content. Imagine a presentation to camera without the vocals, or a peaceful shot of a natural landscape filled with the sounds of industrial machinery. Most often, you won’t want your audio to clash with your visuals.
This means avoiding distracting background noise, maintaining clear vocals, and setting the right balance between the music and your main subject.
How to fix bad audio
Unless you’re in a dedicated studio, it’s rare to record sound in a perfectly quiet environment. Often, you’ll also capture environmental sounds like noise from air conditioning, distant engines, or leaves rustling in trees. Because of the way microphones capture sound, mechanical noises often seem louder than usual.
But a bad audio recording doesn’t mean all is lost. The Adobe Premiere Pro Essential Sound panel includes powerful automated audio clean-up tools that can remove both unwanted background noise and reverb. Reverb is the short echo you hear when recording in a location with lots of hard surfaces, like tiled walls.
Getting creative with audio
Once you clean up your audio, it’s time to get creative.
First, make sure music plays at the right level in the background to hear your vocals clearly. Perhaps you’ll have brief audio effects, too — make sure these have the right level relative to the rest of your audio mix.
In the Essential Sound panel, you’ll find the Automatic Loudness option, which sets the level for audio clips. With one click, you can be confident that your vocals all have the same volume.
If your project is a presentation to camera with background music, you can use automatic audio ducking to reduce the volume of your music whenever there are vocals.
Add impact to your mix with audio effects — there are many to try out. These range from straightforward effects, designed to improve the sound of vocals, to creative ones like echo and chorus.
Audio in Premiere Pro
When you’re ready to tune up your audio, start with the Essential Sound panel. You’ll discover fast cleanup and mixing tools with simplified controls and intelligent automatic options.
