How does the Essential Sound Panel Presets work in Premiere Pro

All right, Sound time. This video we're going to cover the Essential Sound panel, just introduce it for the people, that haven't done my Premiere Pro Essentials course, and haven't really used the Sound Panel before. For the people that have, we are going to explore what we're actually doing, when we're playing with the Essential Sound panel. It's really useful to know that this is a front end, on a lot of the more hard core effects that are here in my Audio Effects library. 

So basically, this is connected to this, I'm going to show you how, plus we'll do some really basic editing here, get this dialogue, music, and ambient sounds, all kind of balance, with a couple of little shortcuts, wait to the end. I'll also show you, what the hang, background walla walla is, a little Easter egg for the end. All right, let's jump in. 

First things first, let's make a new project, and let's bring in some footage. So it is in your 'Exercise Files', there's one called 'Sound', just bring in everything from here. What we'll also do is bring in some more footage, from, in previous one, let's look at Donut Dynamite, and bring in these two, the Sync A and B, and let's start by making a sequence from A. Let's switch our audio, our workspace, sorry, to audio, on the top here. If you can't see that, 'Window', 'Workspace', and 'Set Audio', just rearranges everything, we'll cover these in a little bit. 

The thing we want mostly, even if you don't want to change your workspace is, I want you to be able to pull up Essential Sound. So we did a little bit of Essential Sound, in the Premiere Pro Essentials course, we're going to dive in deeper today. So first up we've got our dialogue, and the cool thing about Essential Sound panel, is actually, there is way too many ways to control sound, I'm surprised there's so many. What they've done is they've actually grouped them, the one, you know, the things that are useful for, controlling and adjusting sound, are all grouped into dialogue. For dialogue, the ones that are useful for adjusting music are grouped in here. 

So the first thing you need to do is assign, these different tags to it, so that Premiere Pro can say, "Hey, these are the ones you should be looking at, not these other ones." Let's bring in a couple of other bits, so let's go to our 'Project' panel, let's make mine a bit bigger. What we'll bring, we've got some dialogue, let's bring in some, music in the background. We'll put that underneath, and let's grab some cafe noise, and we'll put it there as well, for no reason, I don't know, music needs to be at the bottom. 

So we've got three bits of audio, we'll ignore the video for the moment. Let's make it bigger as well, remember our shortcut - you might not remember - for audio, it's 'Option +', so we'll make this a little bit bigger, grab this middle bit. So now we can see our audio, so what we need to do is assign the different parts, here in our Essential Sound. So this here is my Dialogue, so your dialogue, and it's going to give you stuff that can control dialogue, this one here is my Cafe Noise. 

So this is my ambient one, so it's only-- you can see, it's changed, gives me things that reflect, useful controls for ambient sound, and for this last one, music, there's another one there, Sound Effects, as well, there's Interview, doesn't really need sound effects, but you get the idea. Let's look at the automatic features to get started. So the 'Dialog' selected, let's go to 'Loudness', and go 'Automatch'. It's going to, watch, you see, it lifts it up a little bit, to try and match, it's going to try and balance our decibel levels, for this particular, you know, for a dialogue, it's going to try and get it to a nice healthy, probably somewhere between the kind of somewhere around the -12, maybe just above. 

This ambient stuff here, let's see what it does for this, loudness, for ambience, it's going to try and match it, and it's lifted it up. Let's look at 'Music', let's go to 'Loudness', what does music sound like, lowered it down, because music-- and the background stuff, so it doesn't get very right, dialogue, nails it. These other ones, let's have a play through, "I'm Madame Donut, and I own Donut Dynamite," it's not bad, but let's look at this ambient music, it's just, I've made this cafe music, I'm going to mute it, sorry, mute it, we're going to learn these buttons, Solo means only this track is going to play, all the rest of them are muted, let's have a look. 

So I've got some background cafe music to kind of make it feel like this cafe is full, and it's not, feels a bit echoey. So I wanted to make it feel like a busy kind of cafe going on. So what we're going to do is play it, a cool little trick when you are working with audio, is you can lower and-- lower the volume, and raise it, by using a couple of shortcuts. So down your keyboard, you want the square brackets, it should be next to your P key, those two, so watch this. I'm going to hit 'spacebar' on my keyboard, and use those to go up and down, to try and listen to the ambient music or ambient track, to try and get it in the right spot, 'spacebar', "I'm Madame Donut," you've got to have it selected first, just so you know, "Donut Dynamite, we work, we live and work here on Maui, we opened ours…" 

What I might do is mute the music track, as cool as it is, I want to get this balanced out first, "and I own Donut Dynamite with my husband, we work, well, we live and work here on Maui." "We opened our store about seven months ago in the town of Waiduku," there you go. I feel like it's not interrupting the dialogue, but it is, because you need to play audio, obviously, you can't see it. So that's a handy trick, is just have it selected, play it through and use those square brackets up and down. 

The next thing we're going to talk about, is all of the things over here, let's solo the dialogue, "Madame Donut, and I own…" So with it selected, let's say-- like my problem when I was learning is, like there are effects, so the Effects panel., audio effects, and there's just so many, like which one of these, is going to help me, like basically, up until the Essential Sound helped me learn them, I was just, I'd go into this one, 'Compression', and go to 'Dynamics Processing', and that was it. It's a great way of like tidying up kind of rough dialogue, we'll look at that in a little bit, but this panel over here, let's close that down, let's not go via the effects, and try and add them individually, because they go on, and then you've got to start adjusting them, whereas now we can start with this one, and say, 'Preset', let's have a look at--

You can see, all these are turned off, I can start working through them, and we'll have a look at them individually, but I want to show you something, I want to say, 'Presets', let's say, it's 'Balanced Female Voice', let's go 'Clean up Noisy Dialogue'. I played around with this, this is the best preset, it's turned on a bunch of these and adjusted them, can you see, if I bin it, go to 'Default', and say, actually, with it selected, I'm going to go clean up, keep an eye on it, it's not there. You know why it's not there? Because I hit Delete, you saw me do it a second ago, you saw me go like this, and then hit Delete, and then went, you're like, "Delete it," and I'm like, "Yeah, get rid of it," thinking it was going to delete the-- just take it off. 

Weirdly, I've never done that before, and that shouldn't be there, because look, it's gone forever. It doesn't matter how you restart Premiere Pro, so, hey, I Googled it, figured out how to do it, and I, hey, let's leave it in the course, because it can happen to the best of us. So you need to close down Premiere Pro, save the project you're working on, you need to go to your Documents, go to your 'Documents', find 'Adobe' folder, 'Premiere Pro', the version number that you're working on, it'll have your name in there somewhere, or the name of your computer. Find the 'Settings' folder, grab this, drag it to 'Desktop', reopen 'Premiere Pro', and it kind of makes it again, watch. It'll kind of flash up there, there you go, now back to normal. 

All right, let's continue on and pretend that I didn't do that, see you in a sec. So we're back, we've got our dialogue selected, I'm going to try and find my flow again, Essential Sound, and we've picked a preset of, our 'Clean Up Noisy Dialogue', let's actually change it to, like 'Balanced Female Voice'. What is that doing? It's turning a lot of ticks off, on here, but what we can do is, we can dig in, because if you want to stay-- start playing around with the equalizer, you're like, "What is going on here?" You've got-- you can pick a drop down, and there's an amount, but if you want to get into more detail, you can go to your 'Effects Controls', and you can see, that effect, that effect, that effect and that effect, or from the Audio Effects panel has been applied in certain ways. 

So some amazing Sound Engineer has been commissioned to make all these presets, watch this, if I change, watch the effects over here, and I pick a different preset. So let's go back to, From ‘Outside Of Building', you see, different effects are applied, and you can start to get a sense of, like what is consistent, what is good for removing, hiss and noise, by just kind of picking these, deciding what Adobe think is a good preset, and then just getting an idea of what's going on over here, and allows you to go into a bit more detail. 

So let's go to, say something like, what does Balanced Female Voice look like. So Dynamics Processing, I use a lot, but like, Graphic Equalizer, like, yeah, I know what it does, but let's have a look, what they've decided really helps a female voice be balanced. Let's click on 'Edit', you can see in here, that's what they've decided, is a nice subtle female voice boost, but let's have a look at the presets, can you see, the equalizer is actually tied to this. This is the simple version that we're going to play around with, but know, all this kind of more hardcore stuff's going on in the background, watch this. 

If I pick something else, like, Radio, do you see, that's what's getting changed, all this. Now for me, I kind of know what decibels are, and the different frequencies and Hertz, but man, I get a little bit scared in this, but being able to play an Essential Sound, gives me a lot more confidence, and, you know, tinkering, and getting a bit more deeper into sound, watch this, again, if I change my simple cup Bass, they're kind of connected, right? So that's what that is. I wanted to show you the connection between Essential Sound and your Effects Controls, and diving in here a lot more. 

We're not going to do it too much, because yeah, I'm not qualified to go through, and explain exactly what's going on in all these different ones, but I want to let you know that these are getting applied, and you can drag them straight from your Audio Effects, onto your clip, make adjustments if you want, use the presets within here, or you can use Essential Sound panel, which is kind of like a, I don't know, a simplified version, which I love. 

So this is kind of like an overview of like, how this controls this side, let's dive into a lot of these in more detail, like these specific terms in the next video. Actually, before we go, this one always comes up in class, did you see it, you're like, "What the hang is background, walla, walla?" Let's edit, listen. "Donut Dynamite with my husband," Kind of makes it warm and lumpy. Basically, walla walla is a term used, let's say that you're shooting a scene for a sitcom, and there's dialogue, they're in a cafe, what will happen is, the extras, the other actors, have to kind of pretend to be talking, but they don't want any distinctive words, so they get them to say the word walla walla. 

So if you're an extra, you know, I was an extra on a TV show once, strange fact, in the background you get asked to mumble or say the word walla walla, because it doesn't mean anything, It's not going to distract from the, you know, the lead actors' dialogue, but it gives it that cafe kind of, like, "Hmm, walla walla" in the background. If you want to turn people's-- roll off the sharpness of somebody's dialogue, because it's meant to be background, that's what that is. It's usually just background dialogue, but it's called background walla walla, and, I don't know, it's a fun fact, and, I don't know, but that's it, no more talk about walla walla, let's jump in the video, and dive into these individual parts, so we can really get to use them properly.