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Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Editing Audio in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, we're going to do some audio editing. There's a celebrant that we're going to do. We're going to cut it up, we're going to mess with the audio. Not much different than editing video, but let's have a quick little listen of what we're going to do. 

"Marriage is what brings us together today." "Marriage, that blessed arrangement." Ah, beautiful. So we've done some spacing, we've cleared out some laughter. We've deleted some tracks off this video, lowered the music. Nothing real special, just practicing some audio specific editing. All right, let's get in there. 

All right, let's find our celebrant. He is in our Audio folder, there he is there. And the celebrant I'm going to add now, I'm just going to move the music and the celebrant around. The music I want to unmute, because I did that in the last video. I want to kind of just drag it down, so I'm at the beginning of my Timeline, I'm just dragging the middle of it down to this one here. You got to be careful because you can grab the kind of audio levels. So just kind of-- try and-- if it doesn't move you might have turned it all the way down, in terms of the volume. Remember, when we zoom in there's like a little line that you can drag. Cool. 

All right, so I've got our empty track here, which is perfect. I'm going to add my celebrant to it. Now I'm going to do a bit of pre editing, because the celebrant audio - I double click it - it's actually quite long. The cool thing about the audio track is you can view the audio. I've already had a little play around with it but about in here, I'll tell you the time code in a second, because there's like a bit of preamble. Let's turn up a little bit. 

So there's a little bit of walking down the aisle stuff. They just recorded the whole lot of it. Cool. So I'm going to go to, I already know, I wanted to go kind of about where it starts. Hello, welcome. So that's kind of where I want it to start. No, I decided that, not hello and welcome, I'm going to start it there. Now if you're following along you can either drag it, and find it. Remember, I'm using my ' + ' and minus, ' - ', and it's working because I have the little blue bar around my Source Window, and I have my panel just a little bit over, come over here, buddy. 

I'm zooming in, I'm finding this, or you can just type in here. We've got the time code reviews down the bottom here. Do the same thing, that Source Monitor to follow along with me. I want you to go to 18, what did I write down, 4122. That gets us to the position that I want, I'm going to set the end point. Anybody remember what the shortcut was, remember? 'I', or you can just click on this button here, in, out. I want it to play along to, I've already decided where it's going to go, and I'm going to go to 190515. So there you go, type in that, 190515, and set the out point, you can see with a few little shortcuts, which is, out point is 'O', I'll click the button, you've got some-- we've done some editing. 

Now I'm going to drag it down, you can't drag it from the center. You have to drag it from this, there's no video. So you have to drag that little icon down there, or you could, let's just do it once, the thing I never do, is, remember, Track Matching. That there, it's going to go there, we don't want it to do it. I don't want to insert it because it's going to push everything along. I want to hit 'Override'. For the people that are keen on using those shortcuts that's what would work good then. Kind of flick to the end, because it's quite a long track, but that was Track Matching, look at that, good example, Dan. 

So next up we're going to do is, I'm going to show you some icons here, because I need to balance all of this. There's people talking. I think the celebrant's talking amongst all of that, it's hard to tell. So what do you do? First of all let's get the celebrant to the loudness it needs to be. We've used mute, you can mute that track, unmute that track. It's very common though just to solo a track. Solo, like a solo artist, means that track is only going to play by itself. These guys are going to be excluded. It's just useful, if you've got 10 tracks you can just solo one of them. So only the celebrant's going to talk. Marriage is-- And turn it off and they will come back to life, so I solo it again, and I'm watching my little bar, remember, if you can't see the numbers you might have to drag it out a little bit, and 'Spacebar'. 

It's not quite high enough, we know that, we can either click on it and drag it up. Let's do it both ways just to get the hang of things. So I've made it bigger, you notice when it's quite small, you can't see that little line, that's it there. You can't see it down here in teeny tiny view. So I'm going to drag the bottom of it just where it joins. I'm going to scroll down a little bit so I can see everything. Next I want to do is-- actually I've got a lot more audio than I do video. This bar in the middle, I can say, actually go up there a little bit. Just got a little bit more room for the audio. 

All right, so this is my celebrant, I can just crank him up until-- It's kind of close to it. Yep, I'd say that's it. Up about 7.8, or you can go the other way, I'm just hitting 'Edit', 'Undo'. I can go to you, go to 'Dialogue', go to 'Loudness', 'Auto Match'. Give it a second, and it's raised it up. There's a lot of laughing in the background at this wedding, it's a funny wedding. If you want to watch it all the way through-- do I have the final one in here? Go check it out on Editstock. Did I put it in your class files, I can't remember. I think I kept the file size down. It's not in there, but go check it out. The final edit is on EditStock, you can see somebody else's edit. 

Yeah, they are a fun couple, lots of jokes through the wedding, but we're going for like emotion here, but there's people laughing, listen. Can you hear the people laughing, you can't probably hear them, but play it through yourself, and you'll see, between kind of this chunk here, all through the chunks. There's laughter, because they're making gags all the way through their wedding. So what we can do is we can start editing it out. I can grab my, say I want to cut the chunk where there's, like giggles. I can grab my Razor, and you edit it just the same way you do the video. I want that back on, maybe right to the beginning over there. Now back to my Move tool, which is the V key, and delete it. 

So now we've just got the celebrant. You can get in there, and start cutting it all out. What I've found in this particular instance, is I don't really have to, because if I put the music on, turn solo off, and I'll undo that and put that back in, it's in Solo off, let's hit 'Play'. First of all that's really loud, and talking over it, I don't want that. I could just mute the tracks, or-- I don't want this background audio music. I want the background for this, All this, getting ready stuff, I want to delete it. So what you can do is you can right click one and go to 'Unlink'. Click the bottom part, hit 'Del'. All that work we've put in with the cross fades. So right click, 'Unlink', click that way. 

On a Mac, right click, I think you hold down, I've got a mouse in front of me so I can right click. I think you hold down 'Option' and click. I'm going to go 'Unlink', and then delete the audio. Let's zoom out a little bit, same thing here. You can't do them all at once, you can select them all. Unlink them all, then select them all, delink them, so got rid of that. I should probably grab them all, and drag it up to the next track. Here we go, so I've tidied everything up. Kind of run the risk of-- I can't put anything back in there, you can drag them, they're easy. So it's good, but the music's too loud now. So I'm going to grab this, and just drag it down. 

I find, with music, is you play it and drag out while it's playing. You need the balance, there's no official rule. The audio dialogue needs to be bouncing between -6 and -12, but music is, it's up to you. Maybe just a little bit lower. So you can kind of still hear it. When I was doing another edit I felt like the music could be louder, and I couldn't really hear the laughter, so I just left it, but now I can hear it and it annoys me. So I'm going to use my Scissors Tool, sorry, my Razor Tool, just to slice the bits out, and it's pretty easy too, where it needs to be, and you can get a bit of flow going. Let's have a listen. 

So there's a big chunk of, the big chunk in there. So that dream within a dream. C key, click. Drag Playhead. It's easier often to have the Playhead where you want it to be. If you try and do this, and go around here, it's fine, but I find, getting your Playhead, and it will snap to wherever the Playhead is, I find that's quite useful. V key, click, delete, ah, look at us. The cool thing about this ceremony, because it's-- you can't see the person talking, you can adjust this to kind of get it. It's going to be part of one of your projects, so you're going to go through and edit the rest of this. 

So know that it doesn't have to be-- we're not going to-- you could mix them around, who would know? We don't really want to mess around with the world, but there's no reason why you can't. If there's an awkward bit, or he just fumbles it and ruins the mood, you can delete it, but there's a lot of laughter in there so I might solo this track, or mute that track, either one, just to see. Go through now, and edit out a bit of that. You noticed, there was kind of jumping. The reason that's bad, well not bad, it's kind of like, why, oh--

You know I was trying to get in front of it, can you see just above it, there's the Dip to Black. So it's trying to snap to that, which is useful, but not in this case, I'm like, "Don't split to black", so I get my Playhead, put it where I want to, and it will snap to both Dip to Black and my Playhead, which I can kind of force it to go where I want. V key, click, delete. So you might decide that's a bit closer, and that these are all spaced apart. I feel like they all should be really far apart for the mood that I'm going for. All right, so that's kind of basic editing, we've learned what 'solo'ing is. Make sure to turn it off afterwards, and you can mute different tracks as well. 

One last thing I want to do for my mood, is I want to grab all of this, and just drag it off. I don't want to start straight away, I want it to be a bit of music. 'Spacebar'. Marriage is-- probably even further along. Just to have a bit of, get the music going, in the mood. Let's save it and let's get on-- like we're not doing full audio now, but just easing into it. There is a full section on fixing audio in terms of like reverb, and getting rid of background noises, like fans and air conditioning, that sort of stuff. That is in the one a little bit further along. The video will be called Fixing Audio. Haven't actually made it yet, but something like that. All right, that's it for audio for the moment. I'll see you in the next video.