How to add a voice over to your screen capture in Premiere Pro

Hey everyone, in this video we are going to take our original kind of screencast, and delete all the audio, and pretend like we're going to do the voice-over separately. So we'll delete it and we'll show you how to use Premiere Pro, to record straight into the Timeline, and kind of combine it in with your screencast. Now there's a few quirks to it, but basically you click that button, and it will start recording, but let me show you the quirks in the video now. 

To get started let's go back to our old setup. We're finishing doing the zoom, so when I am finished I go back to my Unicorn. If yours doesn't go back to kind of how it was, remember, click 'Unicorn' or 'Editing', go to 'Window', 'Workspaces' and just 'Reset to Saved Workspace'. What I want to do is, we're going to duplicate the original, because, actually don't really want to remove it because I've got a good voice-over, I'm good at just doing it as I'm recording, but you might find that really difficult, you just want to voice over afterwards. 

So we're going to duplicate it by right clicking 'Duplicate', this one here is going to be called 'V2'. So I've got two versions, I'm going to open up V2, close V1, because it can get confusing, and I'm going to delete the audio here. Do you remember how? I want to get rid of the audio but keep the video. You got it, you right click it, and you say 'Unlink' and you delete that, because what I want to do is actually record it while it's playing. You don't have to do that, you can maybe just write out your dialogue, type it out, that's a really good way to do it so you've got a bit of structure and clarity, and less ums and aahs. I'm not going to do that, you might just write out your dialogue, we're not going to bother doing that for the moment, I'm just going to show you the voice-over. 

So what we'll do is we'll kind of get at the beginning here, and it's this little icon here, Voice over Record, look at that, little microphone button. Before we do it just need to make sure, we've got the microphone plugged in properly. So go to Premiere Pro, and on a Mac go down to 'Preferences', and then go to 'Audio Hardware', there it is there, and on a PC, it's under 'Edit', you'll find 'Preferences', 'Audio Hardware'. There we go. 

So my one-- input is the microphone, output is the speakers. Premiere Pro does something really strange, where it will, as you're speaking, will play your voice through your headphones or your speakers, and it's just really distracting. You probably won't know what-- it's hard to describe now, but start doing it in a second, and you'll notice like, "Man, it's weird." So often what I do is I'll record, so I'll pick my microphone, I've got a couple of different microphones that I'm using, I'm using this one, and the output you can put into-- let's say I'm going to put it into my monitor, and turn my monitor down so I can't hear it. That's just a nicer way of doing it so I cannot actually hear myself talking, or you might plug some headphones in and pick those, pick anything you like. 

So microphone setup, and output, let's click 'OK'. Basically we just need to hit this, little 'Record' button. So ready, set, go. Kind of gives you a better lead in, which is cool. First thing we need to do is we need to go down to our Layers panel. We need to right click it and we need to say 'New Layer', give it a name, click 'OK'. So I'm recording this demo, of myself recording this demo. That's it, I'm going to hit 'spacebar' to stop, and it just throws in my recording there, cool, huh? I'm going to go back, listen to it, and it just, actually I can't hear it at all, why not? Because I went and changed my headphones to be going to my monitor, which doesn't have speakers, or at least turned them down. So you're going to have to toggle between this. You'll figure out a better way. 

What I do is I have headphones just plugged into my computer, and I put them on when I want to listen to it, and take them off when I'm just using my microphone. Let's go back to 'Audio Hardware'. I'm going to say I want to hear this now through my computer speakers, or through my headset, that's what I've got. Let's have a listen to me, this panel, we need to right click it, and we need to say, 'New Layer'; nice. 

Now with my microphone you can see, I've only got one channel. So we've talked about sound recording in the course, where I'm going to have to make them go Mono, but it's all right, that's this particular microphone's quirk, that's how you record your own voice. Again, it's really good if you want to write yourself a dialogue. 

A couple of things I want to show you, is where everything works, or ends up. So I have done two versions, one version was a practice, you didn't see it because I was recording this demo, and I did it badly so I re-recorded it. You'll do the same thing, you'll re-record lots of takes. It saves a couple of audio files, now there's two. This one here is not being used, if I hover above this one, I select on it, hover above it, it tells me that this one is audio1_2.wave.

Wave is like an mp3, it's just a lot bigger and uncompressed, really good quality, quite big file sizes, for an audio file. Nothing compared to our 4K video, but anyway. So I don't need this one. So there's two things you need to do. Figure out exactly what you want to do, you're like, "I like this one, so I'm going to…" This one's going to be my Pug Dialogue. You might end up with a few of these, so you might have a Dialogue A. You might have another one that's B, C, D, but this one here I don't need. You can just delete it from here, but it is still on your computer, clogging up the hard drive potentially of stuff you're not going to use. 

So to find it, is right click it and go to this one that says 'Reveal in Finder'. On PC it will be something similar, will it say Finder in Windows, I can't remember what it is. Something similar, look for the same sort of space, and 'Reveal', and will actually show me where on my hard drive this stuff has been saved. So I don't need you, gone. The one that I ended up using was called _2, so I didn't need that one either, so I'm going to delete that one. You'll know if you've deleted the wrong one, because you'll go into here, and it will have question mark, and say, "Where did it go?" I'm going to offline it, and actually don't want it, so I'm going to select the icon, hit 'Del'. It's a nice way of tidying it up at the end. That's a really helpful tool for anything. So you've got footage in here, you're like, "Where the hang is this thing?" Right click it, 'Reveal in Finder', it actually takes you to where it is. I'm going to close this down. 

Last thing before we go is, the microphones that I'm actually using, the tech that I'm using is, I kind of half mentioned them earlier, but I thought I'd throw them into your Links folder. Those are the two microphones. That's what I've used for every course up until now. So if you've done one of my other courses that's what it is. This is what I'm using for this particular course. I'll show you the difference. I'm not-- am I happy with this new one? Yeah, I am, I like it, it took me a while to get used to it. 

So that's the one I used mostly. I'll probably still continue using Audio Technica AT2020 USB. Plugs straight into my computer, and I can record from that. The new one that I'm using is the same company, but this one here is a headset one, more like what a Sports Presenter would use, and I use this one here, the single sided one. I just feel like after having two sets of headphones on, I like having one ear free, I don't know, it's a quirk, and I like it because I get to see my keyboard. If you are doing tutorials and you've got a big microphone in front of your face, it's hard to type on the keyboard, so that was the reason. 

A lot more quirky, this one here has to plug into something, because this is not a USB microphone. It has to go into something to convert it into USB, and I use this thing here. It's pretty common in the audio world. These are Focusrite things, I picked the number 2, I think number 1 would work as well, it's a cheaper version, but you plug it into this, and then that plugs into your computer. It's a bit more nerdy, if you're new just go for this one, it's awesome. If you want to be nerdy like me, and spend ages trying to figure it all out, use this one. 

Last thing as well is, once you've finished doing your recordings, just go through and set your preferences. Remember, 'Audio Hardware', set your 'Output Speakers', back to what you normally kind of have them on, otherwise Premiere Pro won't change. All right, that's it, I'll see you in the next video.