Voiceover Clean Up In Adobe Audition + Premiere

1. Intro: Hello out there. I am David Miller. I am a Phoenix, Arizona, multimedia artist and educator, and today we're going to cover how to do audio correction in both Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere. The reason why we are working with both of these W products at the same time is because it's very likely that you are going to find scenarios where you want to create videos and have voiceovers. But you need Teoh fix up the audio. Perhaps you're getting a air conditioning sound. Perhaps you are stumbling over your words and making this stakes. Perhaps you're introducing a lot of, um's and er's and pauses into your speech. This is stuff we're going to cover, and we're going to show you how to do it in both of these programs. So for this class, you're going to need access to Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere. You don't know what either of those are. You only know what one of them is. Adobe Audition is an audio editing program, and Adobe Premiere is the main video editing program that Adobe offers. Once you have access to those, we can begin 2. Recording Strategies: before we get started talking about software, I want to talk to you about the ways you can prove your audio in the capture process, one that is directional rather than the Laval ear mic or the kind that you pinned to your shirt. I used the blue Yeti USB microphone and many of the other tutorial teachers I'm aware of used the less expensive blue snowball USB mic. Do you speak directly into the mike at a close distance, not from across the table or with your head turned sideways. A good microphone is in stereo, and if you aren't direct, your voice will be louder and one speaker than another. This also accounts if you're using your smartphone or tablet as your audio recording device , do you record in a comfortable environment that can be isolated from sounds like air conditioning fans, dogs, cats, kids, phones, traffic and so on. Carpeted floors absorb echoes and will prevent your recording from having artifacts. I don't have any carpeting in my house, so I use an isolation shield, which both blocks incoming sounds from multiple directions and absorbed all reverb and echo . If you've ever been in a professional recording, studio, you'll see this sound absorbing foam all over the walls. If it's just you and your voice, tabletop isolation is enough. Do you make use of a pop filtered? Prevent your P sounds from pushing air into the microphone. The letters P and s create artifacts in the recording process that we don't hear in our daily conversation and will address the S reduction later on. Finally, don't get upset or discouraged. If you find you're making a lot of errors, simply repeat the problem phrases and keep truck where there's our and the recording process. So you know, to edit them out all right onto our first program, Adobe Audition. 3. Noise Reduction and Extraneous Sounds: Now let's look at Theodore B audition workspace, and we're going to do some basic cleanup of audio here. This is my raw recording. And as you can see in between the words, we have this a big chunk of ambient noise and we need to capture some of this ambient noise . So we're gonna zoom in tight and I'm going to use capture noise points that is going to take a sample. You have to have a certain range of ambient noise if you're going to take a sample. So in your recording process, feel free to leave some of these chunks in so you can get enough things to noise reduced out. Then we go into noise reduction. The parameters are gonna be really up to you, and it's going to depend on the level of noise you have. I usually do something the neighborhood of 60%. And as you can see, that sucked out that ambient noise from the entire recording when I had the whole thing selected. And it makes a huge difference when you are listening to play back that you don't hear this kind of like refrigerator hum noise where I do a lot of recordings is a workshop in my backyard, so occasionally you'll hear things like birds in the background. I'm finally leaving those in actually feel like a little ambient noise is important to having a recording feel like it has some life to it, but definitely nobody wants to hear Josh when they're trying to get a tutorial. At this point, I'm zooming in and I'm checking out the actual voice. And there are a lot of segments where I make mistakes, and I know this is very common. And other people there are a lot of segments where I pause my words while I'm trying to gather my thoughts and their segments where even if I'm reading from a script, I'm going to make a flub. I'm going to cough. I'm gonna mispronounce something. I'm gonna have some inhalations of breath like, and all of those things really show up in the recording. I actually go through my recording and take out the vast majority of these. You can see that little chunk in between words here. That's just a inhalation of breath. It doesn't add anything to the tutorial, so I will either completely delete it or I'll just knocked the audio down entirely, and I do this to the entire recording. So if I have a track that is 30 minutes long, you better believe that I'm going to be listening to that entire 30 minute track and removing all the flubs, the arms, the earth, the inhalations of breath. It just makes it feel a lot more professional. Let me turn up this. That was a simple lips, Mac and the thing with, like your inhalations of breath, your coughs, your lip smacks. You will recognize what they look like on the way forms, so it's not as hard as you think to take these things out, say hi like them, delete them or turn the sound down all the way on them. The real problem comes when you're recording and you don't realize you made a mistake. You're not paying attention to what you're saying. If you have a sentence and you kind of mess up, then what you really should do is restart the sentence. And so if you have a sentence and you kind of mess up just and you do budget Azan, Er's and, um, restart the sentence from the beginning make sure that you have a take that is mostly or 100% good. And don't beat yourself up that you have to do these things over and over and over because , believe me, this is what professional via artists and Victoria makers have to do all the time. 4. Vocal Limiting: now this process that I'm doing. In addition, Aiken, do an audition because I recorded the voice first and then I am going to match video to it . The video, probably a screen recording much like this tutorial is. But if I had done my screen recording and my video at the same exact time than what I really need to do is only listen to the audio, do the cleanup. But I cannot cut chunks out in audition. And the reason is the sound and the video already air matching. And if I need to cut chunks out of the audio that I need to cut chunks out of the video, I need to find a way Teoh keep things synchronized. Otherwise, I'm going to have a lot of problems for myself. There is no right or wrong way to do these kind of audio recordings for tutorials. If you want to screen, record and talk at the same time, because that's either is for you. Just make sure that you aren't sounding distracted or diverted that your attention is halfway what's on the screen and halfway what you're talking about. You need to sound confident and like you have information. This is important information. You've got to get it out to the audience, and they should pay attention what's on the screen. But you are such a master that you don't need to think about what buttons to push. If that means you are following a script, reading from the script in advance and then doing some kind of screen recordings and Masha script, that's fine. That's a perfectly valid way to go. Now I'm going to show you some dynamics processing, and the effect of this is to knock down those highs and lows of your vocal recording. You'll notice that our raw recording has some really high highs where my voice got louder or I said a particular syllable, or I emphasize something and where I was little softer. It's really soft. There are some sounds that we like to have this be part of the audio experience. For example, if you are doing a movie and you had some ambient noise and characters were walking from a car towards a river, you would imagine the river would get louder progressively, and if this was a band recording, you would probably want some dynamic range to the instruments, particularly the guitars, are the drums. You wouldn't want somebody playing the drums really softly, to be as equally loud as when they started smashing things. But with the human voice, we have a problem. We like to have a more compressed, dynamic range, so we have a few options that we work with under dynamics processing. And one is the vocal limiter. That's the one that I usually use. It really does a good job of managing the levels of quiet voice and loud voice. You'll also notice that it raised my inhalations significantly. So when I do something like it's even more apparent than it was before. We have an option called Voice Over, which is very similar, and of the two, I actually prefer the vocal limiter. It sounds more natural to me and not so heavy handed, but it's going to be up to you, which is the option you prefer to use. Should you do your noise reduction first or your vocal limiting first. I often do my noise reduction first, because if I reduce the noise out enough that it doesn't show up, then it won't be raised in volume the same way that my sounds are 5. De Esser and Radio Production Filter: there are a couple more effects that I want to go ahead and show you. One is the Di essere, and the di essere is something that actually takes the edge off the letter s. So there are a couple letters that are problematic as we say them. One is the pea sound, and you address that by using a pop filter in front of your microphone and the letter s s that civil INTs sound really translates in a recording. But just by running the di essere and assigning male or female, depending on what you need, you can really take the edge off that letter s Let's hop over to the radio production side . I want to show you some of the choices that we have there. We have one that literally says, Clean up as voiceover. You'll notice that there is a affects rack that is on the left side of your audition menus . Anytime you apply a filter, it's really a collection of effects. And so you can see that this option literally is a combination of whatever things are in your effect rack. That's just what the filter creates. An adaptive noise reduction at speech volume leveller and the hard limiter. It makes a very loud audio recording, maybe too loud for a lot of what people want out of their YouTube or tutorial type videos. If you just want to go straight into one of these filters and it satisfies your purposes, by all means do that. I'm personally of a certain age where I think a lot of heavy handed radio production is like way too hard on the voice. And I'm talking about things like the Howard Stern Show or in four hours, like just that incredible, hard limiting of voice is actually pretty grading for me to listen to. I want something that sounds natural. I don't want it to have heavy G. I don't want to hear all the arms and earth. I don't want to hear the the wheezing and the breathing, and I didn't want a bunch of empty spaces in the recording. I just wanted to be natural. I want to sound conversational, and I want to feel like I'm in the same room. Is the person 6. Markers in Audition and Premiere: Now let's say we are working with audio that was pulled from Premier Onda. We're not really allowed to cut this audio because it is matching a video and it needs to synchronize. What I'm going to do is actually look at the way form, see where the problem areas are, like the arms, the urge, the coughing, the big empty spaces. And I'm gonna place markers there. The way that I placed a marker is simply to move my cursor and hit the letter M. You can have this cursor moving and have it play the entire track and go ahead and hit em. You can see some of the obvious gaps and put your marker stone. You can move your cursor with the arrow keys so you can just slightly advance it. Hit em. The reason for this is when I save my audio track. It's going to create a way, form and premier that has any adjustments that I made an audition, and it's also going to reflect these markers. Now when I'm listening to this straight through, I might miss a little bit, but you can reposition those markers simply by grabbing the icon next to the word marker and moving it over with your mouse. We save my work. I'll get back to Premier. Let me go back to Premier, and I will show you how those markers are reflected in the audio track. So this was a voiceover I did while watching the original video. And I can tell that they're aligned because they're the same amount of length where the video track starts is where my audio track starts. All of my mistakes here, I'm going to use the razor blade tool and I'm gonna cut the audio. I'm also going to cut the video. And if you have that magnet icon turned on, it is underneath my time code. So where you see 12. 51 Currently, there's a magnet if you have that magnet turned on, and you razor blade something in the audio or you have a marker on the audio. That marker will also reflect in the upper track. It's a lot easier to use the razor blade tool when you have the magnet turned on. Now, once you've cut out chunks of your video and audio, it is important to keep a consistent flow with the teaching and not have long gaps of silence. And if you have information that you're telling the person that information should be reflected on the screen, oftentimes people leave their screen as a single frame and nothing's happening while they're talking for a long period of time. So you really need to kind of tighten it up. If you have cut out a chunk of audio and you've cut out a chunk of video, you need to move those together. One of the ways to do that is to use the track Select Forward Tool, which is the letter A and then that will bring up anything to the right of your timeline you can, and using that you can pick up everything from the right of your timeline and then drag it to meet the previous footage or previous audio. 7. Audio Effects + Transitions in Premiere: Let's look at some of the effects that we have that you can use to sweeten your audio in Premier without having to go into a W addition at all. And let me start this off by saying you condemn finitely, do all of the audio adjustments in audition and then come into premiere and add these effects on it isn't a either or scenario, but I really wanted to show you what footage that is completely untouched by effects and footage that I've pumped up a little bit, how they sound next to each other. So over here we have audio effects. We're going to go straight. Teoh Vocal enhancer and in Premier. If you don't wanna have to scroll through all these things, if you forget where things are, type in the search bar. Thanks pop up To apply your effect, you either double click it or you drag it straight onto your clip, and the effect controls will show up down here under individual parameters. You see male and female, you need to make adjustments to that going to edit three choices. Essentially, this deepens the base part of the voice, and if you listen to a lot of podcast radio productions. You'll notice that they have heavily enhanced the mids and lower range of the voice. I find that there's a bunch of fun, little things you can do with these. I find that there's a bunch of fun little things you can do with these instant films. It definitely has a lot of power to the voice. And when you hear that base, I feel like there is a natural human instinct that we're listening to unauthorized figure. And that could be Barry White's singing. That could be some kind of political speech. But having that lower range president really makes a huge difference in your presentation of the other effects that our presence there ones that you certainly wouldn't use at all like the chorus and Flander unless you wanted to make your character sound like some kind of alien. But we do have a few things that are very similar to what we had in Ow addition. One of them is the dynamics processing. I'll go ahead and apply that. And when we go into custom set up under the drop down presets menu, one of our choices is vocal limiter. That's pretty much the same thing that we had in Adobe Audition. There's also a voiceover. It'll be up to you. Which one sounds better to you, but I'm always a fan of the vocal limiter. You can see it cuts off a certain range here, and then we do have a de Esser apply that. One thing that's pretty common with the cheap Laval ear microphone that I bought is when the battery starts to go. One of the channels does not record very well, and by channels I mean the left speaker in the right speaker. So, in this particular example, liken, Zoom in on the way form, and I can definitely see there is sound in both of these. If my microphone is not picking up both channels, if it's only getting the left or the right, I do have a preset here. Phil left with rights, fill right with left, and I find I have to use that a lot. The last area I want to point out is not under audio effects, but under audio transitions, and we only have three of these constant gain constant power and exponential fade. When you have audio clips and you are splicing them together. So go ahead and cut this and cut this parts. Remove it. Even though this cut was done in one take, it's pretty likely there's going to be some kind of bump in the way form that goes from Clip A to clip be and it's going to be kind of an unnerving transition. So any time you have clips the bump against each other, I recommend doing a little bit of constant power. We're gonna put that there. It does not have to be that long of a transition. You can shrink your transition within the clip, or, if you double click the transition, you can set the duration, Do you how many frames you want? So this is only a six second overlap, but that is enough to stop the way form from having this hard at its and then starting again. Over here, there's a flow limits, and what I'm saying doesn't make any sense. But for sure you don't hear this abrupt sound. That kind of stuff is incredibly irritating to any listener and viewer 8. Audio Mixing in Premiere 1: in this section, I'd like to show you some things that you gonna do an adobe premiere that don't involve Adobe audition at all. So I have imported this footage I shot of crocodiles in Costa Rica. Think there crocodiles and I have some alligator growls. We're not gonna worry about whether there crocodiles or alligators were just going to assume that the sounds match the animals. I've got some water sounds that I've imported also have some music and some voiceover if I want to use it, Um, but I'm gonna show you how to do audio mixing with a variety of sound effects in Adobe Premiere. So the original audio for this is actually very bad. It was taken on a bridge, So there's cars that are going behind me and you don't hear any sounds of the animals. And in one case you hear a little bit of my Children talking to me. So not really selling the, uh, points of these animals. It doesn't sound very exotic or exciting at all. In fact, it sounds really boring, and it takes away from the footage. So one thing we need to dio is get rid of that audio entirely. We're going to mute that track. That is one option. If you want to completely eliminate it, I would suggest unlinked king with your right click menu and then straight up deleting it. Now the fun thing about thes alligators is we're going to have a voice and we're going to have ambience, and those need to be on separate tracks. This is a good way of practice mixing sounds because generally, if you have a voice over whether it's an animal or a person on and you have them in a scene , you also have to have background noises, and you also have to have music. Each one of those should be their own audio track. So we have a one a two, a three. I'm just going to say that a one is voices. A two will be ambient noises. A three will be music. Someone put some alligator growls here, Gonna put some here. I'm going to put ambient noise of the beach here, and I'm gonna put music down on the bottom, going to mix the music last because clarity is always the most important thing. And with a sort of limited amount of sonic space that you're struggling with. You want to make sure that the point of the story is being told that I hear the voices, even though they're just alligator growls. Then I need to hear the ambiance. And lastly, I need to hear the music that is the order for how things are telling the story. Shaky camera footage. Not the greatest hair, but okay. And somebody threw a rock at that point and made a splash. So if I hear any splashing sounds, that's where should go. As things are, the background audio is too loud, and it's too splashy. Uh, the alligators air growling a bit too much for my tastes, and sometimes they're growling when they're not in the scene. So what I need to do Part one is focused on where I want the alligator sounds to be. Now these humps are where things air loudest in your wave form. I'm going to use the razor blade tool. I'm going to put little cuts so I can parcel out the sounds where I see the gators. Where I see them closest, I think, is where I want the growls to be. So this bit here makes sense to have a growl, and where there's three of them here, it makes sense for them to be growling. 9. Audio Mixing and Effects in Premiere 2: Now these guys aren't very close to me, but the alligators sounds sound like they are close to me. So one thing I'm going to do is make them sound further away in our effects palette. We have audio effects. A lot of these choices are pretty irrelevant towards what we want to do. For example, Band Pass makes things sound like they're an old radio, not in effect. That makes any sense when you want things to sound like they're far away echoes reverb are your friends also just simply lowering the volume in contrast to some of the other ambient sounds. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and add some surround reverb. So when you go into the effects and you go into the custom set up, you can see you have a lot more choices than the default Reverb inside a cathedral doesn't make a lot of sense for these alligators or crocodiles. With something like deep, well, open Air Stadium makes a lot more sense, and it definitely does make it feel like these guys are a lot further away. If you have an effect that you use on one clip, you can go ahead. And the copy? That effect, which I have used command see. But control see on windows will do. And then whatever other clips you select, you can pace that on using command V or Control V. Then thes gray boxes all of a sudden become, uh, active with that effect. So now I have my alligators sounds a little further away. Let's check out the water level very loud. Also a little too splish splashy. I'm going to slow it down using speed duration in the right click menu, going to slow it down to be about 20 seconds long. I'm not going to maintain audio pitch because that's going to make this weird stretchy noise that will sound very artificial. And now I'm gonna compare that sound with the alligators to see what's good. I can barely hear these alligators slash crocodiles versus the water. Also where that splashes. That's where I want this big bump on the way for him. So I'm gonna shrink that audio clip until and get the big bump where I want it to be. Okay, so that makes a little more sense. Sonically, uh, I am going to lower the volume of this entire track versus the alligators and the area I'm going to do this in is the audio clip mixer. Do you see appear? We have our three tracks. A one, a two and a three. A one does not have a volume control A two does because it's active if I jump over to a one . So within this audio clip mixer, you'll still have your A one track. But this is where you can raise or lower a two and a three. A three currently has mute on. If I take mute off here, you can see how it's reflected over here. Put me back on. And at this point, you conduce, um live mixing. So which play? Take the water level down because the alligators themselves have reverb on them. I'm going to add the reverb effect, Teoh the water level. So I still have it as a effect that I've saved. I'm gonna do command V. Pull it even lower now. One problem area. You see, I've actually run out of the sound. The water just ends here. So what can I do? Well, if I have more water sound, I can definitely drag this out to fill it. But if I don't have more ambient sound and I need to recycle some ambient sound, one thing I can do is hold the altar key. Grab that clip, drag it, and then once I have thes water sounds side by side, I can use audio transitions and simply cross fade them. So I'm going to use constant power. Andi. Within this space, this audio clip flows into this audio clip without any sort of spike or noticeable change in it. If you constantly recycled background sounds, it will be noticeable to the viewer. But in the case of this, it's really just a low ambient water sound. I don't think anybody would notice, especially when it's mixed in with the alligator growls. And then, lastly, we're gonna put a little bit of music in there, going to a mute it. The music will start really loud, far too loud for these alligators, but if I pull it back 10. WAV Files + Wrap Up: so there we have some tips on how to clean up your voice. In Adobe Audition and Premier, my final recommendation is to always work. In wave Stereo format Wave is UN Compressed Audio, unlike an MP three or other formats and stereo, means there's a slight difference between the sound coming out of your left and your right speakers. This makes it a lot more pleasant to listen to. Remember to post your own voice over recordings to the Skill Share Project page as either a video or audio link and thanks for watching.