Transcripts
1. Introduction: Take a look at this video. Add salt and pepper to both your vegetables in the plate and the
eggs in the panel. Now comparative this. Add salt and pepper to both your vegetables in the plate and the
eggs in the pan. You'll notice that even though the video quality of the
second one is terrible, It's still watchable
because it has great audio. But the first one with
good visual quality, but bad audio is
just unbearable. That's why I hear
people say that audio is 80 per
cent of the video. I might have the best
looking video in the world, but without good audio, that video is as
good as nothing. But I bet you're just like me. I'm not a pro, I don't know how all these parametric equalizers
and audio limiters were. I just want a clean, crisp audio without having to
wrestle with and waste time fine-tuning every single dial in the confusing audio
editing program. Well, over the last two years, making more than 300
voiceovers for videos. I was able to experiment and come up with
the best ways to make my terrible voice-over audio sound more professional. And in this course, I'll show you how I do it. But wait for the best
part all this time. No one knew that all of the voiceovers I've
ever recorded, including this one
for this course, were made in my bedroom without any Who's take sound
treatment with an old iPhone and then later with a built in
laptop microphone, which all of us have. This means that you
can do this too. I'll walk you through
my specific process step-by-step and show every intricate detail
and most importantly, what not to do when recording and editing your
voice-over is this seems hard to believe than
listen to how the voice-over sounds like before any adjustments just recorded in a normal room with a built-in
microphone on my laptop, you can press command shift, period to make everything
bigger and more readable. Now, this is how it sounds. After I apply a few tricks, surround myself with three
pillows and then hence the voice-over audio in
Audacity and Premier Pro, you can press
command shift period to make everything bigger
and more readable. The difference is night and day. So in this course, you'll learn how I set up
my recording environment, how I enhance voiceover in
Audacity and Premier Pro, and then how I create presets. So I don't have to do all the enhancements
every single time. I'm able to drag the preset onto my audio clips and automatically
apply all the settings. You'll also learn how to
combine your voice-over with background music so one
doesn't overwhelm the other, as well as the best Premier
Pro export settings specifically tuned for great sounding audio
in YouTube video. So don't hesitate and jump and you'll figure out how I make my voice-over go from a squeaky nine-year-old level
to Morgan Freeman level. See you in the first lesson.
2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to
record and enhance an audio clip using the key
takeaways from this course. First, I want you to record a short clip of yourself saying a few sentences in the environment that
you are in right now. You don't have to
try hard to just say a few sentences into
the mic, and that's it. Then you're going to take this audio clip and simply
store it for later. Once you finish the course, I want you to record
the same thing, but apply an edit in Audacity and then edit in Premier Pro and use the best export settings for the audio that you'll
learn about later. Then, after you have two clips, one without any post-production
and environment design, and the other one where
you can upload them both as audio files in
the project gallery. So we'll be able to
see the difference between the two clips and
the progress you've made. You can start by recording two or three sentences
into any microphone. It can be your phone, laptop, or any other device. And once you do that, I'll see you in the first
lesson where we'll learn about the importance of
your recording environment.
3. The Recording Environment: The recording environment is one of the most overlooked things by beginners when it comes to recording good audio
quality. Think about it. If I take my microphone and
come out to a busy street, than naturally the microphone will capture not only my voice, but everything that's
going on around me. You might say, Oh,
this is obvious. But what most fail to understand
is that the street is an extreme example and
the same logic can be applied to the room
that you're in right now. If my room has a ticking clock, a buzzing refrigerator,
an open window, or even a computer
with loud fans. It's all going to be
captured by the microphone. And that's not all. When I speak, the
sound travels into all directions,
only interdomain. And if there are
many open spaces or flat surfaces like walls, ceilings and floors around me, the sound waves will bounce off of those surfaces and come straight back into
the microphone and the microphone
will capture it. I'll get a nasty echo
effect in my recording. My voice will sound
distant and far away. So now that you know, the environment is one of the most crucial things to achieving a great
sounding VoiceOver. Here are five little things
that you can do to make your environment work for
you instead of against you. Number one, turn off or minimize anything that produces
notable noise in the room, or move to another room
if that's not possible, a great room to record audio. N is the closet. There are usually no clocks, computers, air conditioners,
or people in the closet. So it's one of the
best places in the house to achieve
exceptional audio quality. Number to move away
from large open spaces, these spaces produce echo, which we don't want
in our voice-over. Number three, surround
yourself with soft objects that
reduce sound reverbs. Examples of such objects
would be pillows, blankets, carpets,
thick curtains. Another reason why
the closet is one of the best places to
record the voiceovers, that it's full of
hanging clothes. You see the surface
of clothes is not flat and so it absorbs sound waves so they don't bounce off and come back
to the microphone. This reduces echo and makes your voice-over sound nice and crisp. Number four, think
outside of the box. If you don't have a
closet or your room is large and without a carpet
or hanging curtain, then you have to improvise, consider getting
under the blanket or grabbing a bunch of
pillows and placing them around g pulling out
clothes and hanging them on chairs or placing them on other flat surfaces
all around your room. All of this might seem
silly, but trust me, it makes a huge difference
in audio quality. By the way, I've done all of these things that I've
mentioned here myself. Number five, Don't overthink it. If your environment
is good enough, adding one more pillow might just lead to
diminishing returns. If you feel that your
voice sounds good enough, there's no echo or a notable background sounds
and it's not necessary to go that one step further
and gets into a closet or surround yourself
with Seven more pillows. With that said, here's how my voice-over according environment
typically looks like. I laid down on my bed, which has a thick blanket
that reduces echo. I surround myself with
three large pillows and also one more smaller pillow
behind the microphone, which in this case is
inside the laptop. I made sure to close the doors from my
room to other rooms and ask people in my house to
stay as quiet as possible. Then I take out the battery from my ticking clock
that's on the wall, then I make sure that
all windows are closed. Pull down roller shades on
all window, and that's it. It's a pretty simple setup that takes me a few
minutes to assemble, but it goes a long way to making the audio
sound exceptional. Of course, if you're now
in an ideal environment, but you don't know how to
speak to your microphone. The voice-over will
still be terrible. That's why I'll show
you how to avoid this crucial mistake
in the next lesson.
4. How to Talk to a Microphone: It goes without saying
that if you have your microphone behind
you when you speak, than the audio is
not coming out nice. So here are a few crucial steps you can take to optimize how you speak to your
microphone order to have the best voice-over
audio possible. Number one, find out the
location of your mic if you're speaking to a laptop or a phone, different
manufacturers, please. There are microphones in sometimes unexpected and
weird locations like e.g. I. Found out that my MacBook Pro actually houses the
microphone here. But all this time, I thought it was at the top. You can do this by googling the mike location or
turning on your voice recording software
and then tapping lightly with your finger
across your device. When you see the
sound waves spike, then you'll know that
your finger is close to the microphone location
number to make sure that if you use your laptop
mic for the voice-over, the laptop doesn't have its cooling fans spinning
because this will tremendously worsen
the audio quality if you can't find
out how to do this, usually turning on energy saver works and
after a few seconds, the cooling fans stop spinning. Number three, smile when
you speak audience. Your audience can sense
everything, your mood, energy, and even how your day went from the tonality of your voice when easy fix to make your voice sound consistent and
high-energy across voiceovers is to simply
smile when you speak. Number for speak louder than you think is
necessary if you mumble your words and even you can hear
what you're saying, then don't think the microphone, we'll try speaking a
little louder than you do normally accenting
each letter of every word so that the
listener doesn't have to try hard to understand
what you're saying. Easy for him to want to
watch what you've created. Number five, Don't rush and finish your sentences with
the white intonation. The mistake of cutting
off the ends of sentences is especially
evident when reading a scrap, your eyes naturally wander
towards the next sentence, but you forget to
finish the last one with the right attention
that it deserves. So make sure to keep this in mind and read every
single sentence fully and that way
your voice-over wound seem rushed
and unprofessional. Number six, repeat sentences rather than words
when you mess up, it's a lot easier
to fix the audio in postproduction when you have the whole sentence to work with, rather than having to insert an individual word in the
middle of another sentence. So if you mess up
during your recording, it's better to start the
whole sentence over rather than starting from the word
that you messed up on. Number seven, speak
roughly 15 cm away from your microphone. This distance can
easily be measured from the end of your thumb to the
end of your pinky finger. It's not the end-all be-all
and every mic is different, but this is just a rough
standard distance at which you should consider
keeping your head away from the microphone. Also to avoid plosives, the letters that
make it seem like your microphone is
exploding, e.g. the letters p and b, you can tilt your head a little bit to the
side of your mind so that it doesn't catch the air coming out
of your mouth. That way you'll avoid
the floating sound in your microphone if you
don't have an air filter. And now that you've
recorded the voiceover in an ideal environment and with the best practices for
talking to the mind, you can move over to
editing your audio. I'll show you how to do
that in the next lessons.
5. Setting Up Audacity: In this lesson, I
want to quickly show you how to download and set up a free audio
editing software called Audacity
because I've always had one issue with it
to where the program doesn't recognize
some audio file type. So here's how I fixed it. First, go to Audacity
team.org and press download Audacity on the
next page that opens up, you'll find all the
installation instruction. It's very basic, just like installing any
other application. However, now I'd
highly recommend you download the FFmpeg library, which basically allows
audacity to import, export a much larger
range of audio format. So just type in Audacity
FFmpeg into Google and click either
the top link for Windows or the
second link for Mac. Here you'll find all the
necessary instructions on how to install the
library or Windows. It's as simple as going to the download page and clicking on the installer
link to download, the installer will then
walk you through the whole process step-by-step
when you open it. So now that you've
got audacity set up, we can start enhancing
the voice-over. I'll show you how to do
that in the next lesson.
6. Enhancing Voice-Over in Audacity: Our six. Total steps I take to enhance my voiceover
audio in audacity. Number one, importing audio. First, when I open audacity, I just see a blank screen. To import my unedited voiceover, I simply drag the audio
file into audacity or come up to file import audio and
select the clips from there. If I'm working on multiple
voiceovers at once, I can mute all the
other ones by clicking solo on the track that I
want to work on right now. Another awesome trick is if
I have a lot of audio clips, track. Audacity
starts to slow down. To fix that, I simply expand the second track so that the other ones below
are not visible and my audacity immediately becomes way faster since it now doesn't have to render all of those audio waves
of the other clips. Number two, limitor. Amitor stops all audio from
exceeding a certain volume. I use it to get rid of extremely
high peaks in my audio, so it doesn't randomly get
too loud for the listener. To apply a limter, I double click inside my clip to select it
all due to effect limiter. Now, how I usually
go about things is I choose okay and wait to see
how much it limits my audio. I have to look at
the very peaks in the audio waves to see
how much they shrink. If they shrink too much, and even the smaller
audio waves get cut off. I know I have a problem. If the audio is
limited too much, it will start clipping
and sound really bad. If I see that the limitor
removed too much, I press control Z or
command Z on M to undo, go into the limitor
again and then adjust the slider to the right
to remove less of my Once I see that
only the very top of the audio is removed, I move on to the next step. Number three, reducing noise. Noise reduction
is a process that gets rid of background
noise in your audio. If you haven't set up your
environment correctly, your microphone will
pick up background noise like hissing or buzzing that
you might want to remove. Find the space in
your audio clip where you're not talking. You can scroll through
your clip by holding shift scrolling, and you can zoom in by holding control
and scrolling. Once I find a space where
there's only background noise, I select only that area, go to effect noise reduction
and get noise profile. Then I double click on the whole clip to
select all of it. Go back to effect noise
reduction and click Okay. If this seems complicated, remember that I'm
only doing this once, and then I'll move all of
these settings into a preset, which I can use later on every single audio
clip in an instant. Moving on to the
fourth adjustment. Number four,
compressing the audio. A compressor reduces the
audios dynamic range. That is it reduces the
difference in levels between the loudest and the
quietest parts of the audio. It makes it so the
quietest parts are louder and the loudest
parts quieter. This makes the audio
sound a lot more professional and even
throughout the recording. To apply the compressor, I double click on my
clip to select it, go to effect compressor. These are the
settings that I use, but the default ones
work just as fine. With the compressor applied, I move over to the final
edit. Number five, Audio normalization
changes its overall volume by a fixed amount to
reach a target level. It just makes your audio quieter or louder based on
a certain standard, which is usually minus one dB. To normalize the audio, double click on the clip
to select it effect, normalize and k. By the way, if you change any of these settings of any
of these effects, you can go back to
factory presets by clicking Manage factory
presets default. It will bring back the
default settings for each effect if you want to go
back to how it was before. Number six, Exp audio. To export your cli, double click on it
to select go up to file Export, and E audio. Choose a place where you want
to save it and click Save. Now that we've all the
audio edits in audacity, I'll show you how to make
it extremely easy to apply all of them again
to any other clip, but without all the effort
that we just went through. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Creating a Preset in Audacity: This lesson, I'll
show you how to create a preset in audacity, which allows you to apply
multiple audio adjustments at once to any given audio Presets in audacity are called macro. A macro is a sequence of
preconfigured commands, mainly audio effects
in this case, in a set order that
can be applied automatically to
projects or audio file. To set up your own macro, go to Tools Macros. Click new on the left and
name it anything you want. Select it on the left. Click Insert on the right. Don't get overwhelmed by all
the settings here because it just shows all the effects
available in audacity. Now we want to find effects that no matter the audio clip, are going to have
the same presets or the same settings every time. In my case, they're the
compressor and the normalized Everything else like the
limitor or noise reduction, I have to do manually
because they're going to vary based on each
audio recording. Now I want to find
those effects. I'm going to click inside the command field and click
C to find the compressor. Once I have it selected, I can click edit parameters
and check if they're the same that I used for my
audio enhancements before. Once I click, it's going
to be added to the macro. I will do the same
with other effects. More final thing that
I want is select all, which basically highlights
all the audio clips before applying those effects. It's also important to know that the layout of
these effects matter. Whichever is at number one is
going to be executed first. N is always the
very last command, so the software knows when to
finish executing the Macro. But normally, the final thing that you apply is
the normalization, it should come
after all the other Before normalization,
usually goes the compressor, and then any other effects like base boost or pitch
change above it. The very first position is occupied by the
select all commands, so the audio is selected
or highlighted, so the effects can be applied. Now that I have my macro
setup, I click save, and the next time I want to apply these effects
to my audio clip, I can go to tools, apply macro and choose my macro. I apply the macro at the very
end of my editing cycle. So after the noise
reduction and the Obviously, all of this
editing takes time, and if you have to enhance multiple voiceovers
per week or month, the time spent is going
to add up dramatically. So in the next lesson, I'll show you some
keyboard shortcuts and the tricks to edit a
lot faster in audacity.
8. Audacity Tips & Keyboard Shortcuts: In this lesson, I'll share a few useful keyboard
shortcuts that I use to make my audio editing workflow in Audacity
a lot faster. To export. I use Control or Command
Shift E then to show the full audio clip or basically to zoom out
to its full width, I use Control F to
select everything, control a to select
only one track. I double-click on it
to zoom in or out. I hold Control or Command and
scroll either up or down. And to move on horizontally
through the clip, I hold Shift and scroll up or down to cut out a
piece of the audio. I use Control X and to paste it somewhere
else, Control V. Then there are a few
custom keyboard shortcuts that I have set up in
Audacity preference sets. I've set S to insert
silence into a cleft. I've set Q to silence a selected portion of a clip here in the keyboard
preferences, you can set up your own
keyboard shortcuts for various actions or browse
through already existing ones. And maybe you'll find
some that you'll adopt for your own
specific workflow. And so when I finished editing
my voice-over in audacity, I move over to Premier Pro, which is my main video
editing software. In the next lesson, I'll show you how I add even
more simple adjustments and tweaks to my voice-over that make it sound a lot
more professionals. See you in the next lesson.
9. Enhancing Voice Over in Premiere Pro: There are three total
steps I take to enhance my voice-over audio once I
import it into Premier Pro, number one, graphic equalizer. So find the Audio
Effects and Premier, whereas shift seven
and then type in the name of the effect. Once you find it, click and drag it onto your
audio clip in the timeline, then highlight the clip
with your mouse and press Shift F5 to open the
effects controls panel. Here you can see what effects
you've added to your clip. Click Edit on the
graphic equalizer. This audio effect
lets me get rid of those audio frequencies that the human voice
doesn't even reach. So they can only hold a certain background noise which obstructs the clarity
of the voice-over. I take the very
last two sliders on both ends of the
frequency spectrum and move them all the
way to the bottom. Then with the other two, I gradually bring the volume back so that the
transition isn't as noticeable and this
is how it looks at the end number two,
parametric equalizer. This effect, if done correctly, is going to make your
audio sound horrible, or if done correctly, the best in the game. Again, click Shift seven to open effects and
search for equalizer. Then drag parametric
equalizer to your audio clip, highlight the clip
and Shift F5 to Open Effect Controls
and then edit. Then what I do is
from the presets, I choose a vocal enhancer. This is just a preset
by Premier and it's a great starting point from
which I can start tweaking. As you can see, it boosts the lower end and
the higher end of my voice, or the bass and treble. And the third point puts some of the nastier sounding
aspects of my voice a little down since I think this preset is very good
by default from here, There's only one little
thing that I do, and it's that I boost my lower end frequency
by three more decibels. So 6-9, if you're a female, boosting the base
of your voice too much is probably
not a good idea, but if you're male like me, than a subtle increase
in the lower end will make your voice
sound a lot more manly. Number three, hard limiter, press Shift seven
to open the effects controls panel and
search for limiter. This effect is very similar
to the limiter in audacity, but I just apply it. So the audio is
maximum level is -0.1. Then I said the input
boost to four dB. This suddenly boosts
my audio volume, but not too much to
make it sound seemingly compressed and clipped and they leave the other
sliders the same. Here's how the same
audio clips sounds before and after all the
effects are applied. Once you find it, click and drag it onto your
audio clip in the timeline. Once you find it, click and drag it onto your
audio clip in the timeline. After setting up these
audio effects, once, I can now create a preset
and apply all of them to any future voiceover clips
that I record in an instant. I'll show you how to do
that in the next lesson.
10. Creating a Preset in Premiere Pro: In this lesson, I'll show
you how to create and apply an audio preset
in Premier Pro. Once I've applied the
effects to my voice-over, I can select the audio clip and then press Shift F5 to
open the effects panel. Then hold Command on Mac
or Control on Windows and select all of the effects that I want to go into that preset. From here, I can right-click
and choose Save Preset. In the next pop-up window, I'll choose a name
for the preset and leave this set to scale, since this actually won't
matter for audio effect. Now the next time you import
unedited piece of audio into Premier Pro will be
able to click Shift seven to open the effects panel. And then under Presets, find the preset that
you've just created. You can also search for it
through the search bar. Now all you have to do is select your audio clip and drag
this preset onto them. You'll notice that now all
of the effects have been applied to every single
audio clip from here, I can choose to fine
tune the effects or as I do normally
just leave them as is because I tried to record my audio in the same
environment every time. But of course, creating a preset is just
one of many tricks that saved me a lot of time when editing a voice-over
in Premiere. That's why in the next lesson, I want to show you some more hidden tricks
and keyboard shortcuts that I use to create an incredibly efficient
editing workflow. I'll see you in the next lesson.
11. Premiere Pro Tips & Keyboard Shortcuts: In this lesson, I'll show you useful keyboard
shortcuts along with some tips and tricks I use for editing audio
in Premier Pro, since I cut up my audio to
remove dead space in Premier, it's useful to know how to copy audio effects from
one clip to another. Select one clip, hit Control C, and then on another
clip Control Alt V. And you'll be able to
select the attributes or the effects that you want to
paste to that clip on Mac, it's Command C and
Command Option V. Next up, when I cut up audio, not only do I delete the spaces and breaths
in the middle, I also make one end of
a sentence overlap, another one like this. It's a great trick to improve viewer attention,
especially on YouTube. Since now there's no gap in between the last and
the next sentence. And so the viewer
doesn't have to wait that extra millisecond for
the next sentence to start. Useful keyboard shortcuts
for trimming out ends of sentences or the q and w keys. When I have a clip
selected and press W, it cuts out everything that's on the right side
of my playhead. And when I press Q, it cuts out everything that's
on the left, my playhead, this makes it extremely easy to cut out parts of your
audio since now, you don't need to
get the Cut tool and then play with it to
delete the empty space. In fact, I never
use the Cut tool. It's also useful to hold Shift and scroll to make the
audio tracks bigger. Alternatively, you can hold Shift and the drag one
of the audio tracks, which will set all
the other ones to the same size and to reset
size to default hold shift, and double-click on
this area right here. What I also do is lock
my audio tracks that have the voiceover since the voice-over is the first
thing that I edit, I want to make sure
that after I'm done, I don't mess it up when adding B-roll or trimming
other clips of bar. Now if your video is made up of some sort of chapters
or sections, it's also useful to color-code your audio tracks and know
where the next chapter begins. You can right-click
and choose label and then pick from any
of these color options. What's also useful,
or audio transitions, especially when working with music tracks and sound design. The only transition that I use is the default one
that premier sets up. And it's just like
cross dissolve. But for audio, you can select
the end of any audio clip, right-click, and choose
apply default transition. Now the audio will nicely
fade out to when the clip, and if you don't like
the length of it, you can grab the transition
and extended or even better, set a new length as
your default one. The next time that you
apply the transition, go to Premier
Preferences Timeline, and change the audio
Transition Default Duration to something that you prefer. You can also set the duration
in frames or second. Now that you know the
essential tips and shortcuts for editing
audio in Premier, I also wanted to show
you how I set up my audio loudness
levels in a way so that the background
music doesn't overpower my voice-over
or vice versa. I'll show you how to do
that in the next lesson.
12. Levelling Voiceover With Background Music and Sound Effects: In this lesson,
I'll show you how I balance my voice-over
loudness levels with background music and other sound effects for
YouTube videos or courses. Adding music to a
voice-over can make the videos seem
friendlier and not so awkward to the viewer
because there are no silences and
pauses in the audio. So I always try to
have background music covering at least 90%
of my voice-over. However, it's very
important to set up the audio levels correctly
so that the listener hears both the music and
the audio effects and your voice-over without each of those tracks
overwhelming each other. A rule of thumb, thumb that
I use for this is that the voice-over levels are in between minus six
and minus one dB. The Audio Effects levels
lie in-between -18 and -20. For the background
music is around -30 db to see at which level your audio is
playing in Premiere, just expand this audio
panel a little bit and then click the S for the track that you
want to listen to. This will make it so you only hear that track
and nothing else. So you'll clearly see
the levels on the right. Now there are two main ways of how I set these tracks to be, add those specific levels. The first one is just by expanding the audio
track and then dragging the loudness line down or up until I reach the desired
level the second way, and the one that I use more often is by going to
the effects panel searching for hard limiter and then dragging it
onto the audio clip. Then in the effect
controls panel, I click Edit and set the
maximum amplitude to the maximum loudness level that I want the AudioClip to reach. This is just a more
precise way of doing it. I can then also copy
this effect over to other clips that I want to
have the same audio level. Of course, if you feel
like the music still overwhelms the audio
or is too silent, you can adjust the
levels accordingly. These are just rough
guidelines which I follow for setting up
my loudness level. And so once your voice-over
sounds good with all the audio effects and
background music added. It's time for the cherry on top, and that's exporting
your audio correctly. That's why in the next lesson, I'll show you the best premier audio export settings
for YouTube. See you there.
13. Best Audio Export Settings for YouTube in Premiere Pro: This lesson, I'll show you the best audio export
settings for YouTube. YouTube as most other
video platforms, adjust the videos audio levels when the video is
uploaded to the platform. This is done, so the
audio levels sound consistent across different videos from
different channels, and the user doesn't have to constantly adjust
his device's volume. In order to get the
best audio quality possible on YouTube, you can match YouTube's
desired sound profile to your videos sound profile So when you're in
the export tab, select effects and then
loudness normalization. Choose ITU and then
set the target loudness to -14 loudness
units full scale. Then tolerance to zero and Mx true peak level to minus one. These are the settings
that will give you the best audio levels
specifically for YouTube.
14. Conclusion: Congratulations, you've done it. Thank you for embarking on this incredible journey with me. I hope that now
you'll be able to improve your voice over quality. Because look, all that it took was engineering
your environment in a way so that the microphone doesn't pick up
background noises, applying a few effects
in Premier and audacity, creating presets so that you don't have to do
this all over again. So if there's one
thing I hope you take away from this class
is that creating a professional sounding
voice-over doesn't require expensive gear
or a studio setup. That's why I encourage you to share two of your
own audio clips. One without any postproduction
and environment design, and the other one with
in the project gallery. And just one last thing, could you do me a favor
and helped me improve by leaving the review for this
course just out of curiosity, I want to know what
you thought about it. What do you know? It
might just make my day.
Thaomaoh, Learn Creatorpreneur Skills
