6.3 Adjusting the Volume of Your Tracks

In this lesson, you will learn how to adjust the audio of your tracks so they can sound appropriate for your video. In a relatively simple project like this, there's only one audio track that we have to worry about. Now there was audio in all of these cutaway shots here, but I didn't wanna include that in this project. I only wanted the audio from these wide shots here, because that has Cheryl's microphone on it, and that's what I wanted to work with. So let me start at the beginning here and play this down for a couple of seconds, and just listen to the audio. >> Have you ever had a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that left something to be desired? It can be daunting trying to find just the right recipe, not flat, not too dry, delicious flavor, picture perfect, and best of all, easy. Hi, my name is Cheryl Ziegler. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to make big bakery style chocolate chip cookies. >> So the question comes up, is that loud enough? Now compared to my voice, the volume of those clips is pretty low. And if you saw in the master meters here, if I play back, just a portion of that again. Hi, my name is Cheryl Ziegler. And in this video I'm going to show you how to make big bakery style chocolate chip cookies. >> We're getting some peaks that are landing around negative 6 decibels and then a lot of the other stuff is around negative 12 decibels, which is, I would say a little bit on the low side. So let's talk about how to adjust this up just a little bit. Now as you may have guessed from the audio transitions lesson, we can use these clip volume keyframes here to make volume adjustments, and we'll look at how to do that in just a second. But there's another way that we can kind of globally adjust the volume for all of these clips at the same time, and that's through a process called normalization. What normalization does is essentially take the loudest peak in a given clip, and it sets that to a specified level. So for example, If I select this clip right here, and I right click on it, and I choose Audio Gain, this will bring up a dialog box with a few options. I can increase the volume here by a certain amount, I can normalize the max peak to a specific level, then I have another option here to normalize all peaks. Now, you might think that, that would normalize every peak in this particular clip, but this is actually an option that you use when you select multiple clips. So if I wanted to just normalize this clip, I might normalize it to something like negative 2. I don't want it to be peaking right at 0 decibels but I wanna bring it up quite a bit. And it already shows me that the peak amplitude for this clip is negative 7.1, which means that If I normalize this to negative 2, it's gonna bring this up about 5 decibels. And watch what happens to these waveforms when I press OK. They got a lot bigger, so now I'll play this from the beginning and you'll notice that it's quite a bit punchier. >> Have you ever had a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that left something to be desired? It can be daunting trying to find. >> It's a lot louder, and I think it sounds quite a bit better. I'm gonna undo that, because I can do that same process to all of these clips. What I'm gonna do is select all of these clips, and then press G on the keyboard, which is gonna bring up that Audio Gain dialog box, it's the keyboard shortcut. And now it's telling me that the peak amplitude on all of these clips is 3.4. Which means that some of these clips are going to be a little bit quieter, some of them are a little bit louder. The loudest one is somewhere in the neighborhood of negative 3.4 decibels. But let's say, we wanted to normalize all the peaks, which means the peak in each one of these clips to, let's say, negative 2. You'll see that it looks like everything came up a little bit. Now all of these individual clips have been normalized to a more consistent level, they've all been brought up by various amounts. Let me play it a little bit for you. >> Just the right recipe. Not flat, not too dry, delicious flavor, picture perfect, and best of all, easy. Hi, my name is Cheryl Ziegler. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to make big bakery style chocolate chip cookies. First, let's go over the ingredients. You will need two cups of all purpose flour. >> You can hear that these three clips now sound nice and punchy, and the volume level between them sounds pretty well matched. I am going to switch projects here for just a second because I wanna show you that you can adjust the gain of a master clip so that any instances that you pull into a new sequence will have the same gain level adjustment. And to do that, you need to select the Master Clip in the Project panel and already have this loaded up here in the source monitor. Let's check out the audio here, I'm just gonna zoom all the way out. If I wanted to adjust the gain or normalize this master clip, I would select the clip right here. And then I could come up to Clip, Audio Options, Audio Gain, or I could use the keyboard shortcut, which is G. That'll bring up the same Audio Gain dialog box here, this clip already has a peak amplitude of 0 decibel. So if I try to normalize it to negative 2, it's actually gonna turn it down. So just for the sake of visualization, I'm gonna jack up the gain here By 10 decibels, and you can see what that did right up here to the master clip. So I'll just select a little bit here, and then I'll pull this down here. If you take a look at the audio on this clip, you can see that the audio is much louder because these waveforms are much bigger than all the other instances of the same exact clip that were already in the sequence. So unlike master clip effects, the change that you make with the audio gain to the master clip will not ripple down to all the child clips that you may have in your sequences. However, this is not the end of the world, if you needed to readjust the game between these clips, we can do that because this audio game change here is not destructive. Meaning any changes you make to clips in Premiere, whether it's a video change or an audio change, do not affect the original clip, it doesn't affect the original source material. So when you normalize this clip, it did not rewrite the audio over the original clip. It's simply making an adjustment inside of Premiere, so that the next time you pull this clip in, it has that audio adjustment. Which means I can go back once this clip is in my sequence, and I can select multiple clips. I go to Audio Gain and renormalize all of these clips to something like negative 2, and you'll see that change will be updated here. However, if I pull this clip back into the sequence, you can see that it's going to have that same audio gain adjustment that I made previously to the master clip. So if you do need to make an adjustment to your source clips, you probably wanna do that before you start pulling them into your sequence. If you see that you have a source clip that has a lower audio level, go ahead and normalize that in the Project panel. Then when you start pulling clips into your sequence, they will all have that appropriate volume level. But if you made that change after you already started pulling clips into your sequence, it's not the end of the world. You can go back to this clip here and you can reset the gain back to 0. And now when I pull this clip in, the gain is going to be set right back where it was before I made any adjustments. So there's a lot of flexibility here in normalizing these clips. You can normalize your master source clip over here, and then start pulling things into your project. Or if you think it's at an appropriate level, you can just start editing away, and then if you need to make an adjustment later, select your clips, press G on the keyboard, and then make whatever adjustment you need to do. Now when we got into this CCI_Ingredients_Wide shot here, the volume sounded like it dipped down just a little bit. So I might wanna come in here and make a more targeted volume adjustment to this clip. So I'm gonna zoom up here, and very similar to how I made an adjustment with the fade outs or the fade ins of individual clips. I'm gonna drop a few keyframes here, and I'm gonna scroll over here, and I'm gonna take this beginning section here, and I'm just gonna push that up just a few decibels here. >> First, let's go over the ingredients. You will need two cups of all purpose flour, half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a teaspoon of kosher salt. >> And that's a really fast way of making some targeted volume adjustments. If there was a section that Cheryl maybe trailed off a little bit, maybe at the end of a clip, >> Nella's extract and two cups of chocolate chips, >> Maybe I'd like to bring up the part where she says chocolate chips a little bit. I would drop a few keyframes here and maybe just push this up just a hair. >> Cups of chocolate chips. >> Now the reason I dropped two keyframes is, if I just put one keyframe here, and if there was a keyframe after this, and a keyframe before this which there is. If I just pull this up here, the volume is going to increase over this time period here, which is not what I wanted, I wanna undo that. I use two keyframes, and that way I can make a volume adjustment here, and then the volume before this first keyframe here remains untouched. So usually, I'll drop two keyframes when I'm making these adjustments, I'm just gonna undo that. So you can use the normalization method and clip volume keyframes to make those adjustments, to make sure the audio is at an appropriate level. In the next lesson, you will learn about the basic audio clip effects and audio track effects in Premiere Pro.