6.4 Audio Effects

In this lesson you will learn about the basic audio clip effects and audio track effects in Premiere Pro, similar to applying video effects to individual clips, you can also apply audio effects to individual clips. Over here in the effects panel. If you drill down on the audio effects, you'll see there is a range of audio effects at your disposal. And if I wanted to make a little frequency adjustment on one of these clips here, I could do that. I would come over here and I would search for something like EQ.And I would bring that in and apply that to this clip and then over here in the effects controls I would make some adjustments here. In this case, this effect has a little pop up here, so I would probably do something like apply a little low cut, I would add just a little bit of those high frequencies back because the microphone is located under Cheryl's shirt here, so it's losing some of those really high frequencies. And then I might take a middle frequency somewhere around maybe 370 or 360 hertz, and I would pull that down a little bit, just a hair, and check out what this sounds like. >> That's before chocolate chip cookies that left something to be desired. It can be daunting trying to find just the right recipe. >> And now listen to the difference when it's off. >> Cookies that left something to be desired. It can be daunting trying to find just the right recipe. >> I think it makes it sound pretty nice. The problem is just like with those video effects, what if I wanted this audio effect to apply to multiple clips? Unfortunately, master clip effects do not work with audio. If I hit F here and I bring up the master clip, and I try to apply an EQ to it, you can't. This is only for video effects. But there's another way and it's very easy. And if you come up to window here, come down and select audio track mixer. Now you may have noticed that there's also an audio clip mixer on here. Let me just pull that over so it's right next door. These mixers do a different thing. The audio clip mixer is essentially another way to make volume adjustments on individual clips. So with this clip selected, you can see that the volume is showing right here a zero decibels. Watch what happens when I hit the home button. Now it's at negative infinity and if I play this clip. >> Have >> You can see that this fader here did a little fade up exactly like what these key frames are doing down here on this clip. Most of the time I never use this audio clip mixer panel because I prefer to just drop keyframes in here and adjust the volume that way. This other panel here I use all the time. This represents the volume on the track level. Which means, instead of making adjustments to individual clips, what I can do is make adjustments to everything on this truck. Which in audio, makes a heck of a lot of sense. If I had to project with multiple microphones and more multiple people speaking, it would make sense to keep all of those microphones on the same track. So if I had Cheryl speaking, I would keep her on audio track number 1, if I had Bob speaking, I would keep him on audio track number 2. And the reason is I can apply effects that will be suitable for Cheryl's voice and Bob's voice individually and it'll apply to the entire track. To do that, I come over here to the audio track mixer, and there's a little twirl down right here, which is the show hide effects incense. So I click that, and now I have this sort of effects rack here that I can click and then add effects. So if I wanted to add that EQ here, I'd come down to filter and EQ, and then add that EQ. And now if I double-click on it here, I can make those same adjustments. Now if you want to find out more about why I'm making these particular adjustments I have an entire course dedicated to audio processing for video and you can find that on tutsplus.com, for right now, I just want you to understand the process of applying these track effects and clip effects and not be so caught up in the why I'm making these particular adjustments because that's outside the scope of this course. So with those adjustments made now if I play this track. >> 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. >> It will sound exactly like when I applied this effects, and I made this adjustments to this individual clip. But now this iCUE is applied to everything on this track. So if I just to a later time. >> The standard 375 degrees because we're making extra large cookies, so we wanna take the low and slow approach. >> This EQ is applied here as well. So you can use these audio track effects to apply your audio to everything on the track and that's very, very useful. Typically what I will do is I'll apply an EQ. And then I'll come down here and I'll grab something like a dynamics processor. And this will help me to just level out the dynamic changes in this track. So it essentially takes the louder stuff and it squishes that back down to a quieter level, and then brings everything else up. So, it reduces the dynamic range so that it's just a little bit easier to listen to. So I'm gonna rewind here and just dial in a few settings. >> The 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 Sheryl 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, half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a teaspoon of kosher salt Three-quarters of a cup. >> So I make some adjustments with the compressor until I thought it sounded right. And you may have noticed while I was making those adjustments that these little red lights over here on this meter lit up. These are audio clip indicators, which means that the audio has reached a very bad level. It has either met or exceeded the zero decibel mark and in digital audio we can't have anything go past zero decibels. Because essentially what happens is the wave forms get clipped off or they get squared off and it sounds really nasty. So to prevent this, what I'm gonna do is come over here to the master track, which is right here, and I'm gonna apply another dynamics processor. When I double click to open it, I'm gonna take off the compressor and I'm gonna turn on the limiter in turn off the threshold to. Maybe negative 2, and that's it. And now no matter how loud any track gets in this entire project. The master audio level or the master audio track will never get louder than negative 2 decibels. All the other tracks are routed to this master Channel. You can see that right here. And so it wouldn't matter if I had one track or 10 tracks with audio on them. If I enable this limiter on the master track and I set the threshold to negative two decibels, the audio won't get louder than negative two decibels. I'm just going to click these clip indicators here. And let me show you exactly what that's going to do. I'm going to come back to the dynamics here for this audio track one, and I'm going to crank that all the way up now. You'd probably never do this in real life. But just for this demonstration, I want to show you what's gonna happen. Then I'll bring up the dynamics processor for the master track here and watch what's going to happen. >> Have melted butter, one cup of packed brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar. One egg and one egg yolk. >> Essentially, I create the volume way up on this first track here and that's almost sure to clip but when it gets to the master track, it's never going to go louder than negative to decibels. And this is a great insurance policy for your projects to make sure that you're not exporting projects with audio that sounds all nasty and distorted because it's way too loud. In every single one of my projects, I always have a limiter on that master audio track to prevent things from getting too loud, and out of hand. I'm just gonna jump back here and reset this to a more appropriate level >> You will need two cups of all purpose flour, half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a teaspoon of kosher salt, 3 quarters of a cup of melted butter, one cup of packed brown sugar In your audio track mixer, you can apply up to five effects here. And in almost all cases, that's usually plenty. And there are a ton of audio effects in here. There's a few different compressors, there's a few different EQ. There's some other wacky stuff in the modulation. There's some very, very basic and I would say not super useful noise reduction. For some more advanced noise reduction. You wanna use a program like Adobe Audition or iZotope Rx, but that's gonna be a much more advanced process. If I did wanna apply a little bit of noise reduction to this, I would probably just put on this Denoiser here, double click to bring it up. >> 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. >> And then just turn down this reduction knob. It actually sounds like it's doing a fairly reasonable job in this particular case, but most of the time, I find this to be just a little bit of a crude Audio effect and I usually don't go for it. But just like with the video effects, there's a lot of audio effects here that you can experiment with, and tweak up your audio, and make it sound great. And again, for more information on advanced audio processing, check out my course on Advanced Audio Processing for Video available on Tutsplus.com So again, applying effects in this track mixer is very handy. Now this doesn't mean that you'll never apply audio effects to individual clips. A lot of times you'll have maybe a B roll sound elements or you'll have a track with many different audio elements on it. Maybe you have some nature sounds. Maybe you have some Footsteps or some other sound effects. And in that particular case, it doesn't make sense to put every single one of those on individual tracks. And so in that instance, what you would do is apply those audio effects directly to the clip because you just have one instance of them. On your timeline. If you had several instances of kind of natural outside ambient sounds, you may wanna put those all on one track. And then use these track effects with the audio track mixer to apply EQ and compression and other audio effects to those particular clips. But if you have one or two in your timeline, Applying an individual audio effect to that clip is probably the best solution. So now that you have a basic understanding of audio clip effects, and audio track effects, you're ready to move on to the next lesson, where you're going to learn how to add some basic titles to your video.