How to Dehum audio in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at the DeHummer. The DeHummer removes kind of electronic rumbles from the background. We're going to go from this, you ready? "Born and raised in the Philippines…” - to – “and I have two other siblings." "I was born and raised in the Philippines, and I have two other siblings." "I was born and raised in the Philippines." All right, that's what we're going to do. We're going to DeHum it, let's jump in, oh, as well, if you're like, "I know what the DeHummer does," there’s a couple of great little shortcuts in here for, just playing audio, looping audio, yeah, some nuggets in here, stick around. 

All right, we are going to use 'Interview Sync B Cam', let's just make a new sequence, and just kind of work on it, on its own. Remember, shortcut for zooming in on audio is, 'Option +' on your keyboard, and backslash, '\', to kind of zoom in. What we're trying to do is, we're going to remove that hum, so we need to find, it's easier to remove it when there's no audio as well. That looks pretty good. So there's a guy talking in there, but I'm trying to find a bit of audio there, that seems good. "Well, I have…" All right, that seemed like a nice big long bit, I'm going to start my in point here, for that little click, out point, make sure my loop's on, then it's hard with that guy so small. Let's move this over a little bit, still can't see him, there, he is there, loop playback, don't even know if it's on, just toggle it, there we go, it's on. 

Another thing, actually, let's not use that looping, let's use the proper audio looping, so with this selected, down here, can you see, there's two things I want to show you first, before we get going, is play only audio, because that's what we're going to be working on, which is really handy, because sometimes, over here, it can be for some pretty, like hard core video going on, or you might have a really bad laptop or computer, and it's just stressing it out. So you can just actually work on the audio, without having to play this, also turn the loop on here. 

So this controls the audio looping, and just playing it, over here, is the whole thing together, that one there, the little button that normally appears there. So that's what I'm going to do. Cool, so I got a chunk in there, right? So let's add our DeNoise, let's select the whole clip, like dialogue, and I want to go 'Repair', and it's 'DeHum', actually. So DeHum, turn it up, turn it down, have a little experiment with it. What is the default down here, I can't remember. Basically, this is Hertz, so, where I live and grew up, and live now, New Zealand and Ireland, we all use power that uses a Hertz of 50 Hertz, and that's kind of the hum that you can hear in the background. 

There's a lot of electronic equipment running, what is it, I have no idea, probably some industrial thing, part of the, part of the kitchen running, that's the hum running in the background, and if you try and DeNoise on 50 Hertz, or 60 Hertz, I'm going to change it, listen, can you see, that kind of like, the weird vibration, kind of went away for 60 Hertz, but didn't work for 50. It's because they're in Hawaii, Hawaii is America, America uses 60 Hertz. 

So I found this little video, where is it, there. If you search for, you don't want to search for this, but if you did 50 Hertz versus 60 Hertz, versus 400 Hertz, you can kind of get a loud version. So this is not too loud, but if you've got headphones on, dial it back a tiny bit, listen. I'll get the editor to lower it down as well, because it's a bit loud, but you can hear that, that's the hum of my people, New Zealand, Ireland, where I am in, that's the hum that electricity makes through, like, mainly older machines, but in America you'll hear this, and you'll hear it through microphones quite a bit, it picks up that noise. 

So that hum, especially internal here, commercial equipment, that's the hum we're trying to get rid of, I don't know why I showed you that, just pick one or the other, it'll either work or it won't, but hey, now we know, oh, look at that, if you hover, most common in Europe, Asia, and Africa, most common in North and South America, here you go, and then the volume, how much it goes up and down, will depend, because what you need to do now, is we've worked out the Hertz, we need to include a little bit of audio, because we don't want to destroy her voice. Maybe we'll go this way. 

So I've got a bit of that and that, "Well, I have…" "Well, I have…" Let's turn on and off, "Well, I have…" "Well, I have..." Can you hear that kind of hum going in the background, that's the DeHummer, and actually it's not a DeHummer, that's what it's called, over here it's called the-- where's the audio, just turn it back on, there it is, it actually is called the DeHummer. You can go to 'Edit', and you can have a look at it, and if you have some sort of weird frequency that, you know, you probably don't, but you can adjust this and decide, that if you're on a plane, it's 400 Hertz, if you're in New Zealand, you're 50 Hertz, and you can adjust it, and then this other stuff, I have no idea what it does, but just getting used to, getting into these effects, and being able to maybe tweak them depending on your unique situation, "Well, I have…"

The other thing to know is that, no one thing will fix it, DeHumming is, what's happening in here, but also reduce noise. There's all sorts of other noise going on in the background, the cafe may be running, or something's happening, it's noisy. So we're going to do both, reduce noise, how much? Let's just play it. "Well, I have…" Oh, it's good, hey. 

So DeNoise does a lot of the work, I wanted to focus on DeHumming at the moment, but let's have a listen. I'm going to turn DeHum on and off as we go, and let's have a listen if it works as well, let's go. "Well, I have…" "Well, I, have..." "Well, I have…" You can hear it, right? I can hear it, it's going to be hard to hear over this audio, for this video clip, but do it yourself, mainly focusing on a bit. I'm going to turn on again, listen quietly, hear that rumble gone. We're getting a bit finicky here, but hey, we could slap some music underneath it, it's not going to work for this interview, so we do need to clean it up. So the DeNoise is doing a great, most of the job, and DeHumming is like the little extra bit you do. 

Another useful thing for turning all these effects on and off, because you want to hear it, like it's pretty amazing, what we can do here in Premiere Pro, let's listen. "Well, I have…" So I'm going to turn all these off at once, so I'm going to hold down my 'Option' key on a Mac, or 'Alt' key on a PC, and you can click one of them, and they all go off. There's no like big giant button to turn all the effects off, maybe there's one, if you can see one, let me know, I can-- that's one of my things with audio, there's no, like giant button up here that says, turn all off. So that's what I do, click this one off, and then we're going to turn on and off, listen. "Well, I have…" "Well, I have…" Oh, so good. All right, that is the DeHummer in Premiere Pro, let's get on to the next video.