How to remove Echo in video in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, in this video we're going to remove echo from our recordings. This is something that I shot in my kitchen, never record in your kitchen, it's so echoey. I'm going to play it a couple of times with the effects that we do on and off, so you can kind of hear the difference, and then we'll get started, you ready? 

We'll start with it sounding very echoey. "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way of choosing fonts." "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way of choosing fonts." "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way of choosing fonts." I might have overcooked mine a tiny bit in this tutorial, but it's pretty amazing what you can do, with the Reduce Reverb effect in Premiere Pro, let's jump in and get to it. 

All right, let's start with importing, from the 'Sound' folder, something called 'Echo', and let's make a new sequence from it. Let's use our shortcut, 'Option +' to zoom in on the audio, have a little look, let's listen. "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my…" Pretty bad, so I'll set my 'I' key, my 'O' key, make sure that I've got the loop playback on, if you can't see it, "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" So it's pretty bad. Never record anything in your kitchen, even if you think it's a really good intro to a show, anything with hard surfaces is bad for echo. So let's click on it, and let's go, you're a 'Dialogue', and we're under the 'Repair', and we want this one here, it's called 'Reverb'. 

You know why they call it echo, I'd call it echo because that's what everyone calls it, but if you're in the sound game, you are calling the-- echo is wrong, you got to call it Reverb. So what we need to do is 'Reduce Reverb', there's not a lot we can do, you just drag it up and down, and decide on, if it's enough. So let's have a maximum amount, let's have a listen. "Today I'm going to take you through my way…" It's pretty cool, like it's not good, like it's way too high but it's amazing, how much echo you can get rid of. "Today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today I'm going to…" 

You would have noticed there, that I'm not dragging it up and down while it's playing. You might have run into this earlier in the course, when we started sound, well a couple of videos ago, so I should have probably thrown it in there, but let's watch what happens. I'm going to hit 'Play', and drag this up and down. "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today…" I'm just kind of like listening with my ear going, like how much of this can I apply, because it does adjust as we're going. 

What you might find is, especially if you're using this one, "Today I'm going to take you through my way…” Watch what happens when I drag it up and down. "Today I'm going to take you…" "Get up, today I'm going to take you…" Can you see all these like keyframes that have appeared, yours might not have happened, you might not be playing it this way, if you play it this way and start dragging this up and down, it adds a bunch of keyframes. Basically, it's going up and down, while I was dragging it, can you see? Let's watch this number here, 'Amount', can you see, it goes up, "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" That's a pain in the bum, I don't know how to, well, I know how to stop it, you can turn those off, delete the keyframes, and now what we'll do is we'll play it. 

"Today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" Basically, start at one side and keep going, until you notice it, and then come back. So I like starting at the top, and just keep lowering it, until I feel like it's gone, and that's Reduce Reverb. You can go into here and have a look, because it's a Reverb, effect, go to 'Edit', there's not a lot you can do in here, you can just drag the slider up and down, which is the same as doing it over here. There's some presets, but basically they just move this to, they just move that slider up and down, so there's not a lot you can do. "Today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today…" I can see what it's doing, Light Reverb. 

One thing that I'll mention here as well, is we've been using, like dialog, slide, reverb, go into here, if you know you just need reverb you can go to your 'Effects', - mine are over here in this kind of workspace. - and just type in "Dereverb", and just go straight to the source, and just drag it straight on. There's nothing different here, but you'll probably find, you'll end up adding a few of them. So in this case, you know, that's it, add reverb, lower reverb, it's not going to get rid of everything, but it's pretty amazing how much it can get rid of, but if you're like, "Oh, there's still a hint of reverb," it's pretty impossible if it's really bad, in my experience. 

Next thing I want to show you is, like often we're not just doing these things in isolation, like I was using this lapel mic and it was okay, now there's a bunch of stuff you can hear in the background, in this clip. There's always a bit of pre-roll, you can find, I've left this bit in here, there's like, it's just me not doing anything, so let's have a look. Actually, let's clear the in and outs, and see what else can get rid of, I like to work in these, echo, you need to listen to the dialogue, but over here there's no echo, but there's some stuff going on, junk, noise floor, let's have a look. 

So I want to find a bit that, not doing my sucking lips and drinking stuff, so something like that, let's preview that. Can you see, so much going on. So what I want to do is a couple of things. It's this balancing act now, that, I've shown you Noise in isolation, and DeHum in isolation and DeEssing, and all that sort of stuff, so it gets to jobs like this, where you need a bit of it all, and why do you need it all? Because Reduce Noise, especially if you're in this bit, if I just turn on Reduce Noise and crank it up, watch this, it just goes flat, you're like, "Done, job done." The problem is that when you add, that much level of denoising to, the dialogue as well, "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way…" 

It makes me sound a little bit robotic. So what you need to do is this, balancing of all of these, Reduce Reverb, get it to a nice point, make sure the dialogue's okay, and in this case, the noise, just sounding a bit too robotic. "Today I'm going to take you through my way…" Trying to find a nice place, and the other bit is adding a bit of, in my case I'm in my kitchen, there is this DeHum in here, I can kind of hear it when I was practicing. So I'm going to set my out point, and I'm going to listen. 

Now this is a little hard, you know, get the file yourself, set the in and out points, play around with the DeHum, on and off, I'm in Ireland so it's going to be probably the 50 Hertz, I know because it's me, I know where I live, but there's going to be this balance of, how much DeHumming versus how much Noise, to get it to sound like pretty clear here, without the dialogue sounding bad. So kind of something like this where you can hear a bit of it all. "Get up…" "Get up…" Now just turning DeHum on and off, while it's playing. "Get up…" "Get up…" Just have a listen yourself, and work out this kind of balancing, of all of the different parts, because the DeHummer, remember, what was it, DeHummer, removes like certain parts of the frequency, not all of my voice, whereas the DeNoiser, which is like a blanket one, kind of gets rid of lots of voice, lots of background noise. 

It's pretty, you know it messes with my voice quite a bit, so it's nice to just get in these tiny little pieces removed from my voice, rather than this big kind of chunk that gets removed. "Get up…" Large kind of parts, anyway, in these low frequencies. So it's a little bit of each, tweaking, finding what works for you, in your situation. Also, before we go, if you haven't seen it, I'll play a snippet, that's what this recording was from, let me play you just the first few seconds. "Get up, today I'm going to take you through my way of choosing fonts." 

So that was where I shot it for, just a little intro for these kind of sort of things, if you haven't seen the Bring Your Own Laptop show, it's free, it's on YouTube, check it out, like and subscribe, it's kind of short pieces, edutainment, is what it's called, a little bit lighter, and less software focused than what we're doing here. What you might have noticed, well, if you heard it there, the echo is still there, why is the echo still there? It happens to me all the time I'm in Premiere Pro, I'm fixing stuff, turning it on and off, but it's part of like, that one there's like an hour long, so there's like 100 little changes that I've made, and I've gone and done something like this where, I've turned it off, turned it on, oh, it's great, and then left it off and rendered, and it's gone out, and because it's a production team of two, or for that show, that particular episode, that was just a production team of one, just me, recording, editing, and end up just leaving it off. It's been a lot of work getting rid of the echo, and left it on, and it's now stuck in YouTube, and you can't replace it, so there you go. 

All right, that is it, removing echo, but you got to call it Reverb from now on, I'll see you in the next video.