How to remove echo reverb from your video in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, we're going to remove the echo, or the reverb. You can't call that echo, if you call that echo, you'll have a bunch of people saying, "It's not echo, it's reverb." Whatever you want to call it, it's the kind of bouncing noise. It sounds like you're recording in the toilet, let's have a little listen. I'll turn my Effects one on and off. "Hi everyone, I'm recording on a really good microphone, but I'm in a room full of hard surfaces." "Let's just say it's the kitchen, definitely not the toilet." There you go. Reverb's easy; 'Essential Sound', crank up the 'Reduce Reverb'. Be prepared though, it's not going to be absolutely 100% perfect, you can make it better, but you can't make it great. Let's jump in now, and show you how to do it in Premiere Pro. 

To remove the reverb we're going to use sequence, Fixing Audio. I'm going to zoom out. And the audio is in Audio. This one, it's called Reverb, just a plain old mp3. Drag it on, it's going to have no video, we're just going to keep it separate. Let's have a quick little listen together. "Hi everyone, I'm recording on a really good microphone, but I'm in a room full of hard surfaces." "Let's just say it's the kitchen, definitely not the toilet." My lame joke, seems funny at the time, you have to live with it. Could you hear it there? I'll play it one more time. "Recording on a really good microphone." Can you hear it, that reverb, that echo? 

To remove it, we're going to select on this, we're going to go to 'Dialogue', and you're like, "I saw it before," there it is, there. So Reduce Reverb, let's click on it, and we're going to decide how high or low this goes. I'm not sure why zooming in helps. Makes me feel like I'm getting more in there. Let's have a listen. "Hi everyone, I'm recording on a really good microphone, but I'm in a room full of hard surfaces.” A lot better. 

The trouble always with reverb is, that you can never ever get rid of it all. If you're thinking, let's keep cranking it up, let's have a listen to robot Dan. "Let's just say it's the kitchen, definitely not the toilet." "Recording on a really good microphone." Sounds like now. There's no reverb but it sounds like, I don't know, I'm recording from inside a bubble. Yeah, reverb you can medicate, but you can't remove. Oh, big words, Dan. That's it, just drag the sliders up. 

Now, you can do other things as well, you might have more than just one problem, I'm isolating these. You might have reverb and a fan going in the background. So you can play around with adding all of these, but it is pretty cool that it is now built into Premiere Pro. You just have to go out to things like, audition to do a lot of these things, but they just kind of brought them into Premiere Pro, using the same technology, just inside here now, which is awesome. 

The other thing you can do is, remember, hit 'Play', and just slide this up. So we'll start quite low. "Hi everyone, I'm recording on a really good microphone, but I'm in a room full of hard surfaces." "Let's just say it's the kitchen, definitely not the toilet." So I'm just listening. “Recording on a really good microphone, but I'm in a room full of hard surfaces." I feel like, around here is where I cross over from it being noticeably echo-ey to noticeably bubbly. You'll have to decide yourself for your situation, how much it's going to happen, but be prepared for tears because, this one here, I just literally went in, recorded audio in my, maybe kitchen. It's full of hard surfaces, obviously, it's the kitchen. I haven't found the perfect example, but there are worse examples. 

So if you are recording in a, let's say a big, you know, your garage. Is it worse? Probably. There's some machines in my kitchen. Just to kind of ?? video sound, bit of angles going on, but a big square box, really bad. That's going to be it for fixing reverb in this video. I can move on to the next video now if you like. Hang around if you want to, I'm going to bore you with the details of how I fix reverb. I've kind of done battle with it, with the echo for a long time, and I'm just going to show you. I feel like I've won. 

So I started-- basically it's hard surfaces, you need to cover them with something soft. And I'll show you my progression from moving to Ireland, having a spare room, and that's what I did to it. I didn't have any blankets or anything yet, they were on a boat coming in. So I found this yanky white rug that was in the roof loft of this rental. That was one of the bed mattresses we got lent. That was my poor son's cot, and some pillows that I found, just found anything and threw into this room, and started recording. 

If you are recording into a microphone like this, instead of, like into a camera, away from where you're actually talking, so behind you. You'll notice in a lot of my videos-- let's have a little look. This one here, you'll notice that, "Hi everyone, in this series we're going to, Can you see that? That is a soft finishing. That is absorbing sound behind my screen. The screen's a bit of a pain, because it bounces the sound right back, but that's while I'm talking into right now, to try and absorb bit of the sound without it being too ugly in the screen. So my wife said, get out of the room, stop making it look terrible, like, great. So I moved down to another room, now my office, about then my office, and did the same thing. Turned that into a shanty town, you can see, let's have a look. 

The curtain's closed because that absorbs sound. So I'm living in this dark room. I found the mat out of the lounge, stuck that in there. Had to put it back in the lounge every time everybody came home. And I made this weird thing. It's meant to be this, that was cheap. See this, it's meant to be a sound microphone shield. I had no luck with it. They look cool, you can buy them, maybe it was me, I did mine with Italian material. I spent a lot of time making it, mine will look like it, and didn't work at all. 

So it was mainly to do with the room. I found, with it on and off, there was a lot of change, but then, same one, but then, don't worry, I got my own office, outside of the house. Made it even more professional one, this is bit of a blurry one, but basically I moved into this room, it had hard wood floors. Everyone in Ireland has a hard wood floor, or fake hard wood. Everything echoes, so to do the recording, this was-- like this works really well. You need some blankets and some sheets, and I set my little desk up in there, and I had to close it down, and when it got hot, I sweated, but the sound audio came out real good, especially this one at the background here, you got to stop the noise bouncing around. There you go. 

So hard wood floors, I paid for this rental office, to have carpet put down, which made a big difference. Well, it was the start, and then, I made these things, you can't really tell from this view. That's the corner of the thing, there you go. So I made these, they're basically just beached house, because it's really absorbent, and they look cool, you get good prints down on them, and I put this sound insulation behind it. It's not sound insulation, it's wall insulation. Wall, not the fiber glass stuff, you don't want breathing that in, but the nice bits of wall behind there just really help it, and also setting them off the wall. 

I think it's really good to capture sound. Basically you're trying to trap sound, that's why they call these things sound traps. I tried to make mine look fancy, with some wooden frames and some beached house. I got the beached house from Society6, if you're looking for them. You see them in all my videos, that's why they are in lots of my videos, because they're there to absorb sound. Then I moved to a new office, back to shanty town. Bloody hard wood floors again. So this one here, I stayed for a little while. I worked out of this one, and that's what it looked like. It looked nice on this side of the screen, but on backside it looked like that, and unfortunately that's what gives you the best audio. 

That is my experiments in sound. So now I'm in my, actually boarder house, and I actually have an office, where I actually can put carpet in, make it all nice, and stop the echoing, but if you are trying to capture audio, and you are at work, you might have to explain, "Can I use this spare room, and can I turn it into shanty town?," with things hanging all over the place. You might do a little bit more professionally than me, but to get started, these things here, you've seen them, probably they're e-carting stuff, you can stick up the walls. 

They're not very good. If I had the choice between a bunch of these, kind of those panels that stick to the wall, I would take a-- we call them Dotheys, Dooners, blanket, let's call it blanket. I'd rather gun staple a blanket to the wall, than a wall full of these. They don't look as nice, obviously, so you might have to do something a bit fancier, but these things are just like, they're more for packing, not for sound absorption. They do work, but not-- they're not the proper stuff anyway. 

Anybody still here? If you are, that's it. You've seen my offices, and the curse of the hard wood floor. Let's get into the next video.