How to remove echo reverb from your video in Premiere Pro
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Overview
I am here to help you learn Adobe Premiere Pro and to show you the tools you need to become a successful video editor. Premiere Pro is the industry standard used by professional designers to create stunning, high class videos and, after completing this course, you too can become a confident, skillful and efficient creator of stunning videos.
This course is aimed at people who are completely new to Premiere Pro.
If you are self taught using Premiere, this course will show you techniques you never dreamed were necessary or possible and will show you efficiencies to help speed up your workflow.
The course covers many topics - all of them on a step-by-step basis. We will use real world video editing examples to work through:
- An interview
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We will work with text, animation, motion gfx, special effects and we will add music to our video.
We will learn how to do colour correction, colour balancing and also how to create amazing video transitions within our movie. Technical ‘guru’ topics such as HD v 4K, frames per second, exporting work, fixing up bad audio, balancing and synching audio will all become manageable tasks for you. Best of all...I will show you amazing shortcuts and techniques to speed up your workflow.
Throughout the course we will work on mini projects and I will be suggesting assignments which will add value to your portfolio.
Start your Premiere Pro training now and fast track your career as a video editor.
* Please note, you have full permission to transform and upload any work using footage of Daniel as a part of this course.
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Transcript
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.
Can Premiere Pro remove echo or reverb from audio?
Premiere Pro can reduce room reverb very effectively with the Reduce Reverb control in the Essential Sound panel. It cannot perfectly restore heavily reflected audio, though, and pushing the effect too far makes speech sound oddly bubbled or as if it was recorded inside a tiny bubble.
How to Remove Reverb in Premiere Pro and Stop It Coming Back
First, it is probably reverb, not echo. Call it echo if you like, but technically this is usually reverb. It is that unpleasant bouncy sound you get when recording in a room full of hard surfaces, where your voice seems to ricochet off walls, floors, windows, screens, and cupboards. The result can make a perfectly good microphone sound like it has been set up in a bathroom. Or a kitchen. Definitely not a toilet.
The good news is that Premiere Pro has a very quick built in way to improve it. The realistic news is that you can make bad reverb better, but you cannot usually make it completely disappear and sound flawless.
Reduce Reverb in Premiere Pro
For a straightforward reverb fix, use the Essential Sound panel. It works for an audio clip on its own just as well as audio connected to video.
Select the audio clip in the timeline.
Open Essential Sound.
Assign the clip to Dialogue.
Find Repair and enable Reduce Reverb.
Raise the slider gradually while listening to the result.
Select the clip, classify it as Dialogue, then use the Reduce Reverb control in Essential Sound.
That is the whole technical fix. Premiere Pro now includes this kind of audio clean-up directly in the editing application, using technology that once meant jumping out to Audition for much of the work. That is a genuinely handy upgrade.
Do Not Crank the Slider to Maximum
The temptation is obvious: if some reverb reduction is good, loads must be better. Sadly, that is where speech starts to go weird. At a modest setting, the room sound becomes far less distracting. Push it too hard and the reverb may be reduced further, but the voice develops a processed, hollow, bubbly quality.
That is the trade-off. Reverb reduction is mitigation, not magic removal. The goal is not necessarily to remove every last reflection. The goal is to get the voice clear enough that the processing itself does not become the new problem.
Find the Crossover Point by Listening
Play the clip and slowly move the Reduce Reverb slider upward. Listen for the moment where the sound crosses over from noticeably roomy to noticeably processed. Back it off a little from there.
Your ideal setting will depend on the recording. A mildly reflective room may need only a small adjustment. A large, empty garage or a square room with hard walls can be much harder to rescue. There is no universal number, so trust your ears rather than chasing a maximum setting.
You might also be dealing with more than reverb. A room could have a fan or other background noise as well. In that case, experiment with the other dialogue repair controls too, but address each problem carefully instead of throwing every setting at maximum strength.
The Best Reverb Fix Happens Before You Record
Software is excellent for saving an imperfect recording, but the best audio comes from stopping sound from bouncing around in the first place. Reverb is largely a room problem. Hard surfaces reflect sound, so the practical answer is to add soft, absorbent materials.
If you are recording into a microphone close to you, rather than relying on a camera microphone positioned farther away, pay particular attention to what is behind you. That is where your voice travels after passing the microphone, and those reflections can come right back into the recording.
A screen behind a desk can be a nuisance because it reflects sound straight back. Adding soft material behind or around that area helps absorb those reflections without necessarily making the whole place look completely ridiculous. Although, to get good audio on a budget, a little ridiculous is sometimes the price.
Start With Whatever Soft Stuff You Have
You do not need an immaculate professional studio to make a worthwhile difference. The early approach can be extremely basic: gather soft things and put them in the room. Rugs, spare mattresses, pillows, curtains, blankets, and duvets all help because they absorb sound rather than reflect it.
This can turn a spare room into something that looks less like an office and more like a shanty town. It is not glamorous, but it works. Close rental curtains, place a rug on the floor, hang duvets on walls, and put soft material behind the recording position.
Blankets and sheets create a rough but effective sound absorbing recording space.
Hardwood floors are particularly brutal. They are everywhere in some places, including rental offices, and they make a room echo immediately. Adding carpet made a noticeable difference, even though it was only the beginning. The point is to reduce the number of hard, bare surfaces that can throw your voice around the room.
Why a Microphone Shield Did Not Solve the Problem
Those curved microphone shields can look very official. You can buy them easily, or make a budget version with towel material if you are feeling optimistic and have time on your hands. But do not expect one little shield to solve a reverberant room.
In practice, switching a microphone shield on and off may make very little difference when the actual problem is the wider room. The walls, floor, ceiling, desk, windows, and screen are still reflecting sound. The treatment needs to deal with the room, not only the space immediately around the microphone.
Make Simple Sound Traps That Look Better Than Blankets
Once you are past the initial blanket stage, it is possible to make something more permanent and less shanty-town-ish. The basic idea is to build absorbent panels that sit slightly away from the wall and trap sound.
A practical homemade panel can use:
A simple wooden frame.
Absorbent wall insulation made from wool, rather than irritating fibreglass material.
Fabric stretched over the front, such as thick beach towels.
A small gap between the panel and the wall.
A fabric-covered frame filled with wool insulation provides far more useful absorption than a thin decorative panel.
The gap behind the panel helps it capture sound, which is the reason these are often called sound traps. Beach towels are absorbent and can be printed with interesting designs, so they can double as wall art rather than making the room look like an audio lab.
The exact finish is not the important bit. You are trying to stop sound bouncing around, so use absorbent materials and place them where the reflections are happening.
Blankets Beat Cheap Egg Carton Style Foam
You have probably seen those cheap egg carton shaped panels that stick to walls. They are common, they look like sound treatment, and they may seem like the easy answer. But they are not especially good at the job.
Given the choice between a wall covered in cheap thin foam tiles and a blanket or duvet fixed to the wall, take the blanket for absorption. It will not look as neat, obviously, so you may eventually want a more polished panel solution. But for getting started, soft, thick material is the better bet.
Those lightweight egg carton style materials are closer to packing material than serious sound absorption. They can do something, but do not expect them to transform a hard, echoey room.
A Practical Plan for Better Dialogue Audio
If your recording has already happened, use Premiere Pro’s Reduce Reverb control and find the least processed setting that improves clarity. If you have not recorded yet, deal with the room first.
Choose the softest room available. Avoid empty, square rooms full of hard surfaces where possible.
Add floor coverage. A carpet or rug helps tame hard flooring.
Cover reflective areas. Use curtains, blankets, duvets, pillows, rugs, or mattresses.
Treat the area behind the speaker. This is especially useful when recording into a close microphone.
Record a test. Listen back before committing to a full session.
Use Premiere Pro for the final clean-up. Reduce reverb carefully, then stop before the voice becomes artificial.
Do not wait for a perfect studio. If you are recording at work, ask for access to a spare room and explain that it may need a few things hanging about temporarily. You can absolutely make it more professional than a nest of gun-stapled duvets, but the principle remains the same: soft surfaces absorb sound, hard surfaces bounce it back.
Get the room as good as possible first, then let Premiere Pro do the last bit of rescue work. That combination is how you get cleaner dialogue without turning every voice into robot bubble audio.
FAQs
Where is Reduce Reverb in Premiere Pro?
Select the audio clip, open Essential Sound, assign the clip to Dialogue, then open the Repair options and enable Reduce Reverb.
Can I completely remove room reverb in Premiere Pro?
Usually no. Premiere Pro can reduce room reflections substantially, but heavily reverberant audio cannot normally be restored perfectly without audible processing artefacts.
Why does my dialogue sound bubbly after reducing reverb?
The Reduce Reverb setting is probably too high. Lower the slider until the room sound is less obvious but the voice still sounds natural.
What is the cheapest way to reduce reverb while recording?
Use soft household materials. Rugs, curtains, blankets, duvets, pillows, and spare mattresses can absorb reflections far better than leaving a room full of bare hard surfaces.
Written by Daniel Scott — Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
