Manually Balancing & Levelling Audio your audio in Premiere Pro

Course contents
SECTION: 3
Weird Stuff I wish I knew when I started with Premiere 16:39
SECTION: 4
Project 2 - Wedding 2:46:34
SECTION: 6
Audio 2:27:17
SECTION: 12
Final Class Project 8:20
SECTION: 13
Shortcuts 33:06

Questions

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

Course info

142 lessons / 16 hours 34 quiz questions 10 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Daniel Walter Scott and I am an Adobe Certified Instructor.

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
  • A wedding video
  • A short commercial
  • A documentary
  • Social media advertising videos
  • YouTube ‘how to’ videos
  • Talking head footage mixed with screencasts and voiceovers

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

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

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.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hey everyone, this video we are going to look at adjusting the video's volume, or leveling or balancing. Basically what it means is, we need the volume to be at a certain level. At the moment it's too quiet, and you have no idea, you're like, "What? Sounds fine," but we need to kind of reach a consistency with the rest of the world. So we need to be able to send this video off, and it not to be too quiet and not to be too loud, compared to everything else that's either on YouTube, or on the television or at the cinema. 

So this needs to be balanced to make sure it's right. So let's go and do that, so what do we do? First of all we need to see the volume. So I've got my Playhead amongst my video clips, I'm going to hit 'Spacebar'. You probably notice this thing jumping up and down, that is our volume, but it depends on your laptop. If you can't see that, go to 'Window' and find 'Volume', where is it? Under 'Audio Meters'. So turn that on, turn that off. 

So what we need to do though is we need to see the actual measurements on it, and it's too small. Like we did between here and here, we can adjust the gap between this, watch. See, no numbers, numbers; yours might already have numbers. So drag it out minimally to where you can see the numbers. It could be really big, it doesn't matter as long as you can see the numbers. Now if I hit 'Spacebar', so you can kind of see in here that it is bouncing in between, kind of gets up to 6, but mostly it's bouncing between this -24 and -18. Weirdly, 0 is the highest, and it uses negatives, don't ask me why, but it is bouncing about here. 

So it's fine but it's just not loud enough; what is loud enough? So dialogue, people talking in videos, should be bouncing somewhere between -6 and -12, somewhere kind of in here, not past -12 really, just somewhere in this zone. So how do we adjust it? First of all we're going to use the first video, so we're going to click in here, have this one selected, give it a click. It is-- kind of creeps up there when I'm yelling, but most of the time it's a bit low. So to raise it, the easiest way to raise it is down here, in your audio track, if you haven't already, remember, you can click the bottom of it and kind of drag it bigger. 

I'm going to zoom in a little bit. So this line, that's kind of hovering in the middle here. That is your volume, that's the easiest way to do the volume. So at the moment it's set to 0, if I click it, hold it, and drag it all the way up, can you see, so it's raising it by 3 decibels, 7 decibels. Way too high, I'm up at 13, see what it's going to do. Hold your phone, ready? Ah, very loud. Getting into the reds, so what you need to do, is you need to come back here and figure out where it is. So that looks about fine. Bouncing, roughly in there, doesn't have to be perfect. 

You'll notice that I start off real excited in all my videos, "Hi, everyone." It's getting a bit of consistency. Later on what we might do is, lower that down a tiny bit, once we get a few more skills, but at the moment, consistently I've raised it up by about, 7 decibels, to make it bounce in this right area. So do the same over here. About there, about 7 decibels, it doesn't have to be super perfect. I'll show you more perfect ways of doing it later on, but for the moment, and not just for the moment but most of the time, just grab it, drag it along. 

The other cool thing you can do when you're manually doing it, is you can hit 'Spacebar' and let it play, and drag it while it's actually moving, watch. So you can kind of let it roll, just, move it up and down just to kind of get it where you want it. If you do have a lot of stuff to do manually, like that, you could go through, because I've only got six videos, easy, done. If they're all different, then you're going to be raising and lowering them all differently. So there's no point doing like a bulk, raise it by 7 decibels because, you might have-- you might be shooting outdoors, or in different rooms, so that audio is going to be at different levels, but this is all the same.

So what we can do is, we can grab this, we can right click it anywhere on the clip, go to 'Audio Gain', they call it. So we want to add to it, we want to adjust the gain by 7 decibels, and the line doesn't move, but watch the, like graph in the background. Can you see, it gets bigger by 7 decibels. You've done the same thing, it just looks different down here. So this one, the line's raised, but the bar graph, sorry, the waveform, the little hills and valleys stayed the same, but doing it that way, using Audio Gain, you've essentially done the same thing, it's going to sound the same on the other side, but you've done it, just kind of looks different down here. 

When do I use both? I'm going to show you the automatic one in the next video, you're like, "What, there's an automatic view?" Automatic way of fixing it, there is, that's the way I do, but we need to know about these things, what the line does, trust me, we need it for the course later on, but for the moment I'm going to leave, the fifth and sixth one, I want to use that for auto in a second. All right, let's get on to the next video.
  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2024