Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Removing background noise like fans aircon fridge hum in Premiere

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, we're going to try and remove some background noise. Have a little listen, I'm going to turn the repair on and off, that we're going to do. Let's have a listen. All right, to look at repair we're going to try and remove some background noise. You can probably hear it, maybe, I've got an electric fan plugged in. Can you see that, hopefully you can hear it anyway. There's a bit of a hissing in the background from a fan, and we can turn it on and off using Essential Sounds repair. All right, let's jump in now and I'll show you how. 

To remove it, let's find-- I've got some footage in here, that has the bad audio in it, and for some reason I left it in the Audio, actual folder. It's got video on it, bad me. Let's leave it in there for the tutorial, so that you don't get lost under Audio. Something called Bad Audio Background. Let's find it, let's make a sequence from it. We won't dump it into our current sequence, so right click it, go to 'New Sequence from Clip'. Let's name this clip, let's call this one 'Audio Fixing'. We'll use this for a few of the next tutorials as well. 

Remember, to get this out of here click, hold, drag it to the left. Kind of comes out, close it up, there we are. So let's have a little listen together, we'll play it all the way through, because I do end up describing stuff, so let's have a listen. To look at repair we're going to try and remove some background noise. You can probably hear it, maybe, I've got an electric fan plugged in, and it's humming away in the background. It's consistent, which is useful, for getting rid of background noises, maybe fridges, air-con, fans, let's see if we can repair it now. 

So that is it, you can kind of hear. I've left the gap at the beginning here, of it, because it's very clear by itself, listen. You hear a humming, and I can see it humming, can you see down here? This is-- we'll call-- like what we're going to do is remove, like tidy up the noise flow. So kind of like the stuff down the bottom here, this background goop. Ours is coming from a fan that I purposely put on, like a little fan heater, but it works really good as well for like fridges, air-con. Works only really good for microphones as well. So if you've got a microphone that's got a background hiss, it might be that you're probably pushing it past its operating, you know, if you if you find you've got this, like 'sssss' in the background, it means your microphone's not happy, and it's not in the scope of this course to go through and fix your microphone, but check out things like raising the noise flow for microphones. 

Normally it's to do with your preamp, anyway it's a bit nerdy. Let's say we want to get rid of it. So to do it, have your clip selected, find your Essential Sounds, remember, if you can't find it, 'Window, 'Essential Sounds', and we're going to, in our case it's Dialogue. I want to try and get rid of it from behind me. There's lots of things in here, I like to click these buttons, just to tidy everything up, clean them all up, and click on 'repair', and you want this one here, it says 'Reduce Noise', turn that on. It's set to 5 by default, and that's probably going to work. 

So back to the beginning, listen. To look at-- pretty good, huh? Now it's pretty amazing for those background noises, like I just literally grabbed the fan and try to break it, and it fixes that up nicely. Now it's really good with consistent sounds. When there's kind of cars in the background, and it's all up and down, and it doesn't-- it's not that good, it will tidy it up. Now we've used Reduce Noise, at default, kind of halfway strength. You can turn it up and down, but let's have a little listen. I'll show you how to preview it, because you're like, "Sounds the same." 

The way to do it is, see this little tick next to Repair, I'm going to hit 'Spacebar' to play, and I'm going to turn this on and off as it goes through. So you watch my tick, and just give a listen to what's going on. You might have to turn your volume up to hear it. So I will turn it off first. To look at-- you hear that? One more time. You can see it there, well you can see it actually in here, watch this. So the noise flow down the bottom here, with it off, can you see, it jumps up to about -36 decibels, whereas if I have it on, look what happens. It's a lot lower, it's still there. 

You got to decide whether it's noticeable enough for you. There will always be something jumping around down the bottom here. You want to try and clean it up as much as you can. The trouble is, if I crank the Reduce Noise up, it will go, watch this, but-- to look at repair we're going to try and remove some background noise. There's a weirdness that happens to your voice. You might decide that it's perfectly fine, but I notice it, probably hear it, maybe. I've got an electric fan. Will the audience notice that? You might because you've heard me so much in this course so far, but let's say I'm sending this out for a YouTube video, nobody's probably going to notice. They'll probably notice more, hey, troll you on YouTube, "There's a bad noise in the background," but it's only tiny bit robotic, might be okay. 

Now we're using Reduce Noise, which works perfect for this example. Reduce Rumble can help as well. Like it says, if you hover above, it's kind of a low frequency noises. So you can play around with Reduce Rumble. Don't worry that-- like, hey, he said reduce noise works background, and you're only going to use this. You might have to use a teeny tiny bit of all of this stuff. So it really depends, everyone's situation's different. You might whack them all on and just see where you go. 

DeEss, Reverb, we're going to cover a couple of more of these, a couple more in the upcoming classes, but play around with them, drag them up and down. The cool thing about it is while you're doing it, you can raise and lower this, so you can kind of get a sense for it as you're going. Again, often headphones can be really useful, because if you're just listening through your computer speakers, they're really like, they sound quite good, and then somebody puts the headphones, and you're like, "Wow." It's not as good as you thought. All right, that is repairing background noises in videos, in Premiere Pro. Let's get on to the next video.