Audio and video is very important, I think we can all agree on that.
That sound is just not pleasant for your audience to listen to.
So that's why we're taking a look today inside Adobe Premiere Pro
on how to improve your speech and make your voice sound very warm
and pop out.
What's up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net,
and today we're going to improve the speech of a very typical scenario here.
I am vlogging, so that means I've got my microphone on the camera.
let's have a listen to it.
What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor,
with a microphone on top of my camera.
So that's definitely not ideal, but a very common situation.
So let's get started on that audio
and what I'm going to do first is select this and duplicate it by holding down my Alt key
to audio track number 2.
And that way we can listen to the before and the after
after that we've applied all the effects to it.
So for now I'm going to mute the first track and work on the second one.
What we're going to do is use the Audio Essentials
from the latest update up of Adobe Premiere Pro.
And to locate that Essentials Audio panel,
you want to head over to the window here on top and select the Essentials Audio.
there we go! or it's actually Essentials Sound.
So this right here is a dialog, so from the options here I will also pick out Dialogue.
And Premiere here made it very easy for us,
what it's actually doing in the background is analyzing this sound clip,
and therefore we can just make changes with one slider or just one click of a button.
It doesn't always work that well, I do have to mention that,
but it definitely works good in most occasions.
Now, anyways,
while we are going to change one of these settings, we could always dive into the details
and we'll have a very quick look at that.
Because I don't want to dive too much into the details, I want to keep this tutorial basic
so that you know what to do with just a few clicks.
We're going to start by repairing this clip, because if we're going to take a listen
you will hear this noise, this disturbing sound on the background:
"...top of my camera".
Something very common, things like traffic in the background or an air conditioning,
or a refrigerator in the background, making noise,
we want to make sure that that is gone.
So I'm going to click here on Repair and I'm going to select the Reduce Noise option.
And now you just kind of have to listen and see what it does.
You want to make sure that the noise is kind of gone,
because that will affect the voice too much, let's have a listen:
"...microphone on top of my camera".
That's pretty okay and I'm going to increase this too much,
you will what it does to my voice.
"...a microphone on top of my camera".
It's actually still holding up pretty well.
You just want to make sure that you are avoiding to have a robotic voice,
you know, something that was recorded on a very old cellphone or something.
Now, often Premiere will kind of analyze your clip a little bit wrong,
what you can then do is with this clip selected that you're working on,
head over to the Effects controls on top and here you will see
the effect that has been applied to that clip by enabling that option here.
And from here, this is the Adaptive Noise Reduction, I'm going to click on Edit,
which will reveal some more options.
And what I can do in here, I can see here that Premiere is doing a reduction of 24 dB,
which is sometimes a bit much, you can decrease that then, right here,
to something let's say around -15 dB.
And then the second option is how much noise is there in the background,
also something that you can play with, of course.
And let me just exaggerate for a moment here, I'm going to do this...
...I'm going to set this to 100 and let's listen now to the sound:
"...cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor, with a mic...'
And this is definitely too much, you can now hear that robotic voice,
so I'm going to decrease that again to something around 50%, should do okay.
"...and this is an audio test, indoor, with a microphone on top of my camera...'
And the noise is definitely a little bit gone, so that is good.
like I said before, we can't remove it entirely.
The next thing we're going to do is kind of make my voice a bit more present.
And to do that, we're going to use here under the Clarity, the Dynamics.
And this is only a thing that we just enable that and just increase that Dynamics setting.
And again this is something that you have to play with,
set a certain value, usually dynamics can be set at something around 6, 7 or even 8
and then just play it back and listen to the sound:
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test..."
And listening to the before...
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom..."
Definitely made it a bit more present and I believe I can even increase this...
...to a 10, let's listen.
"...Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test
indoor, with a microphone..."
Alright, this is now a bit too much let's put this back to... maybe 9.
Like I said before, it's something that you should play with, every recording is different.
"...Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test,
indoor, with a microphone on top of my camera".
I'm very happy with this result, it gives the voice a bit more punch to it.
The next setting is going to be Equalizer, and I'm going to use the Equalizer
to make my voice a bit warmer.
This is definitely something that you have to do if you are working with a microphone
on top of your camera,
By the way guys, I haven't said this before, but if you are doing Studio recordings,
the same things apply.
there are just different values that you're setting.
So, just the select the Equalizer effect, that will apply a new effect to your clip,
and, actually this time, I want to go into the settings of this effect
and I don't want to go to the presets here,
because the Essential Sound doesn't have too much in here to tweak my voice.
So I'm going to click here on Edit for the graphic equalizer
and there are a couple of things here that I want to do.
First thing is remove all the low frequencies,
on the left side here we can find all the low tones,
and on the right side are all the high frequencies and, usually,
those are nasty sounds, like refrigerators and stuff,
so I'm also going to just put that all the way down.
just cut off those sounds.
What we're actually doing here is a high cut and a low cut.
Then the next thing, in the voice there's usually a very nasty sound,
and I want to locate that by exaggerating each band in here
and kind of look where that is at.
So what I want to do is set the Program monitor here on Loop Playback
and if you can't find this button here,
then click on this "+" button to find that Loop option
and just drag that button to your Toolbar of the program monitor.
So, make sure that is selected and now when you are going to play your clip in the timeline
it will actually loop that clip.
And while I'm doing that
I'm going to increase the 8 kHz, 4 kHz, 2 kHz and so,
and usually that nasty sound is going to be somewhere around 1k, 2k, sometimes 4k.
So, let's play it back.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor,
with a microphone on top of my camera."
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor..."
So it's definitely 2k, as you can hear, this is a very nasty sound here.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net..."
And this is something that we have to reduce a tiny bit.
Usually in studio recordings that is going to be around 1k
and if you're filming with a microphone on top of your camera, then it's the 2k.
So let's just decrease that here a tiny bit, something around -10...
...would do, and we're going to bring this other values here back to zero,
set them at default and only decrease here this 2k value, here,
a tiny bit, let's have a listen to it.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and..."
This sounds a lot better now.
The next thing I want to do is make my voice a bit warmer
and those warm sounds are in the low frequencies.
And we kinda want to create this arc here, going towards that 2 kHz,
so I'm going to increase some of these lower frequencies, something like this,
as you can see, creating this arc and you can also see it very good here
in this graph in the Essential Sound panel.
And let's just have a listen to it.
"What up guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net..."
This actually sounds pretty good...
"What up guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test..."
Don't exaggerate with these settings here in the equalizer,
it's usually just a very subtle setting that you want to do.
Sometimes, if you think that dynamics process that we've done before
didn't do its job too well on the higher frequencies,
making your voice more present,
then you can increase your 4 kHz or 8 kHz a tiny bit here.
So let's just do that and listen to how that sounds.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test..."
Alright, that actually sounds pretty nice, I'm going to leave it with that.
The last thing that I want to do is not from the Essential Sound actually,
but from the Effects Library and I've already searched for it before,
right here, the Hard Limiter, it's inside your Audio Effects folder.
I'm going to drag this effect onto my clip that I was working on
and what this will do is kind of push the volume of my speech all the way up
and kind of compress that audio.
Is going to make sure that the audio is not going to clip,
with all of these effects that we've added to it prior,
and also going to make sure that it's not going to be too low.
So it's going to help you with setting that volume as well.
With that Hard Limiter here I'm going to press on the Edit button
And from the presets I'm going to select the "limit to 0.1 dB"
or actually -0.1 dB.
And let's have a listen to it right now
and also let's have a look here, these two blocks right here,
they cannot be red, if they are red, then your sound is clipping.
So let's play this back and it should not happen with this limiter.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor,
with a microphone on top of my camera."
So that is wonderful.
Now let's listen to the before and the after,
This is the before.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test..."
And now let's listen to the after.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test..."
And that is much better, my voice is more present, warmer
and we've reduced that background noise a tiny bit.
The next thing that I want to do is set some music underneath this.
And it's not just about decreasing the volume of that music clip to hear my voice,
there's actually a bit more that we have to do.
So I'm going to go back to my Clips Folder right here
and this right here is an awesome song that I got from premiumbeat.com,
I also want to thank those guys who are sponsoring this video here, again.
Let's listen to it.
This right here guys, is a song that I've got from premiumbeat.com,
I wanna thank those guys as well, for sponsoring this video again.
It's an awesome song that we're also using for an After Movie at the moment.
And we're doing this fast cutting onto it
and we're definitely going to make a video about that as well, very soon.
Now guys, you can find the path to this song in the description below
and yes, you see what I just did there,
it will bring you to this page, right here, guys
and you can listen to the different loop sets that this song has, as well
and that way you can kind of create your own custom song from this music file
and that is something pretty cool.
So, make sure to visit Premiumbeat.com for high-quality royalty-free
music and sound effects.
So let's work with this awesome song, it's very nice,
but it does come with a couple of problems.
Let's listen to the higher frequencies in this song.
And there are a bunch.
And when we are going to decrease the volume those higher frequencies from this song
are actually going to interrupt a little bit with my speech.
Now that is, of course, something that we can fix with the Essential Sound,
let's do that, I'm going to delete here the untreated sound,
because we're not going to listen to the before and after of that again,
and let me just drag in this clip into the timeline,
like so, I'm going to make this a bit longer and...
...drag my clip here into the middle, like that.
Now what you usually want to do is take your Pen tool here from the Toolbox
and kind of create keyframes to lower the volume of that music clip.
So right before the speech starts you create a keyframe, you kind of lower that volume...
usually to something around -15,
it really depends on the type of song that you have.
Like that, create a new keyframe when the speech ends
and lift your volume back up, after that.
Let's play this back and have a listen.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor,
with a microphone on top of my camera."
And this is actually going pretty well,
but we might even be able to push this volume a bit more, -10 dB.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio..."
Alright, this is good, we have a nice presence of the music now in the background,
a little bit too present and that's because of those high frequencies.
So what I'm going to do now is kind of push those high frequencies down.
So I'm going to take my Blade tool here from the toolbox
and just cut right in this transition, right here.
and also here on the ends, like that.
And I'm going to apply an effect onto here.
With this selected I'm going to go to the Essential Sound and instead of music
I'm actually going to pick out dialog.
Because there is this setting here, the Equalizer,
and I'm actually going to use the Background Voice Equalizer,
because, as you can see, it kind of selected the higher frequencies
which is exactly what we need.
I'm going to increase this amount so that will push down those higher frequencies.
You can also just drag in the Equalizer effect onto that clip,
but I find this pretty useful, pretty fast.
And let's play this back now and let's have a listen.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio..."
And now that music is not bothering so much anymore,
because those lower frequencies have been pushed down.
Now, in order to make sure that we're not cutting so fast between...
...having no equalizer and then suddenly having an equalizer between these two,
I'm going to right-click on this cut and say "apply default transition"
and that will add this Cross Dissolve over it,
so that we slowly transition to that Equalizer effect and also on the end.
So let's have a listen to the end result.
This is just one awesome song.
"What up guys! Jordy here for cinecom.net and this is an audio test, indoor,
with a microphone on top of my camera."
Isn't that sounding great!
Alright guys, that was it again for this pretty long tutorial,
but I do hope that you've learned something new
and that you can apply these tips into your next creative project.
I want to thank you guys so much for watching,
and always remember...
...stay creative!.