In this episode I'll show you how to fine-tune audio
in Adobe Premiere Pro using subframe editing.
AdoramaTV presents, Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here
on AdoramaTV, brought to you
by Adorama, it's the camera store that has everything for photographers like you and me,
you can check them out at Adorama.com. Well in this episode we're going to be talking about
something that is awesome it's called subframe
editing, specifically subframe audio editing.
Now a few episodes ago I made a video that showed you how to sync external
audio to
video, and a few keen observers noted that the markers that I made
didn't align the audio exactly, and the reason for that is a limitation
of shooting audio onto video. Now to explain this let me tell
tell you how video works. Video normally shoots
30 frames per second, so 30 still
pictures all put together to make a moving video,
now audio doesn't do 30 audio samples per second,
so when that still frame happens for a 30th of a second, there's audio that's
still going on
inside that frame. So think of it like this,
if we slow down a clap, so here's a clap in normal motion. There it is, okay
we get to see the entire clap and we hear the sound
but maybe when my hands actually got together
that was inside of one of those still frames, so maybe my hands were like this
and then you heard the sound, and then the next frame my hands like this you don't
actually see
where my hands hit, that our brains think we did because we hear the sound.
Now if we slow that way down, we did the exact same thing it may be a little, maybe
2 or 4 frames a second, let's take a look. Alright,
so when we look at that you can see that really slowed down,
and that the sound comes
when my hands are open, and in the next frame my hands are closed, so you don't
actually
see the clap but we hear it, because the audio is still moving
inside the frame. Now to edit that audio we need to go inside the frame or
subframe and do some manipulations.
Now to really get a grip on all this on how it works we're going to zip over to
Premier Pro CC 2014 and take a look
so let's to that right now. Before we continue I want to remind you that Adorama has
some awesome photography contests
it's absolutely free to participate and you can win some
great prizes, so click the link and enter today.
To properly understand subframe
editing, subframe audio editing to be more accurate, we need a first
understand the limitations of editing audio
in Adobe Premiere CC 2014 or whatever
version you have right now. Now this has been true for generations
of nonlinear editors, it's nothing new with Premier, but Premier has some really nice
features that help you fix
these issues but they're hidden, so we need to sort of understand those.
Right so let's first remember what we did, I clap three times in an audio clip, we can hear
that here.
Alright and then what we did was we synced
a clean audio clip with this dirty audio clip
and got nice clean audio, now we did that in a previous episode so you can check that out.
The important thing is we have these three
little markers here that we use to align our
audio clips, and the truth is they aren't really accurate,
why not? Well let's go in here and let's look at our audio
waveform, and I'll try to zoom in as close as I can.
Now this little line right here represents the entire
frame, our video frame, we've got 30 frames per second,
the problem is, audio doesn't stop
like video does, so every 30th of a second it's a still
frame. Audio has got a lot more information
so it's still making
a recording sound during that stopped
frame of video and so what we need to be able to do is get
inside this frame to make changes to the
audio so we can take out pops and glitches and
align audio correctly. Alright so here's our frames entire
one frame of video, but you can see that inside here we've got
audio that's doing all kind of stuff, so how does that really impact us?
Well if we zip down here to our timeline by the way if you don't see these waveforms
on your timeline make sure you click the wrench here and
say Show Audio Waveform, make sure that's
enabled so you can see this. Now what we need to do here is we're going to zoom in,
this is the very first point you're going to see where
editing audio in Adobe Premiere normally
is inadequate, so I'm going to hit the plus button on my keyboard to zoom in as far
as I possibly can, I'm zoomed
all the way and I just really can't see what's going on here with this audio,
I want to see a nice big
audio waveform that I can align things. But what we can see,
if we look here you can see this audio waveform where I clap here
is not lined up exactly with this clap,
but it's all inside the same frame, so
if we just align things up and edit things by frame,
well our audio is going to be out of sync, in fact I'll zoom out here,
you can hear that this audio is out of sync when I play these two tracks
together
it's going to sound sort of like a flange effect or a Darth Vader effect you can hear
this weird thing going on, listen to this.
You hear that? How things sound like
an echo or a stereo kind of weird effect,
that's because these two tracks are just slightly
out of sync, so they're not lined up exactly.
So how do we get in there and see stuff and really
edit this audio the way that we really need to
inside the frame so we can match this up exactly.
Well the first thing you need to understand as you can make this
whole thing right here look much larger by hitting the tilde key, that's the little
squiggly button that's next to the 1
on your keyboard, if you click that you'll get
fills the screen with your timeline, and the other thing you can do is you can
stretch
these out to get a larger view and you can take this center here,
take the center divider here,
pull that up, so you can make these much larger, so you can see what's going on a lot
easier, but that's still not good enough, we still need to zoom in
on this frame and see exactly what's going on there, we should see a lot more detail.
Well to do that I'm going to go back to normal view by hitting
the tilde button again, you would right click
on the measurement here, so this is showing us frames, right click on that,
and we were say Show Audio Time Units,
not frames, but Audio Time Units, so I'll click on that,
and then what we'll do here is on the play head position
if I right click on that, I can show either audio samples
or milliseconds, I like seeing audio samples but if you want to
edit this by milliseconds go ahead, so you can choose that, so I'll just click that
with audio samples. Now the thing that I can do
I'm going to start hitting the plus button on my keyboard, look at that now I can
go in and see a lot more detail in this
audio waveform, and I can really start seeing things. So again I'm going to hit the tilde
button now you can really clearly see
that these two things are out of sync, this waveform and this waveform are the
same thing
but this guy here was recorded on my lavalier mic so it's not as noisy,
there's not as much stuff going on. So what we really want to do is not align this by
frame, which took up a bunch a space but we want to
align this up by our waveform. So what l'll have to do now
is I can just drag this to the left,
keep going until we have these waveforms
properly aligned, now you can see that these are lined up
very precisely, because now I can work with
waveforms at the millisecond format so now let's hear
if this is all lined up correctly.
Now we can see that
we now have things that are working the way that we want because
we can go into the subframe and actually line
things up. Alright one other thing that we can do here in subframe
editing, and that is really, really useful. Let's say we have a pop or a clip
or a glitch or something that's happened inside of our
audio but its inside that frame. Well we can go in,
I'll just choose something here, so here's a little
audio here and maybe I would want to work on that. If I went back here and
put this into normal, let's go back in and show this
and unshow Audio Time Units, so now we just have normal
video units, normal flames, so I'll go over here to
where we set this up, zoom in. Maybe I wanted to take out just a little
bit of audio inside this frame, using my pen tool,
but I can't do that here but if I go in and I right click
and I say Show Audio Time Units, now I'm in subframe
editing, I can really go in here. Maybe let's say I want to take out just a little teeny
chunk of something, well I can grab my pen tool,
I can go in here to my
volume, now I can start going in and I can just take out one
little teeny, tiny piece right there, and it's highly accurate. So we have maybe
somebody that goes...
something like that and its inside a frame and you want to get rid of that
you can just go in and take out that tiny little chunk of
audio, it doesn't affect the entire frame, it's just a subframe
1/30th of a second it's very, very nice. Subframe
editing can get you out of a bind, it's awesome for aligning
audio
very, very precisely and it's super easy to do, just right-click,
show your Audio Time Units, and go for it. Well subframe
audio editing in Premier or whatever nonlinear editor that you use
is going to really significantly
increase the quality of your videos, because you're going to be able to dive in
get out little pops and glitches and things like that inside the frame, and
accurately lineup audio with video if you're shooting on
external audio device. Well thank you so much for joining me in this episode of
Exploring Photography, don't forget
that you can subscribe to AdoramaTV, it's absolutely free
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Center, there are just hundreds and hundreds of videos and articles about
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so check it out today. Thanks again for joining me and I will see you again next time!
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