Why Use Audition?
It is useful and often necessary during editing to make audio adjustments in Premiere. Premiere also has the tools to do many of the finishing adjustments involved in a final mix however, it can be buggy and unreliable.
It is best practice to do basic adjustments and even some polishing of audio in Premiere during the edit for watchability and creative decision-making, but to roundtrip to Adobe Audition to render out final mix files.
Roundtrip Workflow
To bring your sequence from Premiere to Audition:
Navigate To Edit > Edit In Adobe Audition > Sequence
- Path: Browse to the location where you want Audition to save duplicate or “Extracted” versions of the audio files that it will link to.
- Selection: set to “Entire Sequence”
- Video: set to “Send through Dynamic Link”
- The Dynamic Link setting for Video ensures the video preview in Audition will automatically update to show any further picture edits you make in Premiere.
- Audio Handles: The amount of time you want to be able to adjust a clip’s length past the in and out points that were decided during the edit
- Transfer Information To Audition (Set as following to preserve any audio adjustments or effects you made in Premiere)
- Audio Clip Effects: Set to “Transfer Settings”
- Audio Track Effects: Set to “Transfer Settings”
- Check Pan and Volume Information
To Output from Audition To Premiere
Navigate to Multitrack > Export to Adobe Premiere Pro
- Set file name and location for your mixed track(s)
- You have the option to either Export each track as stem (Recommended so that you can have some flexibility to make further edits in Premiere)
Or
Mixdown Session to a single file - Check “Open in Adobe Premiere” to automatically import the tracks in Premiere
Making Edit Changes (Timing or volume adjustments)
After sending to Audition but before outputting back to Premiere:
- Because of the Dynamic Link video setting any picture changes you make in Premiere will show up in the video preview of audition
- However the Audition timeline will not update with any audio changes made in Premiere
- If audio changes are made in Premiere at this point, you will have to manually update Audition to match
After Exporting the mix tracks to Premiere as stems you can edit the track files along with picture to some extent, and can for example, make adjustments selectively to your dialogue stem without affecting the music stem.
Useful Audio Effects/Tools
Most of the following tools can be applied in either Premiere or Audition, and to either individual clips, entire tracks, or the master track to affect the entire video. Where you want to apply them is based on how you want to use them and can be a case by case basis.
Compressor
About:
Makes audio levels more consistent by reducing the levels of the loudest parts of the audio clip or track above a certain threshold without reducing the quieter parts. Often useful for dialogue because of the natural inconsistencies in the volumes at which people speak
Steps:
There are a few options for Compressor effects but Tube Modeled Compressor is recommended
- Threshold: The level above which the audio will be compressed
- Output Gain: The level at which the entire audio will be boosted after compression
- Ratio: For every X number of decibels louder the the threshold, it will be compressed to 1 decibel
- Attack: The time it takes for the compression to gradually increase after levels pass the threshold
- Release: The time it takes for the compression to gradually decrease after levels drop below the threshold
Limiter
About:
Works like a compressor but is more extreme to absolutely prevent the levels from exceeding a threshold, rather than smoothly reducing the parts that do exceed. This is more-so used as a finishing step when raising the loudness of the entire video to prevent clipping.
Steps:
Add the effect Hard Limiter
- Maximum Amplitude: the level at which the limiter will prevent any audio from going above
- Input Boost: Boosts the level of the audio before the limiter is applied
- Look-Ahead Time: How far ahead of the audio exceeding the threshold should the limiter start working (to prevent a sudden loud sound from getting past the limiter)
- Release Time: How long it takes for limiting to gradually decrease after levels drop below the threshold
EQ
About:
Selectively adjust the levels of different frequencies in your audio clip or track
Steps:
To be added
Noise Reduction
About:
Identifies a constant background noise within your audio and attempts to cancel it out. Very useful for interview or VO recordings made in less-than-perfect recording settings (ie. not in an recording booth) but if you push it too far the audio can get distorted and sound tinny or over-processed.
Steps:
- Make sure the audio clip you are doing the noise reduction process on has at least a few seconds of audio that only contains the background noise you want to eliminate, nothing else.
- Set the in and out points so that you have the section with background noise only selected.
- Go to Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Capture noise print
- Once you capture a print, set your in and out points back to the start and end of the full clip
- Go to Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process)…
- A window will open and you can adjust the settings as needed to get the best possible result for your clip, striking a balance between noise reduction and keeping the main audio sounding natural.
Loudness Normalization
About:
Target a certain loudness for your final delivery and useful in keeping the loudness consistent across multiple projects’ deliverables.
This tool is especially useful because it analyzes the perceived loudness of your overall video – how it will be perceived by human ears taking into account all the different quiet and loud moments, rather than just determining what is the technically the single loudest peak in your audio. It then boosts that perceived loudness to match the standard that you select, for example American Broadcast, Europe Broadcast, or Web.
Using this also helps you avoid manually boosting the overall levels of your video by an arbitrary amount to get it louder and then having to apply heavy limiting for moments that clip.
Steps:
Loudness Normalization can be applied in the export window from Premiere under Effects> Loudness Normalization
- Loudness Standard: select “ITU BS…” for broadcast
- To adjust for web delivery, change the Target Loudness from -24 LUFS to -16
- Max True Peak Level: Leave at -2(?) This will apply a limiter to reduce clipping past this level.