Chapter Nine. Working with Audio

Most experienced producers will tell you that audio quality is at least as important as video, and in many situationslike a concert or even a wedding with softly whispered vowsabsolutely critical. Often, the easiest way to differentiate the work of a professional videographer from what an enthusiastic uncle or other amateur might produce is the clarity of the sound mix. Fortunately, the audio components of the Adobe Production Studio, in addition to being very competent overall, do two things exceptionally well.

The first relates to access. If you right-click any audio file in Premiere Pro and then choose Edit in Adobe Audition, Premiere Pro will create a temporary audio file and load it into Audition. As soon as you save the file in Audition, Premiere Pro will substitute the edited (and newly saved) file for the original, making it fast and easy to access Audition's comprehensive feature set.

Second, Audition does an excellent job cleaning up your audio. As you probably know, you'll typically encounter two types of audio problems: consistent background noises like hums or whines from air conditioners or AC ground noise, and random noises like pops or clicks. Audition's noise-removal tool is top notch for the first, while its Repair Transient function is simply the best available for eliminating random noises.

Of course, Audition and Premiere Pro also do a great job at day-to-day blocking and tackling functions like volume adjustment, normalization, and mixing, so we'll start there.