72 Working with Audio in Premiere Pro


#72 Working with Audio in Premiere Pro

Let's say you've shot an interview and plan to add soft background music for a professional touch. You'll need to control the music's volume to ensure that it doesn't interfere with the voices. Figure 72 shows the audio at the beginning of the video, and illustrates the key features in Premiere Pro's audio controls.

Figure 72. Manually mixing the volume from two audio tracks, one containing an interview (Audio 1) and the other containing background music (Audio 2).


Adjusting Clip Gain

Right-click any audio clip in Premiere Pro and select Audio Gain from the pop-up menu that appears to access the Clip Gain control, where you can manually insert a decibel (dB) level to adjust audio volume, essentially accomplishing the same thing as dragging the rubber band controls up and down on the track itself. The Clip Gain control also provides access to Premiere Pro's Normalize function, discussed in #74.


Keyframing in the Effect Controls Panel

You can also adjust volume with keyframes using the timeline found in the Effect Controls panel, but it's typically easier on the main timeline where you can see the waveforms.


The beginning of the video contains several titles, and the discussion doesn't begin for about 13 seconds (Audio 1). The first audio that the viewer hears is the background music, which quickly fades in to full volume then drops down just before the interview begins.

Here are the highlights of the audio features shown in Figure 72.

  • Collapse/Expand Track Expands the track so you can see and edit the waveform. Click the triangle to expand the track.

  • Audio transitions Premiere Pro has two crossfade transitions (Effects > Audio Transitions > Crossfade), Constant Gain, and Constant Power. Constant Gain, analogous to a video dissolve, provides the smoother effect of the two, and is the default audio transition used when you apply a video transition between two clips. You can apply either type of crossfade to the beginning of a track to fade the audio in (or at the end to fade the audio out). As with video transitions, just click and drag the transition to the target track. Obviously, you can also use the Crossfade transition between songs like any transition.

    The Audio Mixer

    You can also use Premiere Pro's audio mixer to perform the operation described above. The mixer is best used for constant multi-track mixing throughout a project, while manually adjusting volume via keyframes and crossfades is more efficient for simpler projects with a few volume adjustments spaced over the entire duration. Check out the Premiere Pro manual on page 229 for more detail on the Audio Mixer.


  • Volume adjustment Premiere Pro allows you to click and drag the yellow line (gray in Figure 72) in an audio track in the timeline up or down to adjust volume. This adjustment affects the entire track unless you add a keyframe. These types of keyframeable adjustments are frequently referred to as rubber band controls (#43).

    Looking for Royalty-Free Background Music?

    SmartSound (www.smartsound.com) is an excellent source of background music that's royalty-free and easy to search, download, and apply. It's also easy to customize the length of the track to fit your clip and still retain the feel of a complete track. You can sample their entire libraries online. If you don't find what you're looking for, also consider Digital Juice's BackTraxx music library (www.digitaljuice.com) and Sony's Cinescore (www.sonymediasoftware.com).


  • Add/Remove Keyframe Keyframes (#43) let you customize audio volume for various regions of the audio track. In Figure 72, the volume of the background music is adjusted downward so that it doesn't interfere with the interview. To add a keyframe, move the current-time indicator to the target location and click Add/Remove Keyframe in the track header on the left. As you can see in Figure 72, you typically have to add two keyframes, one to maintain the previous volume level, and the other to set the new volume.




Adobe Digital Video How-Tos. 100 Essential Techniques with Adobe Production Studio
Adobe Digital Video How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques with Adobe Production Studio
ISBN: 0321473817
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 148
Authors: Jan Ozer

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