Chapter 9. Audio Basics

The way audio works in Premiere Pro is very different from the way it worked in previous versions. Adobe made three fundamental changes, all of which result in greater quality and better control over your audio. Premiere Pro supports:

• An audio mixer. More powerful and practical than previous versions, the audio mixer opens up the architecture to support both clip-based and track-based effects (Figure 9.1). This means that you can apply audio effects to individual clips or the entire content of specific tracks. You can also accomplish standard mixing practices, such as stemming, sends, and automation. The support for live mixing automation enables you to adjust volume faders and levels as you play your sequence back and have those fade adjustments saved to the sequence after a single pass.

  Figure 9.1. The full expanded Audio Mixer references the Audio sequence from the Timeline panel and displays three tracks: Audio 1 (mono), Audio 2 (stereo), and Audio 3 (5.1 surround). Each track has its own pan knob and volume fader. The Master fader on the right controls the volume for the entire sequence

  

• VST plug-ins. With the advantage of clip and track effects comes new compatibility for VST plug-ins. Premiere Pro ships with several professional VST plug-ins that support mono, stereo, and 5.1 source material (Figure 9.2), and many more of these audio effect plug-ins are available from third-party developers. (The VST plug-in format was originally developed for Steinberg's Cubase audio editing application.)

  Figure 9.2. You access VST plug-ins from the Track Effects drop-down menu

  

• Creation of conformed audio and peak files. Depending on the sample rate of the audio you bring into Premiere Pro, when you import and open files, Premiere Pro automatically converts them into proprietary format called conformed audio files. Although conforming converts audio with differing rates into the sample rate of your project, having conformed audio files increases the detail that can be extracted from the audio waveform and allows Premiere Pro to communicate and process audio files more efficiently. Because the conformed files have an increased resolution, Premiere can more accurately assign and play back added audio effects and filters. Regardless of whether you have to create conformed audio files, Premiere Pro always generates a peak file for every imported audio file. This peak file is essentially a snapshot of the waveform information in the audio file so that when you open and look at the waveform in the various panels of the interface, you get instantaneous feedback showing the graph of the waveform.

To better understand the importance of these changes, take a look at the flow of sound as it passes through Premiere Pro.