How To Level Audio Using A Compressor In Premiere Pro CC
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How To Level Audio Using A Compressor In Premiere Pro CC
How To Level Audio Using A Compressor In Premiere Pro CC: In this Premiere Pro CC video editing tutorial, Will teaches you how to level your audio using a Dynamics Compressor.
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Welcome back to another video if you've ever worked with audio that has different audio levels and you're not really sure about the best approach to fix those audio levels so that they all sound consistent that's what we're going to be talking about in this video how to control audio levels using a compressor inside Premiere Pro CC.
Alright i have premiere pro open here with a file i've pre-recorded the first part is me talking fairly close to the mic and the second part is when i talk further away from the mic so i'll give you guys a listen so you know what we're working with before we start the tutorial and i want you to pay attention to where the levels hit on the audio meter because this will help you figure out what levels to input into your compressor this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic so as you can tell the first part is around -6 and the next part is below -18 so there's a pretty big gap between those two audio levels and of course you could split the clip and then simply increase the gain on the second clip of let's say 13 higher to get it similar in volume and while this works very efficiently for just two clips if you had a whole bunch of audio or just one continuous take it would take you quite a long time to do that and it's always good to know various techniques when you're editing because then you can choose the best workflow for the editing project you're working on let's go ahead and undo let's go to the effects panel window and then type in dynamics.
Then under the amplitude and compression folder let's drag down dynamics onto our file alternatively if you want to use a compressor on your entire track you can go to the audio track mixer click the little arrow up here and then in the top section here for inserts you can then add the dynamics effect for the entire track since i'm just working with one audio file we'll just apply the dynamics effect to this single file in effect controls we'll go to edit and then we'll change some settings in the compressor tab so let's go ahead and enable that and then we saw before that our first audio was sitting around -6 and then our next audio was setting around minus 18 or so so the goal of what we're trying to do today in this tutorial with this compressor is in order to raise the lower parts of the volume we need to bring down the higher parts so we're going to use a compressor to lower the loud parts and then we can use the makeup setting in the compressor to bring up the quieter part first we have our threshold this is essentially a number that we input into the compressor to tell it to engage or not engage anything above minus 20 will start to be compressed or lowered in gain for this example then we have our ratio which is how much the compressor will actually compress so right now we have a one ratio which is a one to one and that essentially means you're not going to compress really at all it will just raise the volume but not really compress the audio and control it if you set it to let's say two that will be a two to one and that will start to introduce some compression into your audio you could go up to three or four and but i wouldn't go too much more than that for dialogue for people's voices as then it could start sounding unnatural if you're working with a drum track for example then you could go a lot higher than that to get a nice punchy snare or kick drum sound but again if you're just working with audio you want to make sure that your ratios are kept quite low.
Then we have our attack and release which is how quick the effect comes into play and then over how long it is released typically i'll keep those to default but if you did want to get an average or starting point you can go up to the presets and you can go to a medium or soft compression so let's go to soft and you'll see that it has a 1.9 to 1 ratio minus 12 1 and 50 and then with a makeup of 3.3 the makeup is essentially adding gain or volume to your audio track to make up for the lower volume that was caused in starting to use the compressor so let's go back to default turn our compressor on set this to around two we'll start off with keeping the threshold around minus 20 and then add a make up of about seven decibels now let's give it a listen to see if that did anything to our audio and again pay attention to the audio meters of where each level sits this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic the first audio sounds a little more compressed but ultimately it's staying around -6 but then did you notice that the second audio was no longer below minus 18 it was actually sitting closer to like minus 12 and that's because of our makeup gain of around seven decibels to exaggerate that let's go to 15, this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic with a makeup of 15 decibels you saw that the first part of the audio was peaking this is an audio test where i'm speaking but our second part was pretty much exactly where we want it so now that you're starting to understand how the different inputs can affect your audio let's go ahead and start fine-tuning these settings and i should note that it's pretty common to have different compressor settings every time you work with a compressor just because of the nature of how audio works in different environments.
Let's change our ratio up to three let's change our threshold to -30 and then we'll give that a listen this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic okay now that our levels are getting pretty close we can adjust the overall makeup and i'd be careful with raising this too much because the higher you raise the overall volume the more you're also raising the noise floor in your audio and that means you might hear a lot more background noise or hiss in your recordings okay so with it set to 20 let's listen to this this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic i think that's sounding pretty good let's turn it off for a second i'll show you the difference of where we started this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic this is an audio test where i'm speaking very close to the mic and this is an audio test where i'm speaking pretty far from the mic so as you heard it makes a pretty big difference working with a compressor to level audio but you also may have heard how compressed the voice ended up being so if you find your voice being too compressed working with this way, and you're not a fan of how it sounds, then you might have to go with the other way which would be to manually use the pen tool or like i said before split up the track and then adjust the gain individually.
Overall the compressor can be a great tool to know to level your audio fairly quickly and automatically after entering in just a few settings now beyond that if you want to raise the makeup gain of your audio even more so that it's more compressed you can absolutely do that but again it's going to affect the audio and beyond that you might introduce some peeking into your audio you can get around the peaking by adding a limiter and setting it to you know minus one or minus two for example but i find the limiter in premiere doesn't really sound too great and if you watch one of our other tutorials on how to prevent peeking in audio you'll see that i use another plug-in to do that so check out that video if you're interested okay i hope this video was helpful on how to level audio using a compressor inside premiere pro we have a ton of other filmmaking tutorials on this channel if you want to learn more from us if you like this video give it a thumbs up comment down below and subscribe for more videos from us in the future we'll see you next time.
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