Skip to main content

Edit Audio in Adobe Audition

Lesson 22 from: Creating a Video From Start to Finish

Victor Ha

Edit Audio in Adobe Audition

Lesson 22 from: Creating a Video From Start to Finish

Victor Ha

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

22. Edit Audio in Adobe Audition

Victor suggests photographers edit audio first to get the aspect that we're least familiar with out of the way. Build an understanding of audio editing and skills for using Adobe Audition, including eliminating that room noise.

Lesson Info

Edit Audio in Adobe Audition

Let's jump into Audition really quickly. If I import, okay? Here are my files. This is my full interview file and then this is my, right here, my room tone. So I'm gonna load these two files into Audition right now. OK, and the way you import in Audition is the same as Premier. Just command I, okay, on a Mac. I think it's control I on a PC. Alright. So what we got here, guys, is we just have, we've all seen it. Just an audio wave, okay, of the file. And if I go ahead and play the file this is my Room Tone. You'll hear just the sound of the room and as you kinda get closer to here you'll see that we're gonna hear some car, okay? Now a lot of people here are like, well okay, I've seen this. Like what's the point of doing this here? I can look at this in Premiere. You know? I can look at this in any other sound program that gives me this file. Well the reason that I like Audition, the reason that I use Audition, one, it's because it's part of the Adobe Suite, is this thing here. If I chan...

ge my view to spectral frequency, okay? This is the reason right here. So what I'm looking for is this purpleness. Okay? So we're gonna keep playing here. Can you see this purple? That purple is the hum that you're hearing. Okay? So just follow me here and listen along. I'm gonna move the cursor right here so give me a second. If you listen closely that's a truck, right? Is that a constant sound? No, but it's a truck. So you can see how it affects that wave more. Okay so think about this. Think about this. Think about it in terms of photography. Lows, mediums, highs. Black, gray, white. Zero, 255, okay? We're just replacing zero and 255 with 120,000, okay? So what happens when something gets up here? Well it's playing in the high frequency. What's happening when something's down here? It's playing in the low frequency. So what happened when that truck came? It's playing in the middle frequency, okay? That's how you read this meter, okay? That's how you read this thing. Okay? So what I'm gonna do here is this is the best part of getting room tone, guys. It's this because every time I do it, I giggle. Every time I do it I giggle. Alright? So what we're gonna do okay, I'm gonna take this I beam, okay, right up here. I'm gonna click on that I beam tool. And them I'm gonna drag it across a continuous part of that room tone. Alright? All I'm doing is just highlighting it. Okay, just going here I want that to that. Did I take the truck noise? No, why? It's not continuous. Only continuous. Only continuous. One more time. Only continuous, okay? Otherwise you're going to get something really, really bad you don't want. From here, okay, I'm gonna come into effects, noise reduction, capture noise print. Okay? When I do that what's gonna happen is Audition's gonna see this, it's gonna capture the noise print. It's gonna say, oh. Okay, that's noise. Got it. It's gonna remember it for me. Okay? Now if I go back and go into noise reduction, noise reduction I can play it, actually apply that filter. This is what happens when you play and when you apply noise reduction to this room tone. So I'm gonna play it for you. It's being applied right now guys. Here's it unapplied. Applied. Unapplied. Applied. Unapplied. Okay, now before I wow you another time where did we record this footage? In that room. Where did we record that sound? In that room. What does my audio file have? That room tone. Do you see where I'm going? I can capture the noise print, right? And then now apply it to my audio file. Pfffft, right? Got a question. Could you just repeat the second step? Absolutely. The part where you actually, I got the effects, noise reduction, capture noise print. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so we captured a noise print. So I'll do the whole thing over again, okay? So I'm here. I'm gonna capture my noise print. Effects, noise reduction, capture noise print. Okay? Now I've got it captured. Now I'm gonna go right back up to effects. I'm gonna come right back down to noise reduction and I'm gonna come right here to noise reduction here. Okay, that second one. Okay? And if I wanna play around and amuse myself I'm gonna play and then I'm gonna do before, after. Before, after. Okay? Now here's the cool thing. I'm gonna apply it. It's gonna apply. Now I just did this onto the room tone, so we're gonna look and see what that room tone looks like now. Just gone. Just gone. That noise is just gone. Okay? Alright, so. What have I done at this point? I've just applied it to this. And before we talked about well, this room tone was the room tone from the audio that we recorded in the interview. So theoretically, let's just follow my logic here, if I capture the noise print of the room tone and I apply that noise print to my audio that I recorded in the interview, do you think it's gonna have an effect? Absolutely it's gonna have an effect. So let's do that. Okay? Now bear in mind do I have a noise print already? Yeah. Why do I have a noise print already? 'Cause I copied it from the room tone already. So what I'm gonna do here is since I've already loaded my interview file I'm gonna open my interview file and this is what my interview file looks like. Okay, this is fun, isn't it? Yeah. Isn't it cool? Isn't this cool? Alright, cool. Watch this. So let's find some conversation. I'm gonna turn this down just a little bit. [Audio File Voice] I fell in love with wrestling and at least that beginning of the fight world. Can you hear that noise? Okay, turn it up a little bit. [Audio File Voice] Was that something that came out of you? That just, right here real quick. [Audio File Voice] Now it's going to be live for real. So I'm gonna have you hold something real quick for me. Can you hear that? Okay, it just got a little bit of their drone. [Audio File Voice] I'm gonna frame up some cameras and then we're gonna actually- Okay, so keep listening to it. [Audio File Voice] It's completely- [Audio File Interviewer] In what ways? (laughter) [Audio File Voice] Thank you so, thank you. [Audio File Interviewer] Cool, so I'm just gonna do a quick cut and then we'll keep going, okay? (crosstalk) [Audio File Voice] Awesome. Yeah. (crosstalk) See how much audio there is that we just don't use? Okay? That's okay. There's that drone that is incessant, incessant drone. [Audio File Voice] Hahahahaha. Okay? So here's what we're going to do. I'm gonna already have that noise print. I already have that noise print so what I'm gonna do here is just go ahead come to my effects, come into my filter, and let's see you're noise reduction and apply the noise reduction. Now I wanna apply it to the whole clip because that noise pervades through the whole, is pervasive throughout the whole clip. So the way you do that, there's a little button here. Select entire clip. So select the entire clip. It automatically goes through the entire clip and selects it. Okay? So at this point if I play it for you. [Audio File Voice] So it's gonna be live for real. So I'm gonna have you hold something real quick for me. Okay. If I go ahead here is the before. [Audio Clip Voice] I was super nervous coming in here. Because like, doing a shoot- Okay. And then here is the after. [Audio File Interviewer] With this amount of production- Hang on a second. Okay. Can you hear that? And now here's the after. [Audio File Interviewer] And so getting it and then patching it up so that you can teach about it. Right? So all the stuff we're shooting today- [Audio File Voice] Yeah. [Audio File Interviewer] I gotta package it up- Okay, that drone's gone. I'm going back and forth. (clip playing) Okay? Alright? Now we're gonna keep the audio track playing because I want you guys to hear what's gonna happen at the high end as he starts talking, okay? I'm gonna fast forward through this track a little bit and get to a point where he's actually talking and we're gonna hear something else in this audio track that's actually kind of really distracting, okay? It's gonna happen right around here. [Audio File Voice] The old brown sweater. Good. Okay, let's see here. [Audio File Voice] Now there's a lot, a lot of energy in this area. They're building out, they're knocking down blocks, neighborhoods, to build up for the Amazon campus during the day. So if you can hear at the high end there's a hiss. As he's talking it sounds like static. Okay? It sounds like a constant hhhhhhsssssssss. [Audio File Voice] Well there's a few things. I mean, to me- Can you hear that as he talks it's like rattling. [Audio File Voice] The success of his business is obviously what gets me up. I have to make this happen, right? And the other one is people, you know? I like people. I really enjoy people and I like also- So I'm gonna apply this and we're gonna talk about that high end hiss. That high end hiss is really, really annoying because of whatever. It was static. There was like maybe it was static off of his sweater. There was something that was causing a ssssss at the top whenever he talked, okay? So what we do here is we're gonna apply a noise rack effect on this file to take down some of the high end. And you can hear that sound up in here, right here. Let me find a really good example of it. Give me a second here. So let's see. It should be somewhere like right around here. [Audio File Voice] Walk into the gym. The smells. Okay, it should be right around here. Ahh. Okay, right before that little hiss there was something right there. That little pop can't get rid of very easily. That's a cut. That's a mistake. Get rid of it. But before and after that there is a continual hiss so in order for us to get rid of that what we're gonna do here is apply what's called a rack effect. A rack effect is you hit that power button. You come over here and you're gonna see a drop down. Okay, the only filter, the only thing we're looking for is something called FFT. Hit this, you're gonna hit that little spinner, and we're gonna kind of go over these until we see FFT. FFT. Alright? And I'm gonna apply it. Alright, remember what I said? Shadows, mid tones, highlights. Just like a level. Alright? We heard that up in this area. We know that that area is pervaded by that tone because we see that purple all over the place, don't we? So the only way we can get rid of that at the high end is if we pull the ceiling down to get rid of it and just not play it. Okay? We're pulling out a frequency, basically. We're stopping the playback of the audio track instead of that 20,000 Hz we're gonna stop it somewhere around 10,000 Hz. Okay you guys follow me? Remember, have you guys ever looked at a photograph when you're underexposed and overexposed and you got a histogram in the middle? And you got room on both sides? What do you guys do? You pull it in. Right? You pull it in. You pull it in. You're just pulling those things in. Exact same concept here except instead of it affecting an exposure we're just preventing a certain frequency from playing. Okay? So that's what we're gonna do. The way we do that is I'm gonna come down to 10K. I'm gonna click there. I'm gonna click another time here and drag it down and move it over. Okay, I'm gonna drag it down and move it over. See this guy is horizontal. If I took it and flipped it you see what I'm doing? Okay, so if I flipped it what happens? That blue line's coming across this way and it's preventing all of that stuff from playing. Okay, so let's do that. Let's get a playback. Okay and... [Audio File Voice] You're gonna take your lumps and you might get lumps, right? So here's before. [Audio File Voice] Because the truth of it is like the whole purpose of wrestling is to win. You're not out there to lose. You're out there to win. And after. [Audio File Voice] So it creates a nice strong format- And for those of you who have headphones on you're really gonna hear the difference in the way that this audio is playing back. And just by doing this, if I noticed that I needed to break it down to 7K I can bring it down here over. Just bring it over. So this is what I mean, guys, when I say, oh, you know, what we're gonna do is take care of the audio problems. Take care of the things that are gonna distract us from listening to this thing and getting into the edit. The last thing I'm gonna show you guys is something called the auto heal. And the auto heal is really neat because what it'll do is it'll allow you to kind of like eliminate some sounds and I'm gonna show it on that part where you heard that pop, okay? It's not gonna get rid of the pop but I'm showing it to you so that you could see how if there's like a slight noise you can get rid of that slight noise. Okay, so over here, so here's that pop. [Audio File Voice] It'll create passion. And very enthusiastic for what the feelings and what you get from it. (audio pop) See that? Okay? So what we're gonna do is go after that pop. Okay, that pop is right here, I think. Yeah it looks like it. Let's see here. Alright so here you go. (cough) it's like a cough, alright? So if I go ahead and I select the marquise I can come out here and then go to favorites, just click auto heal. And here you go. It's gone. Okay? Okay? Alright, it's gone. So those are the three things I can teach you guys in Audition. That's my limitation of Audition, okay? I just told you all the things I know and the only things I use in that piece of software. Those are the three things that get me into my edit as quickly as possible. Okay, I'm not an expert in Audition. I learned Audition as a photographer so that I could get into my edit. To get to use my room tone, to get rid of that white noise at the top end, and then to learn how to use auto heal. Okay? Alright? Any questions so far? What's up? If your room tone's frequencies are a little closer to the vocal frequencies, have you seen any issues there? Where you're removing those frequencies and you remove some of the frequencies of the human voice? Right, so if your room tone's somewhere in here okay? What you're gonna have- If your room tone's like in the middle frequency you know, it's interesting because typically room tone doesn't have that middle frequency. It's usually lower because of the way that the sound reverberates. I actually haven't found any kind of room tone that plays in the middle frequency but if I have I would apply the room tone to see what it sounds like and then when you actually go into the room tone adjustment, like when you apply the noise reduction you can make your adjustments here to which frequency you apply it to. Right? You can make your adjustment. Typically you're in and out but if you have a situation like that you can play around in here to get yourself to a better point with that. Okay? I got a question. I do have a question from Steve who says do you know if there is anything equivalent to Audition functionality if you're working in Final Cut Pro? I think it's Media Composer. Okay. I think it's Media Composer. If it's not I apologize. And we'll, yeah, I wanna say it's Media Composer but I think, because I'm so dedicated to the Adobe Suite, I just know Adobe really well. But yeah, I think Google Media Composer and I think that's what it is. Okay? Thank you. Yeah, no problem. I got a question. So you took away the sound of the room. Will you then add ambient sound to make it more real later, or...? So that's a good question. I took out the sound of the room because I didn't want the sound of the room and I think what we hear is his voice much more natural along the video. Because if you have that reverberation and that low hum it's very, very distracting. Okay, so you wanna get rid of that so all you do is have clean tone. Okay, and you get that clean tone you play it back and actually if you really listen to it you don't need the sound of the room because his voice is already reverberating in that recording. It's already in that space. So it's not so distracting. We're getting rid of that noise print just to remove the distraction between his statements. And the overall kind of like hum that pervades that whole clip. Okay? Yesterday you were talking about you wanted to get the room tone the same day. If you're gonna take that sound out does it really matter? Absolutely. So the reason we grab that room tone the same day is so that we can capture the noise print from it and remove it from the real clip. If I don't have that room tone there's no way I can do it easily on my actual audio clip. You see what I'm saying here? Is that I'm actually, basically, it's like tracing paper, okay? I'm going in, I'm tracing it, and I'm putting it in my pocket so that when I go back into my editing room I can pull it out and go, oh, this is the thing that I wanna remove and throw it away from my audio clip and now I've just got my audio clip. Okay? So if I don't go into a room and trace that print and put it in my pocket and then go back into my editing room I can't pull anything out of my pocket and say I need to remove this. I just have the clip. But can it be a different- I mean- Can it be a different day? Yeah, a different day or something like that if you're removing the noise? So in my opinion the best room tone you're gonna get is the day of the shoot because sound will reverberate off of the room in a different way depending upon who and what is in the room. Okay, that's the major difference here is you could potentially go back and grab a noise print but that noise print will probably not match what's in your recording. You want it to match one for one with what's in your recording. 'Cause if you don't do that what's gonna end up happening is you're gonna hear that napster tinny sound we talked about yesterday okay? You've gotta get that room tone. If you do one thing don't ever make a mistake on getting a room tone. You've gotta get that room tone.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Victor's Discount Codes
Keynote
Interview Questions
5 Rules to B Roll

Free Bonus Materials

Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Cheryl Winkles
 

You're awesome, I learnt a lot from you, this is like a must-have first course for anyone who wants to step into video or filmmaking world. Highly recommended and thank you a million Victor Ha.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic course, Victor is one of the finest instructors I have encountered. Great stuff, I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to work in video

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES