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Normalizing and Syncing Audio

Lesson 23 from: Adobe® Premiere®

Larry Jordan

Normalizing and Syncing Audio

Lesson 23 from: Adobe® Premiere®

Larry Jordan

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Lesson Info

23. Normalizing and Syncing Audio

Next Lesson: Text Effects

Lesson Info

Normalizing and Syncing Audio

if we look at my screen, notice that I've set this clip so it starts somewhere other than the beginning. This is really not a good idea. You always always, always want to make sure your first clip starts at the very beginning of the timeline. And the reason is that the timeline starts at at a specific time code number, which for many projects you may not care about. For some projects, it's vitally important. So it's really good practice to always have your clips started to very beginning of the timeline. If there's a gap between the beginning of the timeline in your first clip, you're gonna have a flash of black a little later this morning, I'm gonna show you how you can change the starting time code of your sequence most of the time for projects that are going to the Web. You don't care at all, but there are sometimes especially for broadcast projects, where you care a lot about the starting time coat, so show you how to change that. Also, if you notice I have two sequences open at th...

e same time, I have us always one project, one box that holds everything but I can have multiple sequences open and toggle between them by simply clicking the tabs up here. You don't have to go over to the project window and click on the sequence name. Once you've opened a sequence, it remains open inside a tab until you close it. You close it by clicking on this X up here. Jim, you've let me down. I can't believe you didn't notice this. There's no red circle around my cursor. You have not brought that error. That omission to my attention. That's what My favorite things you know. It's all about trying to make sure people can figure out what the heck is going on. Come on, come on, come on. But we're still with the giant cursor, which I love. I got to use that as a joke. A coworker someday, and this is only 1/4. As biggest it can get, you can make a giant curse of the size of the stops. Have them be completely unable to do any work at all. It's gonna be great. All right. So we have two tabs open at the same time. You can toggle between them. They only show up after you've double click from the first time from the project. One of the project panel is the box that stores stuff. And inside we got a bunch of file folders, those air sequences, and inside those file folders, we have individual sheets of paper. Those are the clips that were editing inside our sequence. Now, Susan, wake up. Pay attention to smell the coffee. I'm so here. I have the question ready from yesterday. Okay, good. Remember the question? What was it? Question was from Trap City produces, I guess. The name right. Okay, go ahead. And it was What is the difference in premier between normalizing Max Peak versus All Peaks? Yes. Now I select the clip. I go up to the clip men, you go down to audio options and the audio option called Audio game keyboard shortcut. The letter G opens up a dialogue which allows us to set the game now setting this game. Remember, we talked about the differences between absolute audio where you're making a very specific change to a very specific level and relative change, which is changing the level relative to the position where it is now. If I set the game the game two plus three can't do that. If I set to gain toe minus one, then the gain goes exactly two minus one. That's when I use the set game setting. When I used to just gain what adjust game does, says if I set that to minus one and the Clippers at minus five, it goes up. Sorry, it goes down one. So this this sets it to a specific value. I will get this English sentence to make sense. Yet this sets the game to a specific value. This changes the game from wherever it is now by the amount you specify here. Normalized Max Peak and normalize. All peaks are exactly the same when you're normalising one clip. But if I'm normalizing two or three or four clips when I see normalize the Max Peak and I would know that I would normally normalize to negative three, you would never normalize to zero. That's way too loved when you normalize Max Peak and I have, say, three clips selected. It's gonna take the loudest peak across all three of those clips and normalize the level so that one peak is it minus three, and everything else is relative to it. When I'm normalized all peaks to minus three, it means that it's going to take the loudest portion of each clip and bring that up to negative three. If you have audio, which is wildly different, and you want to have them all sound the same. Normalized all peaks to negative. Three. If you have, say, a piece of music that split into several clips and you wanna have the dynamics between all those different sections of that music remain relatively the same than you would normalize Max peaks to negative three in general for talking head interviews, you'd want to normalize all peaks to negative three. That would be your preferred choice. I prefer normalization because setting the game and adjusting the gain convert easily turn into a distorted clip because it's easy to adjust it by so much that the volume exceeds zero, which we've already established is bad. So if you're going to adjust to gain using this dialogue used, normalize all peaks and normalized to negative three if it's just one person talking or normalized to negative 4.5, if there's a lot of clips, their sound effects, there's music cues there's multiple things going on at the same time. This gives you a little bit more headroom to fit everything in. I would not normalize toe less than negative 4.5, and I would generally not normalize too great the negative three. So that that answer the question absolutely, very thoroughly. Think OK, now the next thing that we didn't have time to talk about. Now it starts to get a little bit weird when we shoot with DSLR cameras. DSLR cameras have wonderful, wonderful pictures and miserable, miserable audio. They forgot that part. So what we end up happened? What first, never, ever, ever, ever, ever record audio on a DSLR camera that you expect anybody else listen to. It's going to sound really bad. We instead we do. It's called double system Sound. Double System sound is where we have the audio recorded on one device. The typical standard in the industry right now is Zoom H four, and I personally am a favorite of Marantz 6 61 ppm PMD PDM. It's the 6 61 Marantz is the one that I use all the time, but I also use zoom recorders and so we've got the microphone plugged into the zoom. That's box one. We've got pictures coming off the camera. That's box, too. And there's no connection between him. Timecode doesn't match nothing. Fact audio is. I know Jared knows audio doesn't even have time code. There's only one audio format that has time code that's called the broadcast wave format, and nobody shoots broadcast wave. So we got time code that had we have audio that has no timecode. We've got pictures. How do we put them together? There's two ways that we can marry. Clips inside Premiere. We do it with either merging clips or sinking clips. So here I have our sheep, which is a bighorn sheep and I havent audio clip. I was looking through my files, and I realized when I traveled up to Seattle today that I did not earlier this week, I did not bring any of my DSLR materials surrender. This is an intellectual exercise. We're not actually going toe. Listen to the audio because it's a piece of music and we're not actually gonna We're not going to try to pretend that the bighorn sheep can sing, So we're just gonna pretend that I have sound that came from the zoom record of a person talking. So there's two ways that we can work with. This one is noticed that I have audio and video separate. Okay, there's no relationship. I can move one. I can move the other. There's no relationship between the two. When you're working with double system sound, the first thing that you want to do is to sink the clips to get the lips moving with the audios that they're both of the same same point in time with double system sound. Weaken. Do that. You select the clips like this, you go up to the clip menu and you go down to synchronize when you synchronize the clip. We now have several options we can synchronize based upon the start of the clip. We can synchronize based upon the end of the clip, and neither those are your best choice. If you have matching time code, you could synchronize on time code. But audio doesn't have time code, so scratch that instead what we would do. It was we would synchronize on a clip marker, or you could synchronize on audio when you're recording DSLR footage. Always record audio using the camera mic on your DSLR camera when you click the audio, which doesn't work because there's no audio on my sheep clip. But when you click the audio, then Premier will match the wave forms of the DSLR image with the wave forms of the Zoom H Foreign audio track and marry them together automatically so you don't have to worry about clapper slates anymore. In order for audio sync toe work, you must have audio recorded on both the video clip, your DSLR camera and your audio clip. It'll take a little bit of time, especially if they're wildly divergent, so it could take as much as, say, 20 or 30 seconds to hit that sink. But this is the best way because it doesn't involve clapper slates. It just simply marries the audio from one to the other. If you don't have audio on your video track, you just recorded pure video with no audio. Then we generally have a clapper slate, and what you would do is you would put a marker at the clapper slate where that comes down that instant, where they touch and you put a marker in the audio where you here the clap of the clappers late. So I now have two markers. You can then synchronize based upon the marker, and the markers need to have the same name. Generally, I used, like sink one or Sink three. I have a number in there as well, and you can then synchronize on the same marker. It will automatically move the clips in the timeline until they're perfectly sync. Once you've got them sink, let's just pretend. Let's just do this on clip start here. Clip synchronized, started the clip. OK, foam sink. Now we've moved those clips, but they're still separate. They're in sync, but they're not locked together. So now the second step is to select the clip. Go upto select both the audio and the video clips. Go up to the clip man, you go down to merge clips, and now we're going to merge. Clips based upon the in points weaken merge. Based upon the out, we converge upon time code or clip marker. What merging is doing is it is locking the audio and video together, and it automatically shows up as a clip inside the project window. It means that I've now created a clip that acts as though the audio in the video were captured at the same time and stores it inside the project window. So you can then use that as many times as you want inside your project so you can sink clips but not locked them together. That synchronization or you can lock the audio and the video that's merging. You can Onley merge one video clip with up to 16 audio channels. Amano Clip is one audio channel stereo clippers to audio channels. A surround clip is six audio channels. You can merge one video clip up to 16 audio channels. You cannot merge to video clips. It's one video clip toe up to 16 audio channels. Most the time it would be one or two, and that's going to show up inside the project window. This is, ah, a huge feature for people that are working with double system sound, which is increasingly common is DSLR Cameras come in. We thought we were getting away with it when film was going out and video cameras were recording really high quality sound, but knew the industry wanted make our lives difficulty. We're back to double system sound again with all the problems that that causes. But Premier makes it easy to get those clips sink top before we tackle something new. Any questions? Yeah, I'd like to just throw one out. Can you define some of the problems of the double system? Sound chirp? First problems you've got to files were before you had. Once you have a file management issue, the second is because you have a big problem we've got is sample rates where the sample rate on the audio that you recording may or may not tie out with the sample rate that you got the project. Oh, there's this big. There's a big brouhaha brewing where people are trying. I want to record not at 48,000 samples per second. How plebian I want recorded 96,000 samples per 2nd 192,000 samples per second. And then all of sudden, your file sizes becoming gigantic. And you got all this. Why? Which someone record at 96,000 samples per second? I ask that rhetorically because I'm not gonna put you on the spot to answer that question, because overkill as you remember And I know Susan, I'm not even ask Jim a math question. But as Susan will remember, if you take the sample rate and divide it by two, that equals the maximum frequency response. Okay, so, Susan, here's your quiz. You ready for this? If I have a 96,000 sample rate, 96,000 sample rate and I divide that by two. What maximum frequency response does that come close to 96,000? Divide by two. It's like 100 divide by two. What's it close to? You know, I resent that You wisdom that in my ear because I can do the math. 48, right? That means that don't look so surprised. The that means that the sample rate a 96,000 sample, right yields a maximum high frequency response of 48, cycles per second. And as I know, you remember from yesterday, human hearing only goes to 20,000 cycles per second. That extra sample rate is like why so Here's the answer. I do this standing up. You have no idea how hard it is to do this sitting down. I'm sitting next to ah, bubbling mountain Brook and flowing down This mountain is a beautiful bubbling mountain broken in my hand. I have a one cup plastic measuring cup, and I dip it into the bubbling mountain Broken. There is that one cup plastic measuring cup filled to the brim with what used to be bubbling Mountain brook water. Now I pour in some food dye. I add some sugar and I grab a spoon. I start around frantically to get all mixed, and there's water flying out all over. So when I'm done, adding all these ingredients in these effects and mixing it all together, my one cup of water is now half a cup of water. I lost a lot of water in the process of adding all these ingredients, and my final delivery is this One cup. I have to deliver one cup of water and I can't. I've cost myself quality. So what? Instead, what I do is I sit next to this bubbling mountain brook with a lot of water going down. I take a five gallon wooden bucket and I dip it in a book, and I've broken. I've got a five gallon wooden bucket filled to the brim with bubbling mountain brook water. Now here I have two choices. I can add ingredients and mix them around and have water flying in all directions and in the bucket instead of having a full bucket. I've got 1/ a bucket and then I can pour off the one cup of water that I need. And I can have a guaranteed full one cup of water cause I'm just taking a small extract of the vast resource is I had to start with, or I could pour off the water at the very beginning and have one cup of water port back in the empty bucket stirred around the bucket is so big. The space I've got is so large that I can add as many in greens that I want. I'm not going to spill a drop of water, so when I pour it back out again, I have all of my water. Working with higher sample rates gives me a much bigger environment in which to do audio effects or working with higher bit depth. Video gives me a much better environment toe add color correction because I'm working in a much bigger space as opposed to the constrained one cup space of a V C h d your h 10.2 64. I'm working in a five gallon space of 96,000 samples or 10 bit pro Reds video, which gives me a much bigger space within which to work. And I don't lose anything the way I would if I was working inside that small one cup plastic measuring cup. So the reason that sometimes you work with double system sounds. You want higher quality. You want greater flexibility. The camera doesn't record high quality sound. You need to recorded higher sample rates than the camera will support. All of these could be true, and it's illustrated by working in a much bigger space like the bucket provides. Cool. You are such a good storyteller. I was completely I was transported to that from the woods, and I know what that stream now the thing that you should be really impressed with, The thing that I find really amazing is that somebody from L. A who has never seen water standing on the ground in this life thinks of things like bubbling mountain brooks. I think you know, we have hot and cold running sand. It's really, really nice. It is to be able. I was sort of thinking of my childhood growing up in Wisconsin, where we do have water standing on the ground. Any other questions? Yes. And we have received a question from Lewis s yesterday regarding the physical sinking of audio to the video. When you're using a separate system in premiere, is it as easy as just dropping in and lining it up? It's exactly what we went through. Remember, there's a two step process you have sink. So you select your audio and your video clips and you go up to clip and synchronize will automatically sync align the audio with up to 16 channels of Sorry, the video with up to 16 channels of audio. Once they're in sync, they're still separate. Merge then locks the clips together. And the blocked clip now shows up over here in the project window. Perfect. Is that new to a newer versions of Premiere, as opposed to somebody had, like, three or four. Do you Are you familiar? It goes back at least to see us for okay. I can't speak to earlier than that. Awesome. Thank you. And I'm just gonna do a follow up on that George TB wants to know about synchronizing three audio streams with a camera. Is it better to use the volume peaks or the audio gain? Wait, wait, wait. Read that question again to synchronize three audio streams with a camera. What is better to use the volume peaks or the audio gain? Well, you can't use either for synchronization. Synchronisation aligns the audio with the video so that that let's say that I have. Kelly is wearing a microphone and Janice is wearing a microphone and Scotus wearing a microphone. I'm taking all three of those microphones, and I'm recording them to three separate digital audio recorders, and I've got a video camera on all three, and they're doing this wonderfully dramatic scene. Now I've got one video clip and an audio file from Kelly, an audiophile from Janice, an audiophile from Scott. I need to synchronize all those files, the video with the three audio files. So you put the video file here and then you put the three audio files, and in this case you can't really align them on wave forms because all the audio is different. This is a perfect opportunity to a clapper slate where you hear that slate snap. And you put a marker in the video and a marker where you hear that slate in the audio, you would then select your clips, go up to the clip men you go down to synchronize, and you would synchronize it based upon that clip marker, you just answer to quite another question. So brilliant. Okay, So you do you do recommend using a clapper board for doing all double well you want? Absolutely. I absolutely, totally, completely recommended Clapper slate for two reasons. One, it makes you look like you're professional. And everybody believes anyone using a clapper slate must absolutely deserve whatever money they're being paid. So there's the perception of knowing what you're doing. The second is even if you don't use the clapper slate. That clapper slate itself gives you the building to write the shot to take the date. All that information at the beginning of the shot, which your editor will desperately need when they're struggling to find that one shot that got lost in anything that they can't find. And then you also have the added advantage of a sink point that sharp shock where the sound of the clap coming down and that instant where my hands were separated. When they're not separate, there's an instant where we switch from separate to not separate. That sets a very clear in on your video that you can use for a sink point for double system sound, enabling your editor to know what they've got to work with. You're looking like you're a professional. There's all kinds of reasons. Use clapper slates and Jim because I know you and Susan because I know you and Susan going to stop right there. You could give her a gift. The next time that she has a birthday, you can get a clapper slate, and it has her name engraved in the Star column on the slate so that it becomes her own clapper slate that she can carry around to toe look star struck er star full of whatever one looks whenever one does it. And I imagine from an organizing standpoint, the clapper is really helpful for marking your scenes, notated your scenes and takes and all that as well. Yes, it is. I will be. I will be so annoying toe all my friends carrying, caring, snapping in people's faces. That's probably not a good idea, all right? Another question from redheads. 17. Who was from Liverpool? What audio formats will premiere handle and what audio format is preferable? Preferable formats are always un compressed. Premier likes waves like a efs. Those the two that you want to work with it can also can also work with broadcast wave. You want to avoid MP three's A C three's A sees you want to avoid MP fours because compressed audio is not designed for editing. Compressed audio was designed for distribution. Once you're editing is done, so if you have on MP three or N. A. A. C or a C three file, you want to run it into some sort of conversion program, whether it's Quick Time or ITunes or Adobe Media Encoder, and you want to convert it from whatever the compressed format is into un compressed. Always work with wave or area. If you get the most consistently reliable, high quality results great, I think we're ready to keep going. Perfect. So what I want to do now is I want to I may have slides. I do have slights. I have exactly one slide this is what I should have showed at the beginning of the day. But I was so struck by feeling sheepish that I forgot. So what I want I want to do today is I want to clean up some audio details that are left over from day to We've just done that. So if you weren't paying attention, you've missed it. Then we want to explore text effects. We're gonna an ad blend modes to text and images. We're gonna learn a wide variety of motion and filter effects, including picture and picture split screens, chroma key cropping. We're going to explore the new Lumet's tree looks, which for people that don't know, color correction is a wonderful way to change. The look of your images will learn how to read scopes and color correct clips. This is one of my absolute favorite sessions, and it will destroy television for the rest of your life. And then if we have time, we're going Teoh, we're gonna edit a short mini documentary. I want to apply everything that we've learned, plus two techniques that have not yet had a chance to show you were gonna turn. Doctor surf has an interesting sound bite on the creation of the interplanetary Internet on how we're communicating with missions to Mars, and we're going to turn this into something that we can use for, say, posting to YouTube. Then we'll learn how to export with an introduction toe Adobe Media Encoder, which is the compression heart and a transfer heart of After Effects and Premier and Prelude and Encore. It all flows through Adobe Media Encoder, and we want to show you how that works. There are three categories of effects inside premiere. There are text effects. There are filter, there are motion effects, and there are filter effects. What we're going to do now and associated with that or quarter called blend modes. Final cut calls them composite modes. There are ways of combining images that are very organic and very cool and extraordinarily easy to do.

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Adobe® Premiere® with Larry Jordan Keynotes

Ratings and Reviews

Jfraz
 

I love this class. It is highly technically, but there is an awesome wealth of information to be had, even if you are a beginner. I've been struggling for a while, trying to look at YouTube videos and whatnot, but this class helped me make better sense of what I needed to do in all of my video editing. You get such a great foundation that's going to help you go further.

Valentine
 

I recommend Larry Jordan's course there is a lot of in-depth information that will help the beginner as well as the advance premiere editor. The only thing is that his humor is a big corky for my taste but if you look beyond that you get a lot from his teachings. He genuinely wants his students to succeed and get paid well in this field which its nice.

a Creativelive Student
 

This is one of my favorite courses on Creative Live. Larry Jordan teaches in a way that I can follow and is easy to stay focused on. He has a crazy amount of knowledge about this topic as do all the Creative Live teachers. I love this site so much, has done more for my business than all the other sites I have used combined. Keep it up CL!!

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