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Working with Audio: Music

Lesson 21 from: Adobe Premiere Pro CC Video Editing: The Complete Guide

Abba Shapiro

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Lesson Info

21. Working with Audio: Music

Summary (Generated from Transcript)

This lesson focuses on working with audio, specifically adding music to a video project in Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The instructor demonstrates how to adjust the volume of the music, both before bringing it into the timeline and once it's in the timeline. He explains the difference between setting gain to a fixed level and adjusting gain relative to its current level. He also shows how to keyframe the music to create fades and how to isolate specific audio channels using the mute and solo buttons.

Q&A:

  1. How can you bring music into the timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro CC?

    You can either make in and out points on the music clip and target the audio track, or you can simply drag and drop the clip into the timeline.

  2. How can you adjust the volume of the music before bringing it into the timeline?

    You can change the gain level using the Modify menu or by pressing the "g" key, and choose either "set gain to" or "adjust gain by" to adjust the volume.

  3. Which option should you choose if you've already done an audio mix with keyframes?

    If you've already done an audio mix with keyframes, you should choose "adjust gain by" so that it keeps all the keyframes and moves everything up and down relative to its current level.

  4. How can you adjust the volume of the music once it's in the timeline?

    You can use keyframes to adjust the volume over time by adding keyframes and dragging the volume level up or down.

  5. How can you isolate specific audio channels in Adobe Premiere Pro CC?

    You can use the mute and solo buttons to mute or solo specific audio channels, allowing you to listen to specific channels individually or in combination.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Understanding Editing: Bootcamp Overview

07:25
2

Understanding Editing: Overview

25:25
3

Understanding Editing: Video Examples

25:07
4

Tour The Interface: Digital Video Workflow

16:38
5

Tour The Interface: Project Panel

12:28
6

Tour The Interface: Choosing Your Shot

07:18
7

Tour The Interface: Music And Voice Over

10:31
8

Tour The Interface: Video Tracks

05:26
9

Tour The Interface: Edit Markers

08:46
10

Building a Rough Cut: Cut Planning

21:46
11

Building a Rough Cut: Selecting Media

25:01
12

Building a Rough Cut: The Edit

30:50
13

Building a Rough Cut: Edit Points

13:43
14

Refining Your Edit: Preparation

10:29
15

Refining Your Edit: Making Cuts

25:19
16

Refining Your Edit: Using Markers

16:31
17

Refining Your Edit: J and L Cuts

15:57
18

Refining Your Edit: Replace Edit

05:04
19

Working with Audio: Overview

17:43
20

Working with Audio: Levels

13:36
21

Working with Audio: Music

10:00
22

Working with Audio: Mixing And Syncing

14:50
23

Transitions: Overview

13:44
24

Transitions: Effect Controls

09:31
25

Filters & Effects: Overview

18:05
26

Filters & Effects: Using Multiple Filters

22:18
27

Motion & Animation: Motion And Animation Overview

09:40
28

Motion & Animation: Movement With Still Images

26:56
29

Motion & Animation: Picture In Picture

10:57
30

Motion & Animation: Motion Effects

17:08
31

Titling & Graphics: Overview

27:11
32

Titling & Graphics: Advanced Tools

11:03
33

Titling & Graphics: Roll And Crawl Effects

08:01
34

Titling & Graphics: Working With Photoshop

12:17
35

Speed Changes: Overview

21:12
36

Speed Changes: Stills And Variable Speeds

06:23
37

Color Correction: Overview

07:39
38

Color Correction: Lumetri Scopes

11:32
39

Color Correction: Contrast

21:37
40

Color Correction: Advanced Tools

15:12
41

Color Correction: Adjusting To A Master Clip

07:45
42

Finishing: Prepping for Output

14:53
43

Finishing: QC Edit Points

24:56
44

Sharing & Exporting: Overview

29:05
45

Sharing & Exporting: Size And Quality

24:46
46

Ingesting Media:

28:39
47

Ingesting Media: Transferring And Importing

31:15
48

Media Management & Archiving

26:10
49

Multi-Camera Editing: Overview

14:26
50

Multi-Camera Editing: Creating A Sequence

20:04
51

Multi-Camera Editing: Switching Multiple Cameras

15:31
52

Multi-Camera Editing: Finalizing

12:37
53

Creating Timelapses: Shooting Strategies

18:04
54

Creating Timelapses: Editing Images

14:21
55

Creating Timelapses: Importing Strategies

18:47
56

Creating Timelapses: Animation

05:58
57

Advanced Editing Techniques: Take Command Of Your Timeline

22:36
58

Advanced Editing Techniques: Transitions

07:57
59

Advanced Editing Techniques: Keyboard Shortcuts

12:00
60

Advanced Editing Techniques: Preference Hacks

21:15
61

Thinking Like an Editor: Editing Choices

31:55
62

Thinking Like an Editor: Telling the Story

23:50
63

Special Tools: Warp Stabilizer

17:59
64

Special Tools: Morph Cut

06:56
65

Special Tools: Green Screen

20:16

Lesson Info

Working with Audio: Music

Let's go ahead make this actually visually less noisy. Go ahead, I just hit minus. I have this going on here and I want to bring in some music. I have a cut of music that we're going to be working with. Scroll down, it's this cut here. We heard it earlier. (mellow instrumental music) It's nice, it builds. I may put it in at the beginning of the show. Maybe I'll have a musical montage of some of the footage. Then we'll actually fade in. I could go ahead, I could make in and out points and target my audio track. I could also grab it and just bring it in to drag and drop it. Because I haven't marked any in and out points it's gonna bring in the entire clip which is fine because I can always go in and trim this. I can just simply grab the edge, and bring it down. Now you'll notice that that music is way louder than my voice is. Then I would have to go in and bring the music down. We learned how to do that. But I knew the music was going to be too loud so I actually wanna fix that globally ...

before I bring it in. I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna hit undo. Bring that out and I can go in here and I can change the gain level of the mus--, gain is how loud something is, before I bring it in. Now there's ways to get to it from the modification menu. But I know it's the gain, so the keyboard shortcut for changing the gain, the audio gain is g. That's why I've emphasized that. This is a very valuable box because what this will allow you to do is adjust your audio with a variety of parameters very quickly before you bring it in. You can also do it to your audio once it's in the timeline. I knew this would be too loud so I have a couple choices. I have set gain to and adjust gain by. Set gain to is a fixed level. If I said set gain to minus six db. Scroll that down, virtual slider and I hit okay, when I play this, see it's no longer peaking at zero. So it's adjusting to a fixed level. I'm gonna go ahead hit the g key again on my clip. If I adjust gain by it's now gonna be relative to its current level. So you can say I need this to be 10 db less. Db's a weird thing, it's this mathematical, logarithmic scale that every db is one order of, three db is one order of magnitude. Great things to impress people at a cocktail party. What's an order of magnitude? It doubles the volume, okay? So a level three makes it twice as loud. Plus six, four times as loud, and vice versa just as a reference. This will actually adjust it relative to where it is. Now why would you want to use one versus the other? Let's say I've already done an audio mix and I've worked on one clip and I have it nice and balanced and I have all these key frames. Well if I hit set gain to it's gonna wipe out all those key frames and just bring it to that equal level. If I do adjust gain by it will keep all the key frames and move everything up and down until it hits a point of smashing against the ceiling which you probably wouldn't want to do anyway. That's a very useful feature if you need to make something louder. It's also very useful if you have something that's really soft and you need to push it louder, adjust this by 20 db if something's really soft. I just want you to know the difference between those and I can do this before I bring it in. Music, I may say you know something? I want that at minus 20 db and I'll worry about it once it's in the timeline because now it's at a nice under level. Then I can tweak things. I'm gonna go ahead and say set gain to minus 20. What's really cool is if you have an entire folder of music that you brought in, you can select everything in the folder and say all my music, just make it minus 20 so whenever I bring it in I don't blast my ears out over my headphones. It's really very a useful tool and I can hit OK. Just to reference, normalize is it will look for the loudest volume point and try to equalize that so that this is going to be the loudest. Never will exceed minus six or minus two which is nice sometimes if you have someone who's very soft and very loud or you knew there were some loud spots. A lot of times you want to key frame that one spot out. So I'm gonna say okay. Notice that my wave forms are now much smaller. Peaking down to around minus 20. Now if I go ahead and I bring this in, the lazy way. Thank you. You do a lot of travel. Not easy to hear in the studio, but you can hear the music is-- Photography for me, it is business. Getting loud. You saw that in the wave form. If I want this to run under the whole time that's when I may go in here. I'm going to bring this up to full screen and I can make this really as large as possible. There we go. Now I want to start key framing this 'cause what's happening is it's getting louder so it's hard to see in a stereo clip but your key frame is right in between there. It's kind of at the bottom track. If I grab it and bring it down you can see it a little better. Now what I may wanna do is say oh, and hold down the command key, put in the key frame. Maybe just put one way down here and just have it slowly get softer as the music gets louder. Just taking photographers to these places. Now I can hear it relative to the voice. If I still wanna bring it down more, okay maybe it's still too loud, right? Bring this up a little bit. I could say oh, you know what? I could go and try to bring it down here, but I want it down at the beginning too. Guess what? I can hit that g again, bring up my gain control, and now I can say you know something? Adjust this gain by another minus six db. When I hit OK, everything just got a little softer, but I did not lose any of my key framing. It's a really nice way to use that. G, it's one of my favorite audio shortcuts for adjusting gain. You can get it from a dropdown window, you can get it from right-clicking, but I just remember that, remember gain. Things louder, things softer. It does make more sense the more you use it. This to me, for people who are coming from a photographic background, because you're not used to having to deal with sound, is one of the most confusing. You're starting to think left channel, right channel. It's not that crazy. What you really wanna keep in mind is you wanna make sure it sounds good to you and that you don't get levels that are going up into this really high area. That's really what your takeaway should be. There is something interesting about the way audio works is that you could work with each separate channel. Let's say you have three or four different audio tracks. You have music, some sound effects, some voice and you look at each one and you make each one perfect by themselves. Then you play them all together. The sum total of audio is always louder than the individual parts. Audio is additive. Something to keep in mind when you're working with audio that you can isolate it. I'm gonna show you how to isolate this in just a second, because if we look over here there's some adjustments that we can say mute a channel or solo a channel which are basically variations upon each other. I'm gonna go ahead and let's see if I can make this smaller. There we go. If I'm going ahead and playing this we hear both our voiceover and the music. But if I hit mute I'm just hearing the music. I'm just isolating that. Conversely it's gonna seem the same. If I hit solo it's muting all the other tracks. Now when you have only two tracks it's like left hand or right hand, it doesn't make any difference. But if I had eight tracks of music or eight tracks of sound effects and I just wanted to listen to one wouldn't it be able to solo one than mute all the rest? You can also solo two so you just hear those two. Using these buttons allow you to discreetly listen to specific channels if you want to hear how it sounds without the music or with the music. That's one thing to keep in mind. Go ahead and scale this back to where it should be, a nice size. Listen here, so I'm looking at my levels. It's all nice. Let's say I want to fade this down at the end. I have the music on, I'm gonna cut this down, I'm gonna zoom in. I want to fade my audio. I could put and what we'll learn is you can put a dissolve in to fade the audio. But some people like to have more control so I'll go in hit the command key adding a key frame, bring it down and I can fade my audio very nicely. (lighthearted instrumental music)

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Abba Shapiro's Work File Information
Building a Rough Cut - Project Files
Refining Your Edit - Project File
Working with Audio Project File
Motion Effects - Project Files
Titling and Graphics - Project Files
Speed Changes - Project Files
Color Correction - Project Files
Finishing - Project Files
Multi-Camera Editing - Project Files (Large Download - 3.25GB)
Creating Timelapses - Project Files (Large Download - 1.25GB)
Thinking Like An Editor - Project Files
Special Tools - Project Files
Photos

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I've never even tried video editing before this class. I opened the program once and panicked. After only 9 lessons I was able to throw a short video together (basic of course, but still pretty cool). I wish all of my teachers growing up were just like Abba. He goes over everything without dragging anything on for too long. He repeats things just enough for me to actually remember them, and he is funny. He keeps it fun and shows that even he makes mistakes. I can't even believe how much I have learned in less than a quarter of his class. I have a long way to go and am very excited to learn more. This class is worth every penny and more! I was hesitant on buying the class because I have CS6 and he works with CC, but I have already used what I've learned in his course to create a video. The first 9 lessons were already worth what I paid for the entire course. Thank you, Abba! You are an awesome teacher! You have me absolutely obsessed with creating right now! I highly recommend! You won't find this thorough of a course for this decent price!

Patricia Downey
 

Just bought this yesterday and cannot stop watching!!!! What a FANTASTIC teacher-- just love the way he explains everything. For someone like me (who has a zillion questions) it is perfect. As soon as he introduces a feature, he explains several aspects in such a way that's easy to grasp and remember. So, so happy I got this. Thank you Abba and CreativeLive!

a Creativelive Student
 

I am only on lesson 19 and I am so glad I bought this class, so worth it and Abba packs so much information into these lessons its crazy. I will for sure have to come back and watch again when I need to remember to do stuff or need a refresher. He is funny and quirky and a great teacher. I so recommend this to anyone wanting to become a better video editor!! I am coming from being self taught and using iMovie and he makes it so simple and understandable. Can't wait to learn more :)

Student Work

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