The Magic of Audition (and some other tricks).

When I first started editing my video, I noticed that most of my audio had a hissing or humming noise in the background. I googled ways to fix this problem, and every tutorial I watched told me to simply drag the DeNoiser effect onto my audio and mess with the Reduction in the Individual Parameters section. This didn’t work for me. I tried using the DeCrackler, the DeHummer, and the DeEsser (although I have no idea what that even means), but none of them worked. I decided to leave my audio scratchy and tried  drowning out the hissing with music, but then I remembered that there is an audio editing program that comes with The Creative Cloud.

This magical audio editing program is called “Audition” and it pretty much saved my project (not really, but kind of). If you right click on a piece of audio, there is an option that says, “Edit Clip in Adobe Audition.” When you click that option, Audition opens and shows your audio in a new window.

      

In order to edit your audio and eliminate any background noise, you will want to have a colored view of your audio so you can see where the major problems are located. To do this, all you have to do is press the “Show Spectral Frequency Display” button located along the top of the Audition window. Once you press this button, you should see your audio in red, orange, and purple.

Next, press the “Time Selection Tool” button at the top of the window and drag your mouse across your audio, highlighting the entire piece of sound in white.

Then, click on “Effects,” select “Noise Reduction/Restoration,” and click “Hiss Reduction.” Another window will pop up and all you have to do is click “Apply.” This should take away some of the background noise you have. If you still have background noise, try following the same process again, but choose “DeHummer” instead. The “DeHummer” took away some low air-conditioning noise when I was editing.

     

After this, simply click “save” in Audition, return to Premiere Pro, and your old audio should be swapped out with your newly edited sound.

I also decided that I wanted to give my audio an older sound since the entire theme of my video is Nostalgic. By doing a little bit of research, I learned a way to make your audio sound like it is playing through an old radio. All you have to do is put the Bandpass and Highpass effects on your audio, and adjust the Hz of each. For my video, I set the Bandpass effect to 1450 Hz and the Highpass to 775 Hz. In my opinion, this gives the audio a distant sound, which can be cool if you are trying to make an old-time video.

While completing this project, I’ve found that a very large portion of my work includes fixing my own mistakes and applying effects and transitions just to see what they will do. I usually end up deleting them later. There is a lot of trial and error with this project; it can be frustrating, but it is very rewarding when your video finally starts to come together.