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Editing, repairing, and improving audio using Essential Sound panel

Last updated on Oct. 5, 2022

Adobe Premiere Pro User Guide
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Use this page to know about the Essential Sound Panel in Premiere Pro.

Watch this video to learn about how to use the Essential Sound panel in Premiere Pro (2 mins)

Essential Sound is an all-in-one panel that gives you an extensive toolset of mixing techniques and repair options. This feature is useful for your common audio mixing tasks. The panel provides simple controls to unify volume levels, repair sound, improve clarity, and add special effects that help your video projects sound like a professional audio engineer has mixed them. You can save the applied adjustments as presets for reuse, making them handy for more audio refinements.

Premiere Pro allows you to classify your audio clips as Dialogue, Music, SFX, or Ambience. You can also configure and apply presets to a set of clips that belong to the same type or to multiple clips.

Once you assign an audio type, for example Dialogue, for a voice-over clip, the Dialogue tab of the Essential Sound panel presents you several parameter groups. These groups allow you to carry out the common tasks that are associated with dialogue, such as unifying the different recordings to common loudness, reducing background noise, and adding compression and EQ. The audio types in the Essential Sound panel are mutually exclusive, that is, selecting one audio type for a clip reverts the previous changes done on that clip using another audio type.

All the changes that you do using the Essential Sound panel controls are reflected in the more advanced clip settings. For an effect like restoration or clarity, audio effects are inserted into the clip rack. If you are an advanced user, you can start with your primary edits in the Essential Sound panel and then go on with your sophisticated internal effect settings and apply finishing touches.

To launch the Essential Sound panel, choose Window > Essential Sound.

Unify loudness in your audio

In the Essential Sound panel, select the clip type as Dialogue, Music, SFX, or Ambience.
To make the loudness level uniform throughout the clip, expand Unify Loudness and click Auto Match. The loudness level (in LUFS) to which Premiere Pro auto-matched your clip appears below the Auto Match button.

Repair a dialogue track

If your clip contains dialogue audio data, you can use the options under the Dialogue tab in the Essential Sound panel to repair the sound by reducing noise, rumble, hum, and ‘ess’ sounds.

Add the audio clip to a track in a multitrack session.
Select the audio clip and in the Essential Sound panel, select the clip type as Dialogue.
Select the Repair check-box and expand the section.
Select the check-box for the property that you want to change, and use the slider to adjust the level of the following properties between 0 through 10:
- Reduce Noise: Reduce the level of unwanted noises in the background, such as studio floor sounds and microphone background noise, and clicks. The proper amount of noise reduction depends upon the type of background noise and the acceptable loss in quality for the remaining signal.
- Reduce Rumble: Reduce the rumble noise--very low-frequency noise that ranges below the 80-Hz range, for example, noise produced by a turntable motor or an action camera.
- DeHum: Reduce or eliminate Hum—noise consists of a single frequency, in 50-Hz range (common in Europe, Asia, and Africa) or 60-Hz range (common in North and South America). For example, electrical interference due to power cables laid too close to the audio cables can use such noise. You can select the hum level depending on the clip.
- DeEss: Reduce harsh, high-frequency ess-like sounds. For example, sibilance in vocal recordings that cause s-sounds created by breathing or air movement between the microphone and the singer’s mouth.
- Reduce Reverb: Reduce or remove the reverb from audio recordings. This option allows you to to use original recordings from various sources and make them sound like they're coming from the same environment.

Improve the clarity of your dialogue track

Improving the clarity of the dialogue track in your sequence has dependency on various factors. This is because of the variations in volume and frequency of the human voice that range between 50Hz and 2KHz and the contents of the other tracks that go with it. Some of the common methods used for improving dialogue audio clarity are compressing or expanding the dynamic range of the recording, adjusting the frequency response of the recording, and processing the enhancing male and female voices.

Add the audio clip to an empty track in a multitrack session.
Select the clip and in the Essential Sound panel, select the clip type as Dialogue.
Select the Clarity check-box and expand the section.
Select the check-box for the property that you want to change, and use the slider to adjust the level of the following properties between 0 through 10:

Dynamics: Change the impact of the recording by compressing or expanding the dynamic range of your recording. You can change the level from natural to focused.

EQ: Reduce or boost selected frequencies in your recording. You can choose from a list of EQ presets that you can use on your audio and adjust the amount using the slider. To change the settings of EQ preset, select Effects>Audio Effects>Graphic Equalizer to view the graphic equalizer that you can adjust during playback, and save the changes.

Enhance speech: Select the dialogue as Male or Female to process and enhance it at the appropriate frequency.

Improving clarity

Working with Sound effects clips

Premiere Pro allows you to create artificial sound effects for your audio. SFX helps you create illusions such as the music originating from a particular position in the stereo field or an ambience of a room or field with appropriate reflections and reverberation.

To add SFX to your audio

Add the audio clip to an empty track in a multitrack session.
Select the audio clip and choose Window > Essential Sound > SFX.
To set reverb effect, choose the Reverb check-box under Creative.
In the Preset box, select a Reverb preset that suits your needs.

Choosing Reverb presets

Creating presets

Professional users can create presets for the benefit of the users and projects that work on a similar set of audio assets to ensure consistency and to save time.

To create a preset

To create a preset for Dialogue, select Essential Sound panel and click the panel menu.
You can view the presets that are already available for Dialogue listed here.

Presets available for Dialogue
If you want to customize and create extra preset, you can choose the desired settings. After you have selected the desired settings, click Save settings as a preset button next to the Presets dropdown.

Saving your new preset settings

More functionalities

If no clips with differing audio types are selected, the audio type selector available with the Essential Sound Panel serves as a quick select tool to select all clips of a given audio type.
The preset selector serves as a nested menu when no audio type has been selected for a given clip so that you can directly assign audio type and preset with one single click.
The Essential Sound Panel displays a warning symbol next to a control whenever the underlying effect settings of an audio effect plug-in differ from the Essential Sound Panel setting (the user manually changed the effect settings). The Essential Sound Panel also displays a warning symbol if a multi-selection with differing settings has been selected.

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