Advanced noise and reverb reduction

The Reduce Noise and Reduce Reverb settings in the Essential Sound panel will often be all you need to clean up dialogue.

But the advanced controls available in the Detailed Effects settings allow you to use the same audio clean up technology more precisely.

In this sequence, I have some clips that have already been assigned as Dialogue (Dialogue) in the Essential Sound panel.

And I've applied the Auto Match option for the loudness.

Next, we want to clean up the background noise and reverb.

Let's listen to a little of the audio before we begin.

A thousand years ago this is what it felt like to be human.

I am an AI, and I'm going to help you get set up...

I have all of the clips selected already in this sequence.

And over in the Essential Sound panel, I'm going to enable Reduce Reverb.

When you enable the Reduce Reverb effect in the Repair section of the Essential Sound panel, the DeReverb effect is applied to all of the selected clips. the Effect Controls panel shares a group when you're in the Audio workspace with the Audio Clip Mixer, and Audio Track Mixer, and so on.

So, I'm going to open up that panel and just select one of these clips, so we can see the DeReverb effect applied.

It's an effect like any other in Premiere Pro CC.

In fact, if I go to the Effects panel and expand my Audio Effects, here it is - DeReverb.

You could apply this effect directly as you could any other effect in Premiere Pro CC.

Now I'm going to select all of these clips again, and I'm going to add the Reduce Noise option.

Again, I'll deselect in the sequence.

Select one clip and we can see both of those effects are applied.

Now the Effect Controls panel will only show settings for one clip at a time, while the Essential Sound panel allows you to make changes to effects for multiple clips.

So, probably the most efficient way to work is to add these options to multiple clips.

And then if you find a particularly challenging clip, go into the Effect Controls panel to work with the more advanced settings and improve the result.

And, let's take a look at the settings for this clip.

I'm going to click on the Edit button for the DeNoise effect.

This may be a familiar style of dialogue for you already.

At the top, we've got the option to choose presets.

We can enable and disable the effect.

Of course, we can also do that in the Effect Controls panel by clicking the Effects button.

And we have a graph that shows the results of our adjustment.

You'll notice before I get started, that there's a little warning sign over in the Essential Sound panel.

And that's letting me know that I've made adjustments to the effect outside of the Essential Sound panel.

So, the setting there is no longer applied.

I'm going to use the Spacebar to playback a little.

And let's look at the result.

That's just for the experience...

The blue area on this graph indicates the original audio.

We've got the frequency on the horizontal axis and the amplitude on the vertical axis.

The red area at the top indicates the parts of the audio that are being adjusted by the effect.

Along the bottom here, we've got the option to specify particular frequencies we'd like the effect to work on.

And this is something you can't set in the Essential Sound panel. if you know, for example, that you are particularly getting background noise in the lower frequencies, and that's the most intrusive part of the sound.

You can select this option and try again.

Try moving your body...

This may require some experimentation.

And just hover your cursor over each of these options to choose the focus that you want.

We also have an Amount setting and this is very much like the control that you have in the Essential Sound panel.

Over on the right, we've got a resulting level meter.

And we've got the option Output Noise Only, so we can hear how much of the sound is being removed.

There's also a Gain control that you can use to compensate for a reduction in level which is inevitable when you're removing noise, and, for that matter, reverb.

Let's take a look at the DeReverb Effect settings too.

The interface is very similar.

We have Presets at the top, our focus along the bottom.

I'll just play a little, so we can see the graph.

Looking around that sort of thing...

In this graph the green area is the part of the audio that's being removed we have the same Processing Focus options.

But there's actually also an Auto Gain control in this effect which will automatically compensate for any overall level adjustment that's likely to come from removing the reverb.

So, that's the more advanced controls for the DeNoise and DeReverb effects in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.