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Compressing Audio in Adobe Premiere CC

December 13, 2018

 

In your videos, do you ever have vocals that are too quiet in some places and too loud in others? Do you want consistent volume in your productions? In this post, we’ll show you how to achieve this through the use of compression in Adobe Premiere.

How to Compress Audio in Adobe Premiere CC

This is an audio waveform of a person speaking.

Audio WAV form of person speaking 

 

These parts are too loud.

 

Loud WAV forms 

 

Whereas these sections are a little too quiet.

 

Quiet WAV forms

 

If you want to even this out, you can do it manually with the pen tool.

 

Adobe Premiere CC Audio Pen Tool 

 

You would pull the volume down where it’s too loud, and turn it up where it’s too quiet. The edited waveform will result in more consistent volume throughout the clip, like the waveform below.

 

Compressed Audio WAV form of person speaking

 

Compression does essentially this, but without having to go through all the labor of creating and adjusting keyframes. Here’s how to apply a compression effect to an audio clip. In the timeline, select the audio clip you want to compress. In the Effects Panel, select audio effects.

 

Adobe Premiere CC Project Panel

 

Within the Audio Effects bin find the tube-modeled compressor and drag it into the audio clip in the timeline.

 

 

 

From the Source Panel select Effect Controls.

 

 

Find the Tube-modeled Compressor effect and select Edit. This will bring up the Fx Editor.

Set the Fx Editor to these settings:

  • Ratio: 3 x:1
  • Attack: 10 ms
  • Release: 100 ms

For this audio clip I want to take the loud peaks down by 5db and raise everything up by 5db.

 

 

 

Play the clip in the timeline and begin pulling the threshold slider in the Fx Editor down. You will see a red line bounce down. This indicates how many decibels you are removing from the audio. Make sure that the loudest audio peaks are hitting the 5db mark.

 

 

 

Now that we’ve reduced 5db from the loudest audio, we have room to add 5db to all of the audio. Set the Output gain to 5db.

 

 

 

With this effect, your audio levels will be more consistent and create a more desirable listening experience.

 

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