Hello. In today's lesson we'll examine the audio channel in Premiere Pro. Audio is placed on a separate track in Premiere Pro, whether or not it was recorded in sync with the video in camera. Audio tracks in your project can contain music, sound effects, dialogue, interviews, or voiceover. Each would be placed on a separate track for the greatest control over volume, fades, and synchronization. Let's create a new project called "Audio" in Premiere. I'll go to the New Project button, here. Audio. Click OK. Now I'll make sure I'm in the Audio workspace. You can click on the Workspace Toolbar to get there. You could go Window > Workspaces > Audio. If you don't see what I see here, you can go to Reset to Saved Layout. panels in the Audio workspace. There is a Project, and a timeline Panel, as always, but some new panels appear. There is an Audio Clip Mixer, an Audio Track Mixer, and an Essential Sound panel. In order to see the features of these panels, we need to import an audio track. So we're gonna go to the Project panel, and I will do a import. File > Import. Command, (or Ctrl) +I. And I'll navigate to a audio file. Here in my project, I have an audio file here, and I will import that. There you could see the symbol that indicates an audio waveform: a green icon here, and a green label. We drag the imported clip to the Timeline to create a sequence. We'll just click, and drag, and drop. Now you can see the Audio Track Mixer appears, and the Audio Clip Mixer are visible, as well as the Program panel has been made active as well. The track appears on Audio track 1, and I'm going to make the track a bit larger, for viewing purposes here, by clicking on the Timeline, holding down Alt or Option, and clicking the + button, which makes the waveform more visible here. You could see that there is a left and right channel, and a line in the middle. With the Audio Track Mixer, each slider can control the volume of specific tracks, as well as the volume of all the mixed tracks together. The audio levels are measured in dB, decibels. In digital audio, zero DB is maximum volume. Any sound beyond zero DB will be distorted. In general, for web-oriented video sound, 6 to -12 maximum volume is an ideal range. For broadcast video, -10 is a typical standard in the U.S. Play the clip. Okay. And you will see the volume indicated in the Audio 1 mixer, and in a dB meter to the right of your timeline. Even if I scrub it, you could see the volume level. If you right-click on the dB meter, over here, right-click here, you can set a range of decibels for the recording, and you can choose dynamic or static peaks. A static peak creates a yellow line as an indicator of the maximum peak volume in this particular clip. Dynamic peaks do not record that yellow line. I'll switch to that for the moment. And as I scrub through, you could see the line doesn't remain in there. So for this exercise I like to choose the static peaks. They will also record in the audio track itself, as well as the master track. Moving the slider up or down on the Audio 1 track can change the maximum volume level. So if I were to start here and I start playing. Okay. And bring this up. Knowing myself here. You can see that the volume increases. Likewise, if I brought it down, the volume should decrease. also reflects those changes. You can see the meters look the same. Tracks can be renamed for clarity. So I could change this to Voice, for example. At the top of the panel here, we have a number of different controls. The Track Input Channel; system default; master; panning, which will go shift the sound to the left or the right speaker, usually it's centered. And you have other controls in here that you can see: Read, Write, Latch, and Touch. These are controls we'll examine later on, at a more advanced level, with audio editing. You can mute the track. You can Solo the track, which means only one track would play, whatever one is Solo'd, with the S-track, S-button, which can also be found here, in the audio track. And you can enable a track for recording as well. So you could record onto a different track, directly in Premiere. There's also a clip mixer, as we can see here. This would adjust the volume on individual clips in the same place in the timeline, for example. Any click that you click on, however, would be adjusted by the Audio Clip Mixer, no matter where it was in the time. The Essential Sound panel, over here, at right, allows you to quickly access some sound enhancements that can be applied to different types of tracks. So if I click this track, for example, that's a dialogue track. I could click here, and you could see that there are quite a few adjustments and enhancements that can be made, using that panel. This is another control we'll examine in detail in the future. In this lesson, we've reviewed some of the key elements of using Audio channels in Premiere Pro. In the next lesson, we'll look at adding more soundtracks and music in Premiere Pro. Let's go check it out.
