Audio Editing in Premiere Pro Using Keyframes

This Instructable is designed as a guide to manipulating audio within Premiere Pro, whether it be to readjust volumes in order to overlay tracks onto each other and blend them better, or to redesign a single track into something that better suits the video clip shown along side the audio. This project only requires the audio you wish to manipulate and a subscription to Adobe Premiere Pro, and is intended for high school or college students. This project can be used by schools in order to teach Standards of Technological Literacy.

What You'll Learn

Standard 8 Attributes of Design

E. Design is a creative planning process that leads to useful products and systems

J. The design needs to be continually checked and critiqued and the ideas of the design must be redefined and improved

Standard 17 Information and Communication Technology

N. Information and Communication Systems can be used to inform, persuade, entertain, control, manage, and educate

Q. Technological knowledge and processes are communicated using symbols, measurement, conventions, icons, graphic images, and languages that incorporate a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli

Launch Premiere Pro and open a file window (File Explorer on Windows, Finder on MacOS) where your clips are stored, so that you can add them into the project. Once you have Premiere open, select the "New Project" Button on the left hand side of the window that appears on top. You can choose from here where you want the project to save, and autosave as you work on it, as well as the name of the project and adjust preferences for how the video and audio timelines are displayed, and the rendering engine and capture quality for Premiere. Feel free to select the file path for your project and give it a working title (the final title will be made when exporting the finished sequence), and if desired, change the timeline settings to however you prefer. Once setup there, click "OK" and you will continue into the main window for Premiere Pro.

When looking at the primary window to Premiere Pro, look at the top bar just underneath the settings bar. There you will see several options for processes in the creation of your videos. For now, select the "Assembly" tab and drag the files you wish to use in your sequence into the left-hand window of Premiere Pro.

Once you have your clips added into Premiere, you'll be able to start creating your sequence, or the video product of combining/manipulating clips. To do this, you just take whatever videos or tracks you intend to use initially and add them into your sequence window, typically the bottom right window in Premiere, noted by the timeline bar running across the top and the listed video and audio channels for sequencing.

IMPORTANT: When importing your clips into the sequencing window, if you have audiovisual tracks that you wish to separate from each other, you will need to right-click on the track and select the "Unlink" option from the drop-down menu that appears, which should be roughly in the middle of the menu.

Once you have your clips selected and roughly sequenced into an order you find appropriate, you can delete unwanted tracks by selecting them and hitting the Delete key on your keyboard, or right-clicking and selecting either the "Clear" or "Ripple Delete" options. Clear will simply remove the selected track, Ripple Delete remove the track and pushes up the remaining tracks in the timeline to fill in the space it took.

Once you have your clips situated in a sequence that feels appropriate to you, you can start to look at manipulating volume levels on your tracks, initially, when adjusting the volume it will manipulate the entire track at once, which is why keyframes are important, they mark specific frames where the audio marks off at, so say if you create a keyframe at the start of your track and push it all the way to the bottom, the track will gradually increase in volume over the course of it playing.

To create these keyframes, you will need to take the markers for the audio tracks in Premiere Pro, and drag down from the bottom of one of the channels, when you go to drag and stretch the channel, your cursor will change to show two opposing lines with arrows facing opposite directions. You'll want to stretch the channel to cover about an inch of your screen, or about until you see the icons that appear in the image above.

Once you can see the icons, you'll want to move your marker to the point at which you want to create the keyframe, and select the keyframe icon on the right.

Once keyframes are created, you can click and drag them in order to move the keyframes to different timestamps or decibel levels. Using this allows you to further manipulate to the exact frame you want the keyframe to be on, and where you want the audio changes to be.

If desired, you can also right click on the keyframes in order to change the way in which they are adjusted, such as linear, the default. and several bezier, or curved options, such as auto-bezier and standard forms, which will generate a curve transition between keyframes, with auto-bezier generating it automatically, and the standard bezier command allowing you to adjust the curve to determine the transition on the audio.