All courses / Shooting, story and sound
An audience quickly leaves a podcast with bad sound
People will close a tab over a hum, a room, or a voice that keeps ducking under the music. Good audio is important.
One day on editing and mixing a podcast, and on rescuing recordings made under real conditions. The routines that mean fewer of them need rescuing — including which microphone in which position would have stopped the problem before it started.
- Length1 day
- FormatOn site or online
- LanguageNorwegian or English
- CategoryShooting, story and sound
After the course you can
Sound, podcast editing and audio repair in Adobe Premiere and Audition
- Rescue a recording with noise, room or clipping in it
- Use EQ and compression deliberately
- Record voice-over that sits properly in a mix
- Remix music to the exact length you need
- Build a multitrack template so the next podcast episode is cut faster
What we cover
The program
Repairing what you have
- Noise: the different kinds, and which are actually removable
- Room and reverb — the hardest problem, and how far AI gets you
- Clipping and distortion, and what cannot be undone
- Hum, clicks and the mechanical noises of a real location
- Knowing when a recording is beyond saving, and saying so early
Making a voice sound right
- EQ: what to cut before you add anything
- Compression, explained without the mythology
- De-essing, and the plosive that ruins a take
- Matching multiple voices
The mix
- Speech intelligibility as the first requirement, not the last
- Ducking music, and finding the frequency gap for the voice
- Levels for broadcast, for web and for podcast platforms
- Ambience and effects: how much, and why silence is not silent
Voice-over
- Recording in an ordinary office, and making it sound like it was not
- Direction: how to get a colleague to read like a person
- Editing a read to remove the breaths that do not belong
Podcast workflow
- Multitrack templates so every episode edit starts the same way
- Remixing music to length
- Chapter marks, transcripts and what the platforms want
- Moving between Audition and Premiere without losing work
The honest bit
The start of this day teaches repair in Audition, and the honest framing is that repair is always worse than recording it right. Premiere has some tools that Audition does not provide, so most users will edit and mix podcasts in Premiere, even if it's audio only.
Who it is for
Anyone responsible for the sound in their own video or podcast: editors, content producers, journalists, communication staff and podcast producers.
Prerequisites
None beyond basic computer skills. Audition and Premiere are included in a Creative Cloud subscription; the trials cover the course.
Bring
Your worst recording. Genuinely — the one with the fridge, the echo, the person who was too far from the microphone. Fixing a real one in front of the group is the course.
Open courses
Prefer a fixed date for one person?
Also runs as an open course at Qross Kurssenter — classroom in Oslo and live online on the same dates.
Questions
About this course
Do we need Audition, or can we do this in Premiere?
A lot of it works in Premiere and the course says which. Audition earns its place on the difficult repairs, but (maybe surprisingly) we spend more time in Premiere.
Can this be combined with the interview course?
They pair well. The interview course covers getting the sound right on location; this one covers what to do when you did not.
Will the AI tools solve our audio problems?
They will solve some of them, completely, in seconds. They will also make a bad recording sound like a processed bad recording. The day is largely about knowing which situation you are in.
Related courses
Related courses
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1–3 daysVideo on a smartphone
Modern phones shoot material that holds up on any platform you are likely to publish on.
Want this for your team?
Tell me what goes wrong today and you get a written plan and a price back. Two sentences is enough.