How to Improve the Sound of Your Speech in Premiere Pro

You can have the most visually stunning videos, but if you sound like you're talking to your audience from two rooms over, they won't be engaged by your work. Here's how to get better-sounding speech in Premiere Pro.

Part of being a good video editor means getting your sound editing skills up to speed. Premiere Pro borrows some tools from Audition, Adobe's audio editing software, to give video editors the ability to improve their sound within the program. This helpful tutorial from Cinecom walks you through how to use those tools to improve your speech. Here are some additional tips:

  • Watch the meters and make sure they never clip. If they do, you'll see the red squares at the top illuminate. 
  • Take it easy on the EQ faders when tweaking the voice. Removing too many high tones can kill the unique tone of your voice and removing too many low tones will make it sound hollow. 
  • Instead of the hard limiter, try using a multiband compressor. A compressor and a limiter have the same sort of action with different parameters, but the multiband compressor gives you more granular control and is particularly useful for giving voices a more present sound. The compressor should have a "Broadcast" preset that will get you in the ballpark.

Once you do this a few times, you'll get a good feel for how to make voices pop a bit more in your videos!

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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