Tutorial: Fixing Muffled Audio with Audio Compression
This video tutorial demonstrates how to restore muffled sections of spoken audio using the Multiband Compressor in Adobe Premiere Pro CC or Adobe Audition.
Customizing Compression
The Effect - Multiband Compressor dialog in which you customize the effect for the clip you’re fixing (as shown in Figure 7, below) is the same whether you’re working in Premiere Pro CC or in Adobe Audition.
Figure 7. The Effect - Multiband Compressor dialog. Click the image to see it at full size.
To begin adjusting the effect, choose a preset. Typically, I use Internet Delivery (Figure 8, below) because I’m producing video that will be delivered online.
Figure 8. Choosing the Internet Deliver preset.
There are a lot of other parameters you can tweak here, as shown in Figure 7, but I usually don’t mess with any of those because I don’t know what they do, and the preset works pretty well for me without any additional modifications. The one thing I do change from time to time is Output Gain (upper-right corner of Figure 7). If the peaks are really high in your audio clip, sometimes when you apply multiband compression, you can introduce a little bit of peaking, as shown in Figure 9 (below), particularly on the bottom of both waveforms.
Figure 9. Compression has pushed the peaks a bit too high.
In this case, I don’t believe the effect has added any distortion, but peaking is generally bad form, so we’ll need to undo the effect by choosing Control+Z (Windows) or Command+Z (Mac), then choose Effects > Amplitude and Compression > Multiband Compressor to return to the Effect – Multiband Compressor dialog. We’ll stick with the Internet Delivery, but dial down the Output Gain a bit. If the levels were really low and I wanted to both boost volume and compress the audio, I would move the Output Gain slider up. But very seldom do I mess with any of the controls in the lower half of the Multiband Compressor dialog.
And then once you’re in this dialog, whether it’s in Premiere Pro CC or Adobe Audition, you can easily preview your clip with and without the effect applied. Figure 10 (below) shows the preview button. The green icon to the left of the preview button toggles the effect on and off.
Figure 10. Click this button to preview your clip, with or without the effect applied.
At the 3:15 mark in the video at the top of the page, you can hear the clip with and without the Multiband Compressor effect applied.
If you like what you hear, apply the effect, then check the waveform to see if the peaks are too high. With this clip, we still see a little bit of peaking, but we can’t hear any distortion, so we’re probably OK. As Figure 11 (below) shows, the high regions were boosted only a little bit, but the quieter regions were boosted significantly. That’s what compression does: It reduces the dynamic range between the loudest and the softest parts of an audio file.
Figure 11. The clip with the Multiband Compressor effect/Internet Delivery preset applied. Click the image to see it at full size.
Now I use compression on almost every tutorial that I produce to make it easier for my viewers (and listeners) to understand. If you produce a lot of web video, you should consider audio compression as well.
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