How to Edit Audio in your Videos

The era of the silent film started in 1894, and finally ended in 1937. These days, it’s difficult to imagine a movie being made without sound. There are notable exceptions of course, such as Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie or the recent French film The Artist, but for the vast majority of movies, sound is a crucial component. In fact, the quality of the audio affects the viewers’ perception of the movie’s visual quality.

So it’s good to know that even though Premiere Elements is a consumer-grade video-editing application, it does offer some means of working with your clips’ audio. As you might expect, though, some of the necessary tools are only available in Expert mode, but the concept of those in Quick mode is the same — so once you understand how one works, you understand them all.

Not only that, but this software also comes with a myriad of sound effects that you can add to your movie to help create mood and ambience. You can, of course, add a soundtrack to your film, but Premiere Elements goes one better: it comes bundled with a series of musical scores that adapt themselves to the length of your project. That means there’s always a beginning, middle and end to the music, as opposed to having to mess around trying to fade it off because it’s too long, or loop back to the beginning if it’s too short. All you have to do to make it work is drag it onto your project and move it into the correct location.

So let’s have a look at how to ramp up the quality of the audio in your movie.

1. Audio Tools

Click on a clip in your project to select it, then click on Adjust (top-right of the interface) to reveal a selection of tools. The last two are the ones we want: Volume and Balance. The latter affects which speaker the sound comes from, but we’re looking at the former.

2. Sound Alteration

Click on Volume to reveal a slider. Use this to adjust the volume of an entire clip. You won’t see that anything’s changed, but you can hear the difference when you play it back. Move the playhead somewhere else over your clip and alter the audio again.

3. Change Over Time

As you play back your clip, you’ll notice the audio volume isn’t constant any more. In fact, the levels change between the two values you manually set. That’s because the audio levels change depending on the playhead’s position. Now switch to Expert mode.

4. Expert Explanation

You can see what’s happening in the audio layer. There are two white dots, and the audio line changes between the two. It’s important to note that even in Quick mode, these audio tools create keyframes and alter the audio at specific points, not on the whole clip.

5. Sound Effects

Go back to Quick mode and select the Audio tab (lower right). Click on the Category bar and change it to Sound Effects > Show All. You’re presented with a huge list of effects. Preview them by clicking on their play buttons. To add one to your project, just drag it in.

6. Adding an Effect

The audio appears as a yellow rectangle, which is found underneath your main video layer. From here, you can alter its duration by dragging its left or right edges inwards. You can also alter its volume, or even trim the clip using the playhead’s scissors icon.

7. One per Track

To include a duration-sensitive music score, open Audio and select Music Scores > Show All. Drag one onto your project. In Quick mode, you can’t have a score overlapping an effect; adding music before an effect pushes the effect to the end of the song.

8. Flexible Score

The audio score comes with its own parameters. Tick the option Fit Entire Video > Done. Agree to delete any other audio on the same track. The music then fits the video’s duration. Alter the duration and tick that box for the music to stretch or contract appropriately.