How to Improve Voice-Over Quality in Premiere Pro (5 Steps)

I've been working on producing a video course, and one of my biggest challenges in the post-production process was dealing with audio quality.

While I recorded on a good microphone, when playing back the recorded videos, I encountered many annoying issues, like:

• Breathing noises
• Mouth clicks and pops
• Quiet volume
• Drastic difference between loud and quiet parts

Here I'm going to share my quick lessons on improving voice over quality in Premiere Pro.

Note: I'm not an audio engineer, so this is just a simple, replicable process I've found that works for me.

You can also do this in Adobe Audition, but I don't think its necessary if you're working with Premiere.

Prerequisite: set up an audio track mixer

If you have multiple video clips (which I'm guessing you do), then you'll want a way to apply audio effects to an entire track, without having to copy/paste those effects to each audio clip.

To do this, you can use Premiere's Audio Track Mixer window.

Go to Window > Audio Track Mixer to show this window.

Once open, identify which audio track contains your dialogue.

For me, it's Audio Track 1.

Then, in the upper left of the panel, click the arrow to expand the effects panel.

This will open a gray box where you can apply audio effects that will apply to the entire audio track.

The order in which you apply effects matters.

An overview of the effects we'll be using is as follows:

1. DeNoise
2. Dynamics
3. Parametric Equalizer
4. Single-band Compressor
5. Normalization

Step 1. De-noise to remove fuzz

The first effect to apply is DeNoise.

This will get rid of any fuzzy sounds in your audio or background noise.

Apply the effect by clicking on the dropdown arrow and choosing Noise Reduction/Resoration > DeNoise

Then, double click the effect name to open its settings.

I recommend playing around with the amount of the effect, but I've found 10-20% is generally good.

Too high of an amount and it'll distort your audio.

You can similarly use the DeReverb effect if you have echoing in your audio.

Step 2. Remove breathing noises using an AutoGate

One of the most annoying parts of recording audio is hearing all those breathing noises that happen when you talk.

Most people tend to inhale before speaking, and this can becoming annoying after awhile to listen to.

To remove these breathing sounds, we'll apply a Dynamics effect.

Double-click to open up its settings, and toggle AutoGate.

You'll need to play around with the threshold to find what works best for your audio track.

Scrub over the breathing parts in your video and using the dB meter, you can see what volume those breathing parts peak at.

Then, set the threshold just above that.

For me, I've set the threshold to -20db, which means that any sounds below -20db will be silenced.

Then, I recommend increasing the Release and Hold. This will "smooth" out your autogate.

I've found that 200ms release and 50ms hold is perfect, but you can play around with this.

Step 3. Enhance your voice with a Parametric Equalizer

A parametric equalizer lets you boost or dampen your audio at specific frequencies.

For voice overs, it's common to cutoff frequencies less than 60-80 Hz, boost lower frequencies around 100 Hz, and boost high frequencies around 10k-20k Hz.

You can do this manually if you'd like, but Premiere has a nice preset called Vocal Enhancer which does this for you.

Just apply that preset and you're good to go.

Step 4. Apply a single-band compressor

A compressor will basically reduce the "range" of volume in your audio.

One of my early problems was that the loud parts were really loud, and the quiet parts were super quiet.

This made for a jarring listening experience.

A compressor will solve this, and I recommend using the Single-band Compressor effect.

Again, we'll use a build-in Premiere preset, called Voice Thickener.

I'll also boost the overall audio level by changing the Output Gain to something a bit higher, like 16dB.

Great! Now your voice should sound much more pleasant already.

Step 5. Normalize

The last step of the process is to normalize your audio track.

This will ensure that the various audio clips all have a similar volume level.

You can do this two ways:

First, you can select each audio clip individually, and press G on the keyboard to open the Audio Gain window.

From there, you can choose "Normalize Max Peak to" and set it to something like -3 or -1 dB.

Unfortunately though, if you select multiple audio clips and try to normalize this way, it'll normalize based on the max peak of the entire selection, rather than the max peak of each individual clip.

So you could go clip-by-clip and normalize them, but this can be tedious.

Alternatively, select all the audio clips and go to Window > Essential Sound.

From here, click "Dialogue".

Then, press "Auto-Match".

You'll need to press it twice: first to detect the target loudness, and again to auto-match each clip.

And that's it! Now all your clips should have a similar audio level.

Wrapping up

That's my basic process for improving dialogue/voice-over in Premiere Pro.

I'm by no means an audio engineer or expert, I just wanted a simple, replicable method I could use to improve my audio quality easily while producing my video course.

Hope this works for you! And let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.