Thanks to its powerful AI and “Optimize Speech” tool, Premiere Pro (Adobe) quickly transforms a failed sound recording or captured in a noisy environment into a clear, intelligible and usable audio track. A feature that saves you the rush, saves your audio recovery time and increases your productivity.
In the world of video, audio quality is often a poor relationship. Technically aside, as camera sensors, cameras and smartphones continue to improve in performance. But the same is not the case with the microphone. Devices whose quality depends on the type of device used during sound recording. Practically, on the other hand, because most productions don’t have a dedicated sound recording manager.
This includes the dangers of live broadcasting: background noise, noisy street, parasitic chatter around, etc. There are many parameters that can contaminate, or even reduce, the quality of a good scene. Well, it was before, because one technology is about to radically change the way you edit and approach difficult sound shots: generative AI.
At Adobe, you may already know Firefly, a creative AI that can create images with just a few words. But AI isn’t all there is, and Adobe has another AI that can solve your audio problems in Premiere Pro: the “Optimize Speech” function.
An AI that works (well) for you.
Enhance Speech is an advanced AI-powered feature that automatically improves the clarity and intelligibility of dialogue in your videos. This feature applies advanced noise reduction, sound equalization and de-reverberation algorithms. and converts poor-quality audio recordings, even with loud ones, into clear, usable sound sequences.
A screenshot of the video editing interface in Adobe Premiere Pro, showing the audio editing features, including the “enhance speech” option. A video conferencing professional appears in the preview frame. © Adobe
While traditional audio restoration techniques require manual intervention and significant knowledge, the main appeal of the Optimize Speech feature is its simplicity. It’s AI that analyzes the characteristics of your audio clips and automatically applies adjustments to improve its quality.
No need to sample background noise, mess with painful recovery methods or expensive plugins, the AI does its job to restore the sound. And you do your work on editing.
A step-by-step guide to using Optimize Speech
A screenshot of the Adobe Premiere Pro interface showing the context menu for a video clip. An “Enable Optimize Speech” option is highlighted, reflecting a feature dedicated to audio enhancement. © Adobe
1. Import your video:
- Import the video file containing the audio you want to enhance.
2. Identify clips that contain dialogue:
- In the timeline, select the audio clips that contain dialogue.
- You can select clips manually or use Premiere Pro’s automatic speech detection feature.
3. Apply “Optimize Speech”:
- Right-click on the selected audio clip, select “Optimize Speech” and then click “Emphasis”.
- Alternatively, you can bring up the “Required Audio Enhancement” panel, select the “Edit” tab and click “Auto Tag”.
4. Adjust the settings (optional):
- Although this feature produces the best results with the default settings, you can fine-tune the process to suit your specific needs.
- The Essential Audio Enhancement panel includes other settings that allow you to adjust things like noise reduction, EQ, and de-reverb.
5. PREVIEW AND PRESENTATION:
- Before exporting your video, check that the audio output meets your expectations.
- Once satisfied, export the project as usual!
Adobe Premiere Pro screenshot showing a landscape video clip with the Essential Audio Enhancement panel open, highlighting advanced adjustments such as noise reduction and speech optimization. © Adobe
Whether it’s a vlog, report or fiction, it doesn’t matter: AI is so efficient and easy to enable that the time savings for your projects are potentially huge. Valuable time, which you can then dedicate to improving a project, doing something else… or a much-deserved rest!
If you want to get an idea of the quality of the results on an audio file without going through a Premiere Pro project, upload your audio files to the Adobe Podcasts Online tool. And enjoy the result.
