During a video taping session I had in the studio the other day, after transferring my files from my Adobe OnLocation Project to my editing machine (I’ll blog about my workflow…which I think was great in a later blog) I noticed that some of my .avi files contained some clicks and pops. I’m not sure if this was caused due to the Microphone I had (it never did that before) or if it was something in the way onLocation captured the videos. (I need to do more research and will report my findings).

Regardless, instead of recapturing all of my video again (I also captured to tape at the same time as to hard drive), I decided to do some clean up on the audio of the video using Adobe Audition. Read on below to see my workflow:

Let’s start by creating your project in Premiere Pro 2 and then doing your rough edit. Below is my sample project that I already created and did a rough edit on.

Once you are done with your rough edit and want to do some sound cleanup, identify your offending clip and ALT + Click on your offensive audio click to “unlink it” from your video. Then Right click on the audio click and select “Edit in Adobe Audition”.

Of course, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways: You can only do this if you have Adobe Audition installed. Once you do that, you will notice in your Project window of Premiere Pro a new audio only file was created.

This is the audio file you are editing in Adobe Audition. In other words, you are working on a copy of the audio section of your video. This is called “non-destructive” editing. Your original file is not touched at all if you ever want to go back to it.

By now, Audition should have opened automatically for you with your new audio file in there.

This is the standard way that files are opened in Audition, showing you the waveform editor. It’s kind of hard to tell just by looking at this audio file in this view mode where the click/pop is actually located.

To easily find out where it is located, just switch you view from Waveform to “Spectral Frequency Display” by either going into “View” and selecting “Spectral Frequency Display” or by clicking on “SHIFT+F”.

Once you select the Spectral Frequency Display, you will see a completely different way of looking at audio, with color.

In this view it is much easer to catch where the clicks are, since clicks usually span the entire frequency range. By looking at the image below, you can see that the offending click is at around 9 seconds 18 frames. (I zoomed in so you can see it better). Notice those weird colors cutting through the reds and oranges. That’s the “click”.

If you put your timeline indicator over it and press play, you will clearly hear it. So now that we identified where the click is, how do we remove it. This is the fun part and the easy part!

First, make a selection as shown below.

Once you made the selection, click on the “Effects” menu selection, select Restoration, And Click/Pop Eliminator (process)…

This will bring up the following pop up:

Click on “Fill Single Click Now” button. The wizard will start doing its job and then close the window. Your new wave file will look something like this. Notice how the funky colors (blue and cyan) that were there before are now gone.

Play your file through and you will notice that the “click” is literally gone. It’s that easy.

I’ve cleaned up a lot of audio files that way and it works great. Of course, there is much more to the Spectral Analyzer, the Click/Pop Restoration filter and Audition itself, but this tutorial is just meant as a way to get started in audio editing.

Hope you enjoy it and drop me a line with your questions and/or comments.

Cheers!
- Marcelo
The Digital Media Dude