Tips on improving audio? (lav mic came out echoey)

[Jack Brannen]

Hey folks, looking for coaching on audio improvement.

I don't know a lot about sweetening audio. Usually a lav mic comes out pretty clean for me and I don't do anything to it. But this shoot was in an echoey room, and I'm not thrilled with the audio. Any tips on what I might do to improve it?

What filters to use, and how to use them? (What should I be listening for?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV19a3ICAVM

Here's what I've already done

- DeReverb (flat, 30%)

- Dynamics Processing as shown:

Thanks in advance for tips and advice!

[R Neil Haugen]

@PaulMurphy is really good at this, and his PremierePro Youtube channel has several videos about that.

@Mike Russell also has some good YouTube audio posts on his channel.

[PaulMurphy · Accepted solution]

There was a time when I'd roll up my sleeves and dig into fixing audio like this with DeReverb, Parametric Equalizer, and Tube-Modeled Compressor.

But there's a much easier solution: Enhance Speech.

This will generate a clean version of your audio using AI. I find that the version built into Premiere Pro in the Essential Sound panel is still a bit lacking, but you can get great results with the web version, Adobe Podcast.

With audio like this, I would upload to Adobe Podcast, mix the studio version with the original (about 60-90% - leave some of the natural sound in there).

After that, I think you'd only need to add a very light DeNoise to get rid of the background noise.

Hope this helps! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Cheers,
Paul

[Jack Brannen]

@PaulMurphy Wow, I had always assumed that Adobe Podcast enhance was the same as the Essential Sound enhance. Not so! This tool is amazing!

(Why the heck would Adobe release one bad AI audio tool and bake it into Premiere Pro and then have this other good AI audio tool on the web?)

Well, anyway, this is a fantastic solution. Thank you!