From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Mixing Audio Clips and Tracks

Recording a scratch track - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Mixing Audio Clips and Tracks

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Recording a scratch track

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- Many a times, you're waiting for the voiceover talent to send you their clip, but they're late, and you need to start editing. If that is the case, you need to record your own voiceover and edit to it. This is called a scratch track. This way, you will not waste time waiting for their clip. You can start working right away. When you get the clip from the voiceover talent, you can replace your own and use theirs. Let's go ahead and open sequence 4.4 from the Project panel. You will quickly notice that this is an empty sequence, and we're going to record our scratch track in here. You can use the Audio Track Mixer to enable the track for recording. For that, all you really have to do is just click on this R right here. As you notice, this R turns red, and so does this one here. Let's go ahead and shut it off just for now. Before we do any recording, let's just make sure that our audio hardware is talking to Premiere. Go to Premiere Pro, Preferences, and then Audio Hardware. Let's make sure that the microphone that we are using, it's listed in here. I could use the Built-in Microphone or a USB mic that I have, the Samsung. That's what I have, so I'm just going to choose that as the Default Input. Now all I have to do is click OK. In addition to enabling the track in the Audio Track Mixer, I could do it directly in the Timeline. There is the Voice-over record icon, which we added in a previous movie. If you don't see it in your interface, click on the Wrench. Choose Customize Audio Header, and drag the Microphone icon into your interface, and then click OK. All I have to do now is click on the Voice-over record icon, and I will get a countdown here in the Program panel. Let me go ahead and make that bigger. Here we go. Testing, testing. This is a test. This is a scratch track. I can now pause, and I can see my recorded audio. Let's go ahead and play it back. Testing, testing. This is a test. This is-- As you can tell, this volume is very, very low. Let's see what's happening in our System Preferences. I'll go to the System Preferences, Sound. Of course, I'm on a Mac. It's going to be different on Windows. In here, go to the Input tab, and check your hardware. In my case, the USB mic. Now I'll change the Input volume. Testing, testing. This is a test. Those levels are much, much better. I can now close this. I can delete this. Here we go. Let's do it once more. Testing, one, two, three. This is a scratch track. Now, even just by seeing the waveforms, you can tell that the audio signal is that much more powerful. Testing, one, two, three. This is a scratch track. A couple of things before we finish. Right now, the audio scratch tracks for one and two went into my active bin. I don't recommend doing that. I recommend that instead, you create a bin just for your scratch track. To create a bin, click on the the New Bin icon, or use the shortcut command or control + b, and then just call it Scratch Audio, and have that bin be the active bin. In other words, click it to select it, and now let's record once more. This is a test, this is a test. If we look at the Project panel, we see that indeed, the audio went into the Scratch Audio bin.

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