From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

Makings adjustments to audio and video

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

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Makings adjustments to audio and video

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- [Instructor] Sometimes your video files just need a little cleanup. You've shot a video of someone standing in the shade, it's too dark to see them, or the color isn't quite right, or it's not vivid enough, or the sound is good, but not great. Now, the Adjustments panel includes a number of tools for correcting your movie's lighting and color as well as for enhancing your movie's audio. To launch the Adjustments panel, you must have a clip selected on your timeline, I'm going to select this dark clip right here. And then go over to the toolbar on the right and click on the top button, which is Adjustments. So, as you can see, the Adjustments panel has a number of adjustments you can make to your audio as well as your video. Shake Reduction we're going to take a look at in more detail a little later in the course. Smart Fix should do an automatic fix to your video, its main concern is with stabilizing the video and correcting the lighting, so let's click on Apply and see what it does to this particular clip. Smart Fix doesn't think there's anything wrong with the clip. Sometimes Smart Fix is a great shortcut, sometimes not. Anyway, we have other options here, other corrections that we make to lighting and color. These adjustments are made using a pretty intuitive tool called the Quick Fix panel. With quick fixes, your current setting is represented by the center square, and you can adjust, for instance, hue, different shades of color by clicking all around it. At any point, you can reset by clicking the button in the lower left. We can adjust lighting, saturation of color, if you click on the More button, you can use sliders. If you prefer using sliders, I always get great results here with this little Quick Fix preview panel. Gamma Correction, which is going to brighten the picture a little, look at that, that's actually pretty good, here's my before. Here's the selection I would use, and that does a great job of sort of brightening up the picture. Let's reset that, you see you also have settings for Lighting, color, Temperature and Tint, this is great for fixing pictures. Let me show you one. Look, this is a color shift clip right over here on our timeline, and as you can see, my problem with color shift is that this picture was shot as the sun was setting, and it's a little bit orange and yellow. We'll go down to color Temperature and Tint, sometimes you get the best results with Temperature, sometimes with Tint. And we'll just try a couple of settings. You can click on these, and each time you click on one, it will undo your last selection. Look at that, that's a very nice setting. This one down here is even better. Go a little bit too far here into the blue, but this one in the lower left looks like a very good setting for this picture. Here's before, here's after, it did a great job of stripping out some of that yellow-orange that appeared in the video as a result of the wrong color temperature being set in the camcorder. Finally, there are audio tools also. Here we've got a low volume clip. Now anytime I'm working with audio volume on a clip, I always open up either the Audio Mixer, which is under the Tools menu, or I simply put the timeline into Audio Mode. There we go, that gives me a little meter to watch, always trust the meters, never trust your ears or what you hear in your headset, or on your speakers on your computer. But we have a video here that's recorded at too low a volume. As I play this, you can see it's only registering about that much. I'd like it to peak close to zero, usually averaging a peak around negative six. To do that, there are a number of ways I could do it, I could just move this rubber band up and increase the volume. I often get great results by increasing the gain. Increasing the gain can make your audio sound a little bit fuller, at least it does to me, I always prefer to adjust the gain rather than the volume when I can. To do that, we select the clip, we go down here to Audio Gain on the Adjustments panel, and click Apply, and that's going to open up the Clip Gain panel. In here we can select Normalize, in which case, the program will make its best guess. You see how it increased the level of volume in there, I sometimes make a manual adjustment to this, so I'm just going to click Apply again, and you can see it brought it up to 6.5 decibels, that's actually a pretty good increase. Sometimes I'll increase it even higher, maybe to eight decibels, all depends on what you need. Once again, watch the meter, and we'll see if the meter registers something that looks a little more like full volume to me. So that's very nice, to me that sounds like much fuller volume. We did that by making an adjustment on the Adjustments panel. So the Adjustments panel is really sort of a master control center for correcting and adjusting the color and lighting in your video, as well as enhancing, adjusting and sweetening the sound of the audio. Adobe's done a great job here making these tools easily accessible and making the interface here very, very intuitive.

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