It's time to learn about the pen tool. And the pen tool can be annoying, it can be hard to use, especially in Premiere, and some editors won't even use it because they don't like it. They think it's not worthwhile, but it is and knowing how to use the pen tool and when to use the pen tool is crucial. So without further ado, where is the pen tool is this guy. Click on it and your mouse changes to a little point of a pen. And for shortcuts, you can just click P and it changes to get back to your mouse just hit the just like Photoshop or the other Adobe programs.

So hit pen or hit P and switched pen. And what this allows you to do is create, well, let me make this bigger for you and zoom in. So this line that goes across every audio clip is the volume for the clip. And if you bring it all the way up using the mouse tool B, you see it goes up six decibels. That's how much you can raise it and bring it down. You can go well, all the way down.

But realistically, like negative 20 years, kind of where you'll land unless you make this super big. And you never really want to have your volume line, for lack of a better term, all the way down here because then it's just so hard to control. That's why if you remember recommend using this slider to do like the most of the correction, and then we'll leave this for minor corrections. It's already tough, you can't even get it back at zero. That's close enough. So hit p for Pam.

And we can make a point. And if you select the point and click and drag, it moves up and down. And right now we only have one point, so it's affecting the whole line. But if we have two points, see what starts happening. So we want to make this louder, and then make that softer. There you go.

What this is commonly used for is dialogue, or changing music to allow for dialogue. Let's say this is your intro here. And then you start getting a voiceover the music has to drop. So this is a quick and easy way to do it. Now if you want to be more exact about where and when it drops and zoom in Let's say you wanted to be super sharp. And this is this is the time it takes for you to go from loud to soft.

And that is extremely quick. But you could also make it smooth by going something like that. Now, when you're moving this, when you're moving a point, left and right, if you hold Shift, it'll lock you into the level you were at. So I always recommend using shift. Also, you can select multiple points at once. And slide that again, hold shift and it will snap it back to place.

Now this is really all you need to get started with the pen tool and get comfortable with it. And let's say you had dialogue and then you had a gap and you wanted to bring the music back up, make another point, bring this back up. So I'll just be able to keep Hear what this sounds like? Let me know. So you can do fade outs like that too. And sometimes the stock premiere crossfades and exponential fades which we'll get into don't achieve exactly the fade you want if you're getting really particular about it, and the pen tool is a good way to manually do it when the facts you use can't.

And let's say we wanted to do a face In on this track. Now let's say you mess up, you mess it up, you've done way too much. And you want to start fresh. You can right click on your track and hit remove attributes. And we're concerned with the volume. If you've done on the panning, which I don't think you will, you just leave this and hit OK. And we're back to that nice clean line.

So let's say we want to do a manual fade and let's select this point to keep it at zero and then make another point in the beginning and bring that down to negative infinity. Now, sure, you can achieve this with the effect but what's cool about the pen tool is You can do more than just a linear line. If you hold the Command key, and you'll see that your, your cursor changes to an arrow. So holding command or control, if you're on Windows, click the point and it becomes curved. And let's zoom in here, again, because these are so small. That's why some editors don't like doing this in Premiere, but if you're trying to really get the results you want, sometimes you have to do this.

And now this little arm that extends off, you can cut, you can drag this and then this is the curve that the audio is going to follow. So let's say we want it to fade in from zero but get up to speed really quickly. We'll go like that, and that'll be nicer than just a straight line. Conversely, if we want a slow fade him That's nice. Smooth too. So that's just a preview of the pencil, you want to play around with it.

And if you want it back to linear, hold the command and control key and click on that again and then it'll delete its resume. And that's what you need with the pencil to get started. So go ahead and play around with it and use it to really finesse your your minor adjustments around dialogue around sound effects. And if you have a quiet part in the music that you need to be on par with the rest of it. You can do simple things like this. If you get good, it's pretty quick.

And then all of a sudden, you have the same volume here as you do here. Or if you want this to be quiet or for some reason, just like that, so go have fun with the pencil. start drawing around.