This lecture we're gonna be talking about the compressor and the limiter. And I'm sure you've heard it a compressor before that song has compression. And I want to preface this lecture with the fact that being good at using a compressor is a lifelong endeavor. professional audio mixers, the best producers in the world, still, every day learn more about compression, and how to do the best compression. And so our goal together is not to understand every facet of compression. Because of this pretty complicated, and our goal is not to be an expert in knowing how to use it.

I think our goal together should be knowing how to use it in a video editing application to make your sound sound good and better using these tools and I will We'll give you a run through of the basics of them. But if you really want to dive in and learn more, just search on Google and learn, there's so many tutorials about the intricacies of compression and how it works. And I find it fascinating myself and I've spent hours diving in and really learning and all the information is out there for free about compression. Now to get started with compression and video editing, I am first going to tell you a little bit about how the compressor works just so we're on the same page before even pulling up a compressor. Think about the word compression. What does it mean to you?

It means almost squishing something right making it smaller, compressing something as to make it smaller. So in the audio world, we are always talking about the waveform. Here I have the wave form of a song Notice the difference in loudness, this area is bigger, it's got bigger waveforms in this area. And it is louder. Those big waveforms come from the kick drum and the snare drum, if you listen here and then here, no kick drum or snare over here. So that's what these extra spikes are coming from these peaks.

What a compressor would do is shorten the difference between these high peaks and these low valleys. So what a compressor is doing is it'll take this section and shrink the waveforms almost like this. If I were and this isn't, this is A visual example for you. It might make it like that. So it's similar to here. It's not adjusting volume, exactly.

It's adjusting when the audio gets to a certain threshold, which is like right above here. When that waveform gets right up there, it's going to start compressing it and start smashing it down. And what that allows you to do overall, is make the whole thing louder, because if I were to adjust just volume right now, and I was going to make the max peak, which is one of these all the way up to zero, which is our theoretical limit of how loud something can get. So that stretches all the way there. And this goes up to but if we were to go any louder than this, this would start clipping which means it would run off the edge and be over zero and be over Our limit, and it would be distorted and it would sound bad, that'd be bad sound quality. So compression is used for a variety of things.

But let's say we wanted to make the entire thing louder. But we couldn't make it any louder because this section would start clipping. If we compressed it, and these waveforms shrink down a little bit to be in line with these, then we could raise the volume overall of the entire song. And just as a little fun exercise, I would challenge you to find the most popular EDM song on the radio right now and grab it and throw it into premiere and check out the waveform because EDM is famous for compression. They want their music as loud as possible and as smooth and as even as possible. And so literally their whole waveform of the song, you don't even get these peaks.

They're all just full compressed, all right below zero. So that's a good visual example of compression really working. So I'm going to undo this. And now let's start to take a look at actual compressors in Premiere. We go up to the audio track mixer, drop down this arrow and go to amplitude and compression. So there's a couple different compressors.

And I have to, I really have one favorite, which is the multiband compressor. But first I'm going to show you the single band because it'll show you a couple of things going on. Double click. And if this is too detailed for what you want to learn about compression, you can skip forward, I will get to just how to apply these things to make your sound better, which is the point of this tutorial. But this is really actually interesting information and will allow you to communicate with anyone else about this or be able to understand direction from an audio mixer, anyone who is inclined in the sound world. These are the basic components of compression, we have threshold ratio attack and release.

Threshold is when do you want the compressor to start? Do you want to start when the audio crosses negative 20 DBS right about here. Or maybe you want everything compressed. So this tells when the compressor when the kick in this the ratio tells the compressor how much to kick in. This is the lowest amount of compression and this is the most and if you get up to 30 you'll start hearing some distortion and some things you weren't intending. The sweet spots usually between one and 10 attack is how fast compressor works.

Release is how, how long it holds on after the audio dips back below the threshold. And there's a lot of info about this out on the internet. So if you want to learn more, and there's some great videos on YouTube, just go search and explore on your own. Next I'll show you dynamics processing because this is kind of a good visual of what compression does. Here. Remember our EQ line that was straight across.

This is the straight line for compression. Right now it's not doing anything. It's got plenty of presets, and I recommend working off presets as you start. So let's say we want Huh, smooth vocal. You see it drops this line over here. So visually, our threshold looks to be about negative 20.

That's when it looks like the compressor will start kicking in. And it so any audio that goes above negative 20 is going to be compressed and brought down so it can at maximum go to negative 10 decibels. That means if there's a really loud moment in the song that came all of a sudden, and it went all the way up to zero, this compressor would bring it down to negative 10. Just that little loud part. You can see when it's red right here, you can that means the compressor is working and I It fills up over here you can see if this compressor wasn't here, it would get loud up to here. So doing something like this, taking the peaks in a little bit, makes it a little smoother.

And this is something nice to do on vocals. The microphone track I'm actually recording on right now. Just I'll step out of premiere for a minute. I'm recording in logic, and here are the other things that are affecting my voice before it even reaches you. First I have a de Esser which really quickly, it targets high frequency sounds. Remember our EQ, there's a high frequency sound that our s sounds register.

So my microphone makes those really loud. So I have a de Esser which brings that just that high frequency down a little bit so it's not hissing. Then I have an EQ. I don't need all these bass frequencies that are in the ambience of my room. So I've taken those away. And then I have my compressor.

And this is a fancy logic processor, but it's using the same tools. It's got the threshold, it's got the ratio of how much it's compressing, how fast it works, and how long it takes before it releases. So my vocal here, it's smooth, if I were to get really loud, see, that was me getting really loud, but the compressor is bringing it down so it's smoother. So doing something like that will allow for Well, a smooth vocal, and there's a lot of other things. If you're applying this to music and you want more of a kick. You get that line You can start playing with these presets and visually seeing what it's doing is a broadcast limiter, it's not going to let it's not going to let them the audio go above this limit.

So I like using this dynamics processing for individual tracks, such as a vocal track, or adding a limit of some sort. And we'll talk about a limiter that I like using this particular tool for one track by itself. Lastly would be the multiband compressor, which is my favorite it does the most, it makes your audio sound the best with the least amount of work, which I'm a huge fan of. And it's got a few presets. Now this looks crazy and fancy. And why it's crazy and fancy is because it's splitting up our EQ Number EQ starts here and goes to there into four quadrants.

And then you can compress each quadrant differently. So the base, the lower mids, the higher mids and the highs, you can apply different effects to all of them. But the presets that it comes with are really, really good. And I'm going to get into master compression on a following lecture. And that's like my biggest key secret to making sound audio sound good and premiere very quickly. But I like the broadcast and the classical master and some of these down here.

See already here, things changing. If you really want to go and understand compression, it takes hours. So go and read about it, learn about it, but know where the in Premiere where the cool tools are. So I'm just gonna recap real quick for you. amplitude compression. The single band is good for certain effects you're trying to get.

If you have a Do you want to do a vocal booster, voice level or voiceover all these are gonna apply different curves. So that's a good preset. Way to go. Low mid enhancer, bass, so on. And we've also got, here's the de Esser that I was using in logic, it's considered a compressor and see the high frequencies right here. It's got that narrowed out, it's gonna compress those more than the other stuff.

It's a very, it's like a precision compressor. dynamics. This is a popular one for vocals. Because it's got a few different things going on all within it, you can check compressor. So this is a good one to play around with. Then the multiband I just showed you, and they've all got their own.

This is a really simple just channel volume. If you need more volume than this can give you, you can just this is just extra volume. So you can apply multiple instances of that if you need to get it really loud. So go in here now that you know where they are, and look for them. And check out the presets premiere has. I recommend broadcast and classical and pop master.

Those are some really nice presets. Let me know. Now I want to talk quickly about the limiter What a limiter does is it deals with this. We never ever want our audio to go above zero. When if it goes above zero, it's gonna clip it's gonna sound distorted. And when it gets delivered to the viewer, whether it's on their laptop, their phone in the theater or wherever it might be, it'll sound distorted sound too loud, and it's just a rookie mistake.

So the limiter does is it saves us it's a machine programmed tool to never let anything get above zero. And what's great about the multiband compressor and some of the other compressors is that they have limiters built in. So if we were to choose this pot master preset, it's got the brick wall limiter checked. So with this checked, it can never ever go above zero, you're safe. It gets close, but it's not going to go above zero. So I recommend using the limiter and a couple different cases.

If you've got a vocal tract that's anywhere near the top, then put a limiter on it. And that's as easy as going to. Oh, and also on these effects, you can stack them up there multiple stacks, so you can have a compressor and then you could put, let's say you have an EQ and that's doing something and then you have why not another EQ. After that, you can also put on a limiter. Click this limiter, and probably just do a preset. This is limit to negative point one dB, so that's just below zero.

I think negative three is a little safe. That's one dead horse that means it's like as compressed as it can get so loud. So limit this to negative Three. So you could put on a limiter that way, my favorite way to do a limiter is just building it in with the compressor. Or, here. If you did broadcasts limiter, same thing.

There are many different ways to do it dynamics. Use our limiter. So you just check what you want. It's never a bad idea to put on a limiter. But it's a good idea. If you're getting close to zero and you're worried about that.