Classroom in a book

230
LESSON 12
Acquiring and Editing Audio
5
Click the transition rectangle on the clip to select it, and view its parameters in 
the Effect Controls panel.
6
Change the duration to three seconds.
This gives you a nice fade-in.
7
Click End on your keyboard to move to the end of the Timeline, and then 
drag another copy of Medieval_JB02.aif to just after the first copy on the 
Audio 5 track.
8
Drag Constant Power to the edit point between the two clips, and listen to 
how that works.
9
The intro to the second clip is too abrupt—let’s make that side of the transition 
longer. Hover your pointer over the right edge of the transition until it becomes 
the grab pointer; then drag the right edge of the transition to the right. Now 
listen—the intro to the second clip is more gradual.
10
Replace Constant Power with Constant Gain, and listen to it.
Favor constant power
Constant Gain changes audio at a constant rate in and out as it transitions between 
clips. Sometimes this can sound abrupt. Constant Power creates a smooth, gradual 
transition, like a video cross-dissolve. It decreases audio for the first clip slowly at 
first and then quickly falls off at the end of the transition. For the second clip, this 
audio crossfade increases audio quickly at first and then more slowly as it reaches 
the end of the transition. Constant Power is the default audio transition. Rely on it 
for most transitions. But your ears are the best judge.

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ptg
ADOBE PREMIERE PRO CS5 CLASSROOM IN A BOOK
231
Adjusting audio gain
Adobe Premiere Pro offers multiple techniques for boosting audio volume. You’ve 
just seen the direct volume control; now let’s look at the Audio Gain tool. As back-
ground, understand that when you boost audio volume manually via the volume 
graph, you have no way of knowing how the volume compares to other tracks and 
whether you’ve increased the volume so high that it will produce distortion. You 
can listen, but you can’t be sure.
In contrast, the Audio Gain tool in Adobe Premiere Pro gives you access to a 
normalization function that automatically boosts audio volume as loud as it can go 
without producing distortion. And, if you normalize all your tracks, the volume of 
all your content should end up more or less the same—a result that’s near impos-
sible when you’re fussing with the volume graph manually.
Even better, you can set the audio gain over multiple clips simultaneously, speed-
ing your work, and gain adjustments appear in the audio track waveform, so you 
can gauge the effect of your work. However, you can’t keyframe your gain adjust-
ments—it’s one setting for the complete clip. Of course, you can split your clips and 
work on them individually, but that gets time-consuming.
A good working paradigm for choosing when to use the Volume control versus 
when to use the Audio Gain control is to use Volume for fading in and out or for 
varying volume over the duration of the clip. In most other instances, use the 
Audio Gain control.