Ways to work with less-than-ideal audio in your video edit.
Compensating for a Bad Mic
Camilo Castañeda applies the standard tools for basic good audio (multiband compressor, DeEsser, Parametric EQ and DeNoise), but in emergency surgery mode (the demo begins at 1:12):
A particularly helpful tip: Camilo suggests you “loop the audio” – by this, he means looping the section of the timeline which contains the audio you’re working on (to avoid having to constantly stop-and-start). In Premiere Pro:
- in the Timeline, add In & Out points (using “I” and “O”)
- go to the Program window > “+” > drag “Loop Playback” into the menu of the Program window




Room Tone
Deity offers 5 Audio Clean-Up Hacks For Perfect Sound, including specific plugins for removing clicks and pops, and perhaps the most useful “hack” of all – creating a bed of room tone:
Shutterstock demonstrates that Adobe Audition even has a dedicated device for generating room sound from any audio clip:
Also in Audition, Curtis Judd demonstrates how to fix audio clipping:
The Modern Filmmaker demonstrates How To Remove Background Noise In DaVinci Resolve 17:
Interference
DOD Media deals with a very specific, but very common, problem – RF (radio frequency) interference:
Processing checklist
And finally, Gerald Undone walks us through his audio processing workflow (for YouTube, but the principles apply to many other types of video projects):
Javier Mercedes‘ idea of fun, it seems, is to create a bad audio situation and challenge himself to repair it in post, using only the stock effects found in Premiere Pro:
Further Viewing
Of course, the best way to avoid many of these problems at the post-production stage is to get them right at the production stage, by capturing audio properly:
Get creative – a bed of “silence”, room tone, and ambient sound can work all kinds of magic, from creating the “illusion of continuity” to “adding to the story”:
ADR – one of the most common “fix it in post” techniques is Automated Dialogue Replacement: