Capturing Analog Audio - Adobe PREMIERE 5 User Manual

Capturing analog audio

If you want to use audio that is not yet in digital form, you will need to capture it. With the
proper audio or video-capture card, Premiere can capture audio that is synchronized with its
source video or that is independent of it. In Windows you can use an audio capture program
such as the Microsoft Windows Sound Recorder to capture audio as a waveform (.wav) file, and
then import it into Premiere. On Mac OS, you can capture an audio-only clip directly from
within Premiere, and then save it to disk as a file you can import. For information about the
sound formats you can import into Premiere, see "Importing clips" on page 120.
The quality of digitized audio and the size of the audio file depend on the sample rate, or the
number of samples per second, and bit depth, or the number of bits per sample, of the digitized
audio. Also, digitizing stereo audio requires much more disk space than mono audio. These
parameters, controlled in the Capture Settings section of the Project Settings dialog box,
determine how precisely the analog audio signal is represented in digital form. Higher sample
rates and bit depths reproduce sound at higher levels of quality, but with correspondingly
larger file sizes. If you plan to export or play back the final cut from Premiere, capture audio
at the highest quality settings your computer can handle, even if those settings are higher than
the settings you'll specify for final export or playback. This provides headroom, or extra data,
that will help preserve quality if you adjust audio gain or apply audio filters such as equalization
or dynamic range compression/expansion; see "Applying audio filters" on page 228.
To set options for capturing audio:
Choose Project > Settings > Capture.
1
Choose a Capture Format from the menu, and click Audio if available.
2
Specify audio options and click OK. The available options vary and are provided by the
3
hardware and software you are using to capture audio.
Note: The Audio Settings in the Project Settings dialog box affect audio previewing and
exporting, not audio capture. The Audio options in the Capture Settings panel affect audio
capture. See "Preparing for video capture" on page 93.
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