Colin: How do I open CS4 in 'The Levelater'?

Question

Hey Colin: I did as you suggested and I downloaded 'The levelater'. I grouped the same projects together again to create a new project just like the old one. I am anxious to see how it works. Also I was using a lot of memory doing it frame by frame and things were starting to slow up a bit.
I could not figure out how to get CS4 into 'The Levelater'. You said something about dragging some Wv@...#$% files. But I am clueless. I put 'The Levelater' in a file on the same drive as my project. I could tell you all I tried but then all that would do is muddy things up.
So in really simple terms, for a rookie, please tell me how to get the two together.
Thanks Jim

Answer 1

(I hear you callin'....)
Jim,
What you'll need to do is extra the audio portion of your clips to individual WAV files. Now, since it sounds like you don't have Soundbooth, I don't think you'll have the "Render and Replace" command for audio in Premiere. To check if you do (which would make life easier), select one of your clips in the timeline, and then go up to Clip > Audio Options > Render and Replace. If you do have that option, great! It'll make life a lot easier--simply select it and Premiere will automatically render the audio portion of the clip to a WAV file and link it to the video portion of the clip. The WAV file will likely be stored in the same folder as your Premiere Pro project. If you have this option, you can even do this in a batch: select all of your clips in the timeline, and repeat the process. "New" audio files will replace all of the original audio.
If you don't see "Render and Replace" as an option, fear not: salvation lies ahead, though it may mean a bit more work for you. Instead of selecting your clips in your sequence, select them all in the project panel/bin, and go to Clip > Audio Options > Extract Audio. This will perform largely the same procedure as "Render and Replace", except for the fact that the audio will not be automatically linked to the video clips in the sequence. However, the clips will appear in the bin (with something like an "Extracted" addition to their name), and you will be able to (one-by-one) replace the sequence audio clips with the new extracted ones, by holding down Alt+Shift and dragging an audio clip to its matching video clip in the timeline. As said, this may involve a bit of work, but is still doable.
After you've done either one of these above, close out Premiere. In Explorer, find your project directory (where the extracted audio WAVs should be), and create a new folder, called something like "Extracted Audio". Move the extracted audio files into that folder--as said, they should have something like "Extracted" in their name. These are the files to which Premiere is currently pointing, which is the reason we needed to close Premiere.
Next, to the Levelator: after you've extracted or rendered your audio, depending on the process you followed above, you can simply drag all of those generated WAV files to the Levelator application window. Note that you can also select all of the files, right-click on one of them, and go to Send To > CN Levelator; easy! It will process each file, one after another, and create new "fixed" WAVs with another addition to the filename--this time, it's ".output". Great, your audio is "fixed", but now Premiere doesn't know where those files are because we moved them and changed their name! No problem--we can fix that...
First, make a new folder at the same level as the "Extracted Audio" folder we created above; call it something like "Fixed Audio". Move all the files that now have the ".output" addition to their name into the "Fixed Audio" folder. Download Renamer and install it; this is an extremely useful tool that ends up as part of my video workflows all the time. When you open the program, drag your files with the ".output" addition into the files pane, and then click where it says "Click here to add a rule". Select the Remove option, and in the text box type ".output" without the quotes. Click "Add Rule", and then in the main panel click the green Rename button. That ".output" addition to the filenames will be automatically removed.
Finally (!), relaunch Premiere and open your project. First it will complain that it can't find the audio files, so navigate into the "Fixed Audio" folder and select the first file that it asks for. All of the rest will be automatically relinked, and the audio now associated with your project will be your fixed audio!
Now, I know that seems like a lot of steps, but honestly, it will take longer to read this than to actually do it. I hope it helps and please post back with any problems or, preferably, tales of resounding success!