Noob here seeking help to make sure audio for my film is mastered properly

Question

I learn through diving into things, watching and discussing and I'm at the point of worrying about audio and was hoping someone can fill me in on proper steps to take.
I am cutting together a 25 minute film on premiere CS5.5 and of course I have Audition. I have many many audio clips as you can imagine. I am wondering the basic process as to what steps I should take to make sure this sounds as good as possible. I have read some tutorials on Audition but honestly don't know enough on the concept of sound to understand if the steps shown in any of the tutorials pertain to my specific case.
I basically want all the volume levels to be standardized across the board. I know this can be done in Audition, and would love if someone could give a step by step as to how to properly do this. I suppose I am shooting for the standard -6 max peak, but again don't know which options to select in the process to make sure this is properly set. I'm not even sure how to properly select which clips I want the effect applied to... I attempted to do a volume match in some clips in Audition, but I did it by hilighting the clips with the mouse by dragging over them in the timeline, and I think though that the volume matching popup window was instead asking me to find these clips over in the Files window to the left. I pressed batch process and it defniitely processed SOMETHING though i'm not sure what. I hope that the program truly doesnt need for me to physically click on the files in the window to the left and will accept what is just hilighted as this would be a nightmare trying to sort through hundreds of clips.
I also don't know how to make the clips youre editing in Audition apply the changes to the Premiere timeline when working with dynamic linnk. Do I just save?
I also know I'm going to need to take out the electrical hiss is many clips (or hums) and was wondering what the best process to do that is as well.
Thanks a bunch for the patience with newbies like me to anyone who chooses to answer.

Answer 1

Hi Velzz,
If you've achieved picture lock in Premiere - you're done editing the video and are now mastering the audio - this is a pretty straightforward procedure.
From the Premiere sequence, choose Edit > Edit in Adobe Audition > Sequence... and allow Premiere to generate an interchange session and open it in Audition.  You may want to render a reference video to make it simpler, but this is not a necessary step.  What we'll be doing here is not directly editing the clips in the Premiere timeline, but generating new clips for an Audition session, then sending rendered, mastered stems back to Premiere to replace the existing audio.
Once this sequence opens in Audition, select the clips you wish to standardize - these would likely be voice clips only and not music - and right-click one and select Match Clip Volume from this menu.  You'll be able to select a target level to which you'd like all selected clips normalized.  You may need to follow-up by adjusting the levels or mix depending on your needs, but this should get all the clips at a relative level so you're not making wild adjustments.
When you're satisfied with the mix, choose Multitrack > Export to Premiere Pro... from the menu.  You can send back individual tracks or buses rendered as full-duration stems, or the master output rendered to mono, stereo, and/or 5.1 stems.  Premiere will import these and allow you to place them on new audio tracks in your sequence.  mute the original audio tracks and you should be ready to export your final product.
To attack the hum/hiss, you'll want to try some of the Noise Reduction / Restoration effects.  Hiss reduction should make short work of any standard hiss while you may want to try the DeHummer tool to remove electrical hum and related harmonics.  You might have good luck using the Noise Reduction tool for these operations as well - find a region of audio that contains JUST the noise or just the hum (or both), select it, and choose Capture Noise Print form the right-click menu.  Then open the Noise Reduction effect and preview/adjust until you find the right balance of noise reduction without affecting your actual audio signal and apply.