How To Speed Up Video With No Audio Distortion In Premiere Pro

This video tutorial by photographer Nathaniel Dodson (from the website tutvid) looks at how to speed up a video or a portion of a video while still maintaining a decent sound in Premiere Pro.

Usually, when we use a video at a faster pace than normal we do not keep the sound and play a background music instead. However, there might be some situations where you might want to speed both the video and audio (typically a few percent at most otherwise it can look a little bit ridiculous).

So how do you do this in Premiere Pro? well, there is an automatic pitch shifting which you can use after you speed up or slow down the video – from Dodson’s experience (we didn’t play with it that much) it doesn’t seem to work very well. So your only options are going to be manual.

Your best bet if you want your fast (or slowed down) video to sound natural is to use one of the more advanced pitch shifters in the Effects panel – you have the older one (obsolete) or the newer one (and Dodson seem to have the AUpitch which doesn’t seem to come with Premiere built in for Windows as it is a MAC only effect – see here).

You will need some playing around with the settings of each of these (try to follow Dodson’s instructions here and adapt them to your video based on how fast (or slow) you made your video sound. Getting a perfect result isn’t easy – but you can get a very close one if you didn’t speed/slow your video too much.

You can find more tutorials on the video editing section here on LensVid. You can also check Dodson’s previous videos here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.