Precisely Set Your Background Music Length In Under 1 Min

Photographer Peter McKinnon recently published a short video explaining a technique that we have been using for quite some time now using Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition – it is short, simple and if you didn’t know it existed it can really change your life (or at least make you a little bit less frustrated).

Basic explanation – let’s say that you are working on a video which is 10 min long and you just picked up a soundtrack to play in the background but it is only 5 min long – what will you do with the other 5 min? well – until about a year ago you needed to manually repeat the track and somehow cut and crossfade it to itself to make longer (shortening a piece also required some work although it might be a bit simpler).

Enter a feature in Audition which, to be honest, is currently more or less the only reason we use this (very powerful) software. All you need to do is right-click on the soundtrack in Premiere Pro, click edit clip in Adobe Audition and it will open the track in Audition (make sure you have the software installed on your machine of course).

Now you need to choose multitrack in Audition – add your file and in the properties tab on the left click remix – wait a few seconds and then choose the exact length of the soundtrack that you want to remix (say 10:04) and enter it and press enter. It might not be super exact (you might get 10:05 or even 10:15) but you can play with it (for example enter 10:01 or 10:10 and see if you get a closer result). If you are pleased – click file and export to Premiere Pro and your new sound clip will appear (down) in your timeline.

A few notes – first – this usually work very very well (we have done all of the background music on all of LensVid’s videos using this tool in the past year). The most recent Audition 2018 CC update changed things a bit and we got some strange issues where for whatever reasons we get the sound levels to change through the clip – maybe Adobe changed the default settings of Audition somehow – we are still trying to get to the bottom of this – if you also ran into some similar issues (and maybe found a way around them) – let us know.

Make sure you check our sound recording for video productions link which covers both equipment and techniques 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.