So, here’s the problem: You have the perfect piece of music for your video project, but it’s too long. You COULD just fade it in or out, but it sounds SO MUCH better when the music starts and ends naturally. Time for that laborious process of manually editing music to get it to the right length; and that’s assuming you can cleanly match the beat and harmonic transitions in the music.
In most cases, manually editing music ends up sounding like you went at it with a meat cleaver and a dull knife.
Remix to the rescue. Remix first appeared in Adobe Audition. Now, Adobe is experimenting with it in the beta version of Premiere Pro.
NOTE: Remix can shorten longer audio clips, but not make a short audio clip longer.
HOW IT WORKS
Edit the audio clip who’s duration you want to adjust into the Timeline, then select it.
From the Clip menu in the Menubar, choose Clip > Remix > Enable Remix. The Essential Sound panel appears. The Duration portion of the panel is the new addition.
NOTE: While Premiere (Beta) supports multiple workspaces, the default is Edit. This feature works fine from that Workspace.
By default, Remix is selected. Enter the approximate duration for your new music. Remix is good, but it can only reedit music ±5 seconds of your selected duration, simply due to fact that music has beats and melodic themes that can’t be arbitrarily cut.
My source music was 2:56. I needed it for a 30 second promo, so I entered 00:00:30:00. Instantly, Premiere re-edited it to 34:05.
Hmm… too long. So, I entered 25:00 and the music was recut to 29:27. Perfect.
The clip in the Timeline shows where the edits are made, though you can’t adjust them. Instead, you can adjust two sliders:
Adjusting Edit Length allows Remix to adjust how close together (Short) or farther apart (Long) edits and sequences are placed.
Adjusting Features allows Remix to emphasize spectral (Timbre) or harmonic characteristics of the music when determining where to place edit points.
The best way to use both these sliders is to adjust one, then listen to the music. If you like it, it’s good. If you don’t, adjust a slider again.
SUMMARY
While Remix works fine on instrumental music, I don’t recommend you use it for any music that has lyrics. Why? Because Remix slices-and-dices music, it doesn’t pay any attention to the content or structure of the lyrics.
Remix reminds me of the early years of SmartSound, where we could creatively adjust the duration of a piece of music, while still retaining the overall sound and feeling.
Remix doesn’t have the same level of musical manipulation that SmartSound provides today, but for editors who need a really fast way to adjust the duration of an existing musical clip, Remix is a very handy tool.
