How to Use Audio and Auto Save Preferences in Adobe Premiere Pro

The next preference we have is our Audio preference. All of these preferences are very detail oriented, when you are doing audio mixing. So I am going to refer to most of them doing the audio mix, but suffice to say that Automatch Time is only applicable when you are doing automation audio mixing. So when you are using the audio mixer, using the fade levels and using different read-write methods, you would refer back to the Automatch Time. We'll get to that in a later lesson of this series.

One check-box in here that is very relevant, is the Play audio while scrubbing. That simply means that when you scrub on a clip, whether in the timeline or in the source monitor, you are going to hear that audio through your speakers. Another audio check-box is to Mute input during timeline recording. So when you are recording audio directly to the timeline, clicking this check-box allows you to not have to mute the other tracks, while you are recording audio down to the timeline.

Additionally, when you are doing automation tasks and you are adjusting fade levels, the keyframe thinning and time interval thinning allows you to reduce the number of keyframes that are written as your assigning fade values. So when you go from value X to value X10, 1 through 9 are not assigned with keyframes, you will just have a simple line between 0 and, let's say, X10.

Audio Hardware is going to refer to the hardware that's stored on your system. This is slightly different than in previous versions of Premier Pro. One of the things you specify is the Default Device that you are going to use for playing back your audio. So if you have an additional audio card or an additional video card in your system, you can select that card from this drop-down. If you don't, you are probably going to just see Premier Pro Window Sound.

If I select Premier Pro Window Sound, this is going to either play out of my DV capture device or it's going to play out of my standard Desktop speakers which are hooked up to my default sound card. Clicking the ASIO settings is going to allow me to see all of the audio possibilities on my system. Here you can see that I have an M-Audio card that's been installed and that's what we are actually using on this system, instead of the default sound. Go ahead and click OK, out of this dialog box, and I can select back M-Audio Delta ASIO.

Now when I have a card that has ASIO drivers associated with it, it actually installs and gives me a proper ASIO dialog box. So notice when I went and opened the default Premier Pro Sound, it gave me a native dialog box associated with how Premier looks for sound. When I went and it shows the M-Audio Delta ASIO settings, it gave me a customized M-Audio Delta Control Panel. Here I can specify things specific to the audio card that I am using. So if you have your own third party card, this is where you would access the settings for routing, may be increasing the volume on your input or your output, and so forth.

Once you have chosen your default audio device, you can click Audio Output Mapping. This allows you to decide what audio channel is sent where. Because I have already mapped using this device, I could swap the channels of the audio device. If I had a six channel thing, I could route the entire surround sound information for that appropriately. I basically would be controlling exactly how the audio is playing back and exactly to what speakers it's playing back. So you are mapping your sound.

Auto Save is a nice function. If you want to continuously backup your project, what you'll have in the same area that you are saving your project, is another folder that says Auto Save. In that Auto Save folder you will have numbers that reference exactly the information set in this dialog.

So turning on Auto Save says, every 20 minutes, this value you can adjust, save a version of the project. Once you get to five versions, start deleting the sixth one. So what I would like to do is I usually like to set this to about an hour. So I'll probably say let's have six versions and then let's save it every 10 minutes. So if you want it to save for one hour of work, you would set the Maximum Project Versions to 6 and Automatically Save at 10 minutes. That gives you about an hour of backup.

If you want to be really safe, what you can do is set the Maximum Project Versions to about 20. That gives you 200 minutes of back track from your work and a lot of different project iterations to work through, if you need to figure out where did you change something, or getting back to a previous point of reference in your cut.