The Dynamic Link workflow between Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition gives the user incredible flexibility for tweaking their audio and the amplification that was designed for audio, all the while having a very solid video reference that will contain all the elements as they exist in real time from the Premiere Pro timeline.

So here we have a sequence that I've just created and I'd like to send this to Adobe Audition to do additional editing, mixing, and mastering. So up in the edit menu, I'll choose edit in Adobe Audition, sequence. I'll select the entire sequence, and then I'm going to choose to send the video through Dynamic Link.

Now, previously you would have had to have rendered this out. But thanks to Dynamic Link, this is now a nondestructive, no render workflow. You can set your audio handles. You could choose to render any audio clip effects. Now clip volume keyframe metadata is essential because if you've drawn any volume handles on any of your audio clips, you might want those respected, and Audition will do just that. Go ahead and click okay. It will create a new session for us and open it in Audition so that we can begin working.

So here we are in Audition now, and let's just shuttle ahead. You can see we've got the same thing displayed, and let's play a couple seconds of this. What we give to you for us to play in is like—that's our gift to you. Okay, and just as with Premiere Pro's Mercury Playback engine, if you right click on the video panel here, currently I'm playing back at one-quarter res, but I'm at full resolution when I stop. So this makes it very fast, very efficient when cutting audio to picture in Audition.

Now one of the first things that I like to do is to take all of my like files, meaning all my dialogue, all of my music, and process them all very quickly so that they all have the same peak level. So to do that I'm going to double click on one of these dialogue files, go into my files panel. I'm going to select all of the audio clips, and I'm going to drag them down into this panel here called match loudness. If you don't see that, it's also contained in the window menu.

Under match loudness, now I will be able to see all of the attributes of the various audio files. And in this case, I'm dealing with their peak amplitude. And I want them all to peak around -3.00. So under the match to field down below, I can choose peak amplitude. I'll set the peak to -3.00, go ahead and click run on this. And just like that, now everything is -3.00 and everything has kind of the same—at the same starting point.

Now after I've done all of that, I'll typically start working on the surround mix. And while you may have great capabilities for surround in Premiere Pro, the only limitation is that you're limited to this space. This is where you're going to conduct your 5.1 mixing. And for me, working in this very small environment, it's just not enough. And if I need to edit, I'm confined to this little small square. So once again, this is something that I would do in Audition. So now if we go ahead and select one of our music tracks, if I double click on the surround panner here, I also have this panel docked over to the side.

Now as I move around, not only do you have much more visual detail but you can actually see where the sound and how much of the sound is going to each of the 5.1 channels. Additionally, if I twirl down the automation field here, let's go ahead and show our envelope for angle. This happens to be one of the music tracks. I'm simply going to plot a couple of points here because I want the music to go kind of moving around the surround field, front to back.

Let's go ahead and solo this and watch the surround panner as we've just automated that motion. Okay, now that's quite erratic movement, but you get the idea. You have the ability and total flexibility here for automating your surround mix in a much physically larger environment just to give you more flexibility for getting the best mix possible. Now, of course, we want to send it back to Premiere.

And in this case what I want to do is I want the flexibility to be able to come back to this session, as well. So the first thing, best practice, is to save this. So we'll go ahead and save as. Now, multitrack, export to Adobe Premiere Pro. Now I have the ability to send this back either as stems or as a stereo mono or interleaved multichannel file.

So if I send back stems, I can click export and it will do just that, it'll create new stems. It'll place them in a new track for me, which you can see here. Let's go ahead and make this full screen. And now you can see all the dialogue from the original track one is here in track five. All the dialogue originally on track two is now here on track six and the music, et cetera.

But what if you don't actually need stems? What if really the picture is locked and I'm just doing a final mix? Well, you also have the ability to send interleaved files. So for this case, I'm going to choose mix down to 5.1. Once again it will send over to Premiere Pro in a new track.

Let's go ahead and make this full screen, zoom in a bit. And now on track nine you can see I've got my interleaved multichannel file living inside of Premiere Pro. Now what if I'm watching this, and the picture is fine but there's a small tweak that I want to make to the audio. Even if you closed that session—let's go ahead and close our Audition session—from within Premiere, I don't even need to reestablish the Dynamic Link anymore. I can simply take this interleaved mix. I can choose edit original, the standard Adobe edit original. It will then relaunch the session that created that file and everything, including all of the surround information that I created, is there allowing me to re-edit, re-tweak this and then send it back to Premiere Pro using that same multi-track export to Premiere Pro command.

So I can batch process files for loudness, for peak amplitude. I can analyze the actual audio in question. I could do more advanced surround mixing and automate those surround mixes. And then I have a very easy way to send back individual stems, mono, stereo, or multi-channel files directly back to the Premiere Pro timeline.