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Humanities Teaching Academy / Assessment Screencasts / Cleaning Up the Audio on Your Screencasts

Cleaning Up the Audio on Your Screencasts

If you’re recording screencasts using the built in microphone on your laptop, the audio results can be less than impressive.

Boxy/echoey audio doesn’t sound great – and can be fatiguing to listen to for long periods – so here’s how you can polish up your audio to make it sound more professional, without using expensive mics.

You can run audio and video files directly through Adobe’s new podcasting speech enhancer tool, which uses AI to clean up speech.

Basic Instructions
  1. Go to https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance
  2. You can drop your video or audio file directly onto the enhancer

  3. If you select Choose Files instead, you may need to select All Files depending on your file type:

  4. Wait for your file to upload

  5. You can then play a preview, and use the slider to see the level of enhancement.  Click download when you’re happy.

If you’re working with very long/large video files, you may struggle with the up/downloading of very large files – depending on your internet capacity.

In this case, you can separate the audio from your video, and only process the audio track through the enhancer.  You can then add the enhanced audio track back in to your video.

You can also download this guide in PDF format.

Step 1 – Export the audio from your video
  1. Open Camtasia and start a new project
  2. Open Import Media, and browse for your screencast video:

  3. Drag your video onto the timeline

  4. Click on Export, top right, and select local file

  5. Choose M4A (audio only), name it accordingly and save it

Step 2 – Run your audio file through the speech enhancer
  1. Go to https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance and click Choose Files

  2. To find your M4A file, you’ll need to change the file type to All Files:

  3. Wait for your file to upload

  4. You can then play a preview, and use the slider to see the level of enhancement.  Click download when you’re happy.

  5. Depending on your browser’s default download location, you may need to move your file to a more permanent location on the C: Drive. (Camtasia will complain if you try to import files from a network drive.)

Step 3 – Add the enhanced audio back in
  1. Back in Camtasia, right click on your screencast video on the timeline and Separate Audio and Video

  2. Click on the eye symbol to disable the original audio track. (You could delete it altogether, but you may want to compare the two.)

  3. In the Media Bin, click the plus sign to import your enhanced audio file

  4. Drag it onto the timeline

  5. You can now export your video – this time as an MP4.

Optional Extras

If you hear loud spikes in your audio, you can use the Audio Compression tool. 

  • Go to Audio Effects, and drag the Audio Compression effect onto your new audio track

Compression will “normalize” your audio, lowering the peaks and raising quieter moments.

You can also zoom in on the track and double click on it to add individual “audio points”.   This is useful for lowering the level on harsh plosive sounds, occasionally at the start of words. Simply add three points and drag the middle one down.

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