How to Denoise Audio in Premiere Pro — DeNoise Effect and Enhance Speech

Importing footage into Premiere Pro with background noise and looking for the best way to clean it up inside the editing workflow?

Premiere Pro offers multiple approaches to audio noise removal depending on the severity of the noise and your workflow preferences. The DeNoise effect (Audio Effects > Noise Reduction/Restoration > DeNoise) is a classic spectral subtraction tool with a single Amount slider. Adobe's newer Enhance Speech feature (Essential Sound panel > Dialogue > Enhance Speech) uses AI to improve voice clarity and reduce background noise with a single toggle. For most video editing noise scenarios, Enhance Speech is the easier and often better-quality option. For severe noise that Premiere's built-in tools can't handle, a common workflow is to process the audio externally (AI cleanup tool) and re-import the cleaned audio into the Premiere timeline.

What You Get:

• Enhance Speech in the Essential Sound panel is a one-click AI improvement — no manual knobs, no noise profile needed
• External AI cleanup processed before import gives better results than Premiere's built-in effects on severely noisy recordings
• DeNoise and Enhance Speech are non-destructive in Premiere — you can adjust or remove the effect at any time without re-rendering
• For audio extracted from camera footage, cleaning the audio before import and replacing the camera mic audio saves manual track-by-track effect application in the timeline
• Processing audio externally allows you to use dedicated tools (iZotope RX, AI browser tools) that significantly outperform built-in video editor effects on difficult noise