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How to Mute Audio For Video in Adobe Photoshop

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CaptainDan

CaptainDan

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Muting audio in a video project is an extraordinarily simple, but important thing to do. I’m sure you can imagine why. If you’re working with many different video clips in a project, you most likely wouldn’t want the audio in those clips to be competing with one another. Also, if you don’t want the audio in the clips to sound through at all because you’re going to add an external file to the project, muting becomes critical. As I stated above, getting rid of sound is super easy, it just takes a bit of explanation to make sure you can get it done.

In today’s post, I’d like to walk you through the process of muting audio while working with a video project in Adobe Photoshop. I’ll first demonstrate how to mute things the traditional way using two different methods. After that, I’ll demonstrate how to mute the sound of a video Smart Object. While the Smart Object scenario is slightly different, most of it’s the same. There’s just one extra step involved.

The Random Video​

I have a random video already opened up in Photoshop. It makes absolutely no difference what type of video I use for this demonstration or what the audio sounds like. All that matters is that I have a file and that it’s opened up in the application. This one just so happens to be a slow panning of some tea cups sitting on a table.


tea-cups.jpg

Two Methods For Muting Audio​

Okay, here’s a view of the clip in the Timeline panel. I’m sure you’ve seen this before if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time.

timeline-panel.jpg

To hide the sound in the clip, all I need to do is click on the small control triangle that sits at the end of the clip itself. And then, once the control box opens up, I’ll click on the small button that has a music note icon on it.

audio-panel.jpg

Once I’m in the audio control panel, I can either push the Volume slider all the way to the left or simply click the Mute Audio check box. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Another method for revealing that control box is to right-click inside the blue area of the clip in the Timeline panel somewhere. That will do the exact same thing.

Here’s the thing with this though. If you have tons of video clips in one project and you’d like to use external audio, you’ll need to mute the sound of every single clip. There’s no universal audio controls. For that, you’ll need to upgrade to Premier Pro or something similar.

Muting the Audio of a Smart Object​

For many reasons, you may want to convert your video clip to a Smart Object. If you’re interested in what a Smart Object is, please do a site search above. I’ve written about this topic ad nauseam. The issue with attempting to accomplish the same task with a Smart Object is that the Audio control box isn’t available when the file is in that form. Take a look at the screen shot below. I clicked on the same control triangle at the end of the clip. I even right-clicked in the purple area.

video-smart-object.jpg

It appears that a Motion control box opened up as opposed to the Audio one that we saw above. This Motion control box isn’t going to help us.

The workaround for this is to head over to the Layers panel and to double-click right on the Smart Object layer thumbnail. Like with any Smart Object, a new tab that contains the original file will open up. Inside of this new tab, we can follow the instructions I gave above. After that, close out the tab and that’s it. Again, it’s very simple.

I hope I clearly explained how to mute the audio of a video clip inside of Adobe Photoshop. If you have any questions regarding this post, please leave them in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!
 
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