Enhanced multitrack audio editing
Learn about multitrack editing and mixing in Audition, including customizable track and clip colors, sound removal, ITU loudness metering, and more.
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[Adobe Creative Cloud: Audition CC] Adobe Audition CC adds a whole new series of enhanced multitrack features to really improve the experience of mixing, editing, and generally working in Audition as a whole.
So I'm going to show you a couple of those now.
So the first thing that you'll notice as we look at the interface is there's a lot more color, and one of the things that people have been asking for for several years is the ability to color-code not just your clips, but your tracks.
So we now have track color-coding, which, again, just allows you to organize your files and your media that much more easily.
You can group things together by color, rather than by clip.
And, again, it's just a very simple way to work and visually allows you to very quickly find things when you're mixing.
So if you take a look here, you can see that we have all of our various tracks colored.
To adjust the color of your tracks, you can actually simply click on the little square right here, and you can adjust the track color accordingly.
You can see how that's being reflected there.
And when you adjust the track color, you'll see that it's changed there.
Now you may have noticed that some of my clips did not change.
That's because the clips can either follow the color of the track or they can maintain their original modified clip color as well.
So if I right-click on one of these clips, and I go into Clip Group Color, you'll see that if we actually select a color for one of these, they will automatically change.
However, if we choose this box here with the line through it, then it will automatically follow the color that's been associated with the track itself.
So again, this is just a nice way to have independent track color and clip color, in case you mix and match.
The other nice thing is that if your clips are assigned to follow the track color, as you move them around, they will automatically conform to that set track color, which you can see is happening here as I move the position of this clip.
Now one of the other things that people have been asking for for a while is the ability to merge clips together.
So quite commonly, you might have an interview, or you have several pieces of audio that essentially you cut, but perhaps they were all originally sourced from the same file.
Maybe you didn't actually edit them, you just placed a cut there in anticipation of editing and then just sort of left it as two pieces.
Well, again, in terms of organization, multitrack organization, this to me is very visually distracting.
So now, inside Audition CC, I can select multiple clips, I can choose merge those clips together, and then very quickly what you'll see is that it creates a new merged clip, and if I just zoom in here, vertically, you can see that a little bit better.
It actually creates a new clip that is merged together.
So again, just to keep things a little bit cleaner, a little bit tighter, finessing that organization, making it easier for you to actually navigate inside the multitrack.
Now continuing on with that, when it comes time to do things like silencing, and especially—this is when you're working with interviews or dialog—people tend to have a lot of what we call glottal sounds or just those momentary [makes glottal sounds]— all that kind of stuff, and traditionally, to fix those problems, you would go in to your track, and you would start using envelopes, and you would start to draw your envelope points, and you would do this kind of a thing here—I'm not even listening to what this, don't care at the moment— and you would do that, and that's a fine workflow, and you could add splines to this or, as we know in the design and video world, Beziers, by right-clicking and adding spline curves.
This is a fine workflow, and you can still do this.
It's just a little more time-consuming.
Well, now in Audition CC, we actually have a feature where you can silence a particular section by making a selection, literally in one right-click operation.
So let me just zoom out a little bit here, and what we're looking for is a section of the interview here.
All of this footage that you're seeing is from the Danny Way documentary "Waiting for Lightning," and there's a little section here where he's talking about how he had a lot of trauma in his life, and you'll see that he says he had a lot of "like trauma" in his life, and, obviously, we want to take that "like" out, so take a quick listen; I'm going to solo this for you. [interview plays] Now again, I could come in here, and I could set my envelope points, and I could click one, drag down, click again, drag back up— four steps to do one simple removal.
Well, it's a lot easier now.
I can simply select my Time Selection tool, select the "like," right-click, and choose Silence Selected Clips in Time Selection, like that, wind it back.
Let's clear our time selection here. [interview plays] And very quickly, very cleanly, it just repairs that.
And many people will say, well, but that's a very sharp, linear sort of move.
You wouldn't want that, it's going to cut off too quickly.
Well actually, if you zoom in, you'll see that there is a slight, just a very slight, curve to the way that that envelope has been applied.
Again, you can adjust these.
These are all nondestructive, anyway.
You haven't destructively changed the files.
So it just gives you a little more flexibility, but now, as you're spot-checking your dialog, you can simply come in, make a selection, right-click, silence, and you're done.
You don't have to click multiple points and actually draw those curves anymore.
So that's just one of those additional enhancements that really makes the whole process of working that much easier.
Another highly user-requested feature was the ability to simply select all of the clips in your track at one time.
So if I come up to my interview track here that we've been working on, again, I can simply double-click inside of the track, and instantly you'll see that all the clips are selected.
Now another thing, especially if you're working with dialog and, again, doing some of those silencing operations, the ability to simply zoom in full-screen to that track.
So now, using Shift+/, I can automatically zoom in vertically, And now, of course, I have all of my horizontal zooming capabilities, and you can see I'm just using the gesture on my Magic Mouse here, and this just makes it very easy and fast to very quickly zoom in to the track you're working on, Shift+/, and zoom back out.
So again, a lot of flexibility there.
And remember, of course, that as you're working through these tracks, you can continuously reorder them as you need, so if we're done with the interview track, sometimes I like to just simply click on the waveform icon here and move it down.
So you still have all those cool capabilities to reset and reorganize all of your tracks as you're working through them in the multitrack display.
Now another thing that people have been asking for is to change the way that we basically brought files into the multitrack.
Now if I select a whole series of clips here in my Files panel, traditionally, what would happen is, as I would drag them in, effectively, they would all come in on one track, stacked in a row, like you can see here.
So again, dragging them from the Files panel, everything is just stacked in sequence, and that's fine, but if I have different audio or if I have, say, multitrack audio, and all of these things are synced properly, well, I want them to come into individual tracks.
So, without releasing the mouse, I can simply hold down my Alt key, and you can now see that it will automatically place those clips into individual tracks.
Or if I let go of Alt, again they just stack in sequence as they did before.
So this is one of those very simple things, but it's a great time-saver, especially again if you're working with multitracked audio or presynchronized audio that you simply want to drop into individual tracks or if you simply want to take a bunch of footage, drop it in, and start working independently without having to click and move things around.
Now one of the last things that I'll talk to you about deals with broadcast metering and loudness.
And this is something which is really popular today.
You probably heard there's all kinds of things going on with broadcast loudness standards.
And we're very fortunate to have the TC Electronic Loudness Radar Meter now a part of Adobe Audition CC, as well as Premiere Pro CC.
So what you can see here is that inside my multitrack online master, I actually have the Radar Loudness effect applied.
This can actually be found under the Special menu, Loudness Radar Meter.
You can also see that I have my dynamics processor set here— [video plays] and we'll just mute this for a moment here—and basically, what this is allowing me to do is properly monitor the loudness of my content, effectively before I export that content to deliver to— whether it's going to the web, to a device, to CD or DVD, or, in the case of a broadcast environment, on air.
You can see if you look at the presets here, we have all the standard presets that follow various broadcast loudness standards.
In your settings, of course, you have the ability to reference your loudness units in LUFS or LKFS, and this conforms to the BS 1770-3 standard.
Now, 1770-2 effectively rendered LUFS and LKFS the same, right?
So again, you can choose how you want this thing to be leveraged.
You can see nice and visually how it's actually working on the audio, if you have any out-of-band peaks, and if it's conforming to that particular loudness standard, and very quickly you'll know that, yes, this is now broadcast-compliant, and I can deliver this with confidence.
So those are just some of the new and exciting new features in the Enhanced Multitrack in Adobe Audition CC.
[Adobe Creative Cloud]
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