Audio being written to reference quicktime

[Shane Ross]

How can you tell?

Shane

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[John Pale]

I think thats how its always worked. It only references video files…the audio is built into the file.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John Pale] “I think thats how its always worked. It only references video files…the audio is built into the file.”

Yes, that’s what I understand as well. I am sure it has to do with combining multiple or overlapping audio tracks which would be hard to do with a reference file (playback two or more tracks of audio from a single file). So, that audio gets written to a single file for easier playback and encoding as other applications will know what to do with one file. Are you finding a problem using this method, Alan or are you just trying to save space?

[Alan Hatchett]

Its not that its necessarily a problem. I just want to make sure that my audio isnt getting altered at all. I’m doing a multicam edit and the cameras got turned off and on so I lined them all up in a timeline and I’m then exporting each camera out, with black spaces when the camera was turned off so I’ll have one movie for each camera that is timed accurately for the multicam. I just want to be sure that the audio I’m editing with is the raw audio and hasnt been mixed down or altered in any way.

In the back of my mind somewhere I have a memory of an older version of FInal Cut allowing audio references. And if you were to put two movies together inside quicktime and save it as a reference movie, it would work right. So I really dont understand why final cut does it this way. The way the video works is that it references the original video until an effect has been applied or a dissolve is added and then it embeded just that altered video into the Quicktime file. The audio could certainly act the same way.

[Alan Hatchett]

There are a few ways to tell its writing the audio to the file. First, it takes a few minutes to write the file. Second, the file is over 100MB. And third, and most clearly, if you open the file in Quicktime and go to Window->Show movie properties, you can select the Sound Track and go to the Resources tab on the bottom and see which files it is referencing. For the Video Track it lists all the raw capture files. For the audio, its only lists the exported file.

[Tom Wolsky]

Final Cut works with multiple tracks of video and audio. The video is normally rendered out before output if there multiple tracks. So the reference file is based on and points to those render files. If you don’t render before output the render files get built directly into reference movie.

The same thing happens for audio. The problem is for audio there is no render equivalent (except for mixing down which isn’t exactly the same). So to get the multiple tracks of audio it has to build them into a mixed down, exported file. That’s what gets built into the reference movie. That’s the way it has always worked. There has never been reference files built from audio.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Jeremy Garchow]

Exactly what Tom says.

Your audio will be a recompression if you are using this export method.

If you want the original audio, then you have to take the audio from the orig sources and lay that in to your timeline and do the multicam edit only on the video.

Jeremy