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Audio in AE
Could someone explain to me just how audio works in AE? I’m sure I’ve got a pretty decent idea about it only playing during a RAM preview. I understand that AE is more of a graphic/video/motion program rather than an audio one but is there a way to hear the music other than in the RAM preview? I know you can use the wave forms to see the spikes in the music and I know there are plenty of tutorials out there to animate a layer via the audio. But what I need to do is properly sync the audio with the video and I just can’t do that with just the wave form and RAM preview. Is there anyway at all I can get the audio to play ‘real time’ when I slide the time line pointer back and forth like in prem pro and vegas?
Any help appreciated.
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8 Replies
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Here is a suggestion of what I generally do. Play the audio with the ram preview before you put in any video or graphics. As you go along the timeline, with the audio layer selected, hit the asterix (*) on key words. This places a marker. you can then double click on the marker and label it. I do this for the start of each line of text and on key words. Then, I do not have to play back the audio as I am editing in AE.
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Isn’t that a little awkward? Do you know why adobe chose not to have the option for real time audio in AE? It just seems like something they could do quite simply that would have a tremendous effect for users. It even seems like something someone could have done in a plug-in. What’s the reason for it being the way it is?
But thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a go and make the best of it that I can, cheers.
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rather than ram preview, you can hit the decimal point ( ‘.’ ) on the #s keypad to preview just the audio (it will generally render the audio much faster than a ram preview. hitting the asterisk on the #’s pad will have the same effect that jonathan described (placing markers in the timeline). i think the audio preview is limited by default to around 8 sec., but that can be increased in ae’s preview pref.
you can see the audio waveform if you twirl down the audio layer’s attributes, then audio, then waveform. its not that great of a display, but you can pull the bottom of the waveform display to expand it more.
i suppose you could also create your own waveform from the the audio waveform effect, just turn the layer on when you need to use it and off when you render.
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I would guess that the rationale behind it is rather simple. AE is a motion graphics app, not an NLE. Many AE projects don’t include audio at all, and other just use audio for timing purposes. Mixing audio & video together is generally better done with Premiere.
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great tips dave, i love learning something new (even if i rarely work with audio–i’ve found editors change the audio too often, thus my animations)
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[Dave LaRonde] “You also have a limited capability to scrub audio in AE. Hold down the command key (ctl key win) and move the timeline cursor; the speed of the scrub depends on the complexity of your comp. Or just hold down the key and hold down the cursor, and you’ll get something like the next 10 frames of audio”
That’s spot on, pretty much all I need. It just wasn’t an obvious thing to do, before I got AE I pretty much used vegas/prem pro to do any editing and because the audio in those two programs is pretty straight forward I thought there was something wrong with my install of AE or my codecs when I couldn’t seem to get any audio from it. To comment on your point in your other post, I understand that AE is a very powerful program with it’s specific uses, that’s why I still use vegas to do the standard editing of footage. It’s just the piece I was making couldn’t be made in anything other than AE and I needed to sync the audio perfectly, now I’m confident I can do that. Thanks for every ones input.
On a side note, which is better to use in conjunction with AE, so not which is best but what is best when teamed with AE; vegas or prem pro? The obvious choice is prem pro but I’ve heard that rather than have problems between ae and vegas it’s more just like you have more options with prem pro, which is to be expected I guess. I am currently using vegas, that’s why I ask. Should I consider going back to prem pro or if I’m comfortable with vegas should I just keep doing what I know?
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I’ve been reading this forum for tips. I’ve been trying to sync kinetic typography to audio the last two days. It seemed to be going swimmingly when i held down the command key to scrub. But towards the end of the audio the ram preview would have huge glitches in the audio repeating parts and sometimes just going silent. I restarted and eventually ran into the same problem.
so here is my tip to add to this thread:
use an ‘audio proxy,’ a highly compressed version of your audio, when working in after effects to help your RAM previews go faster and less glitchy.
Thanks Cow Community!
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Really? I was using a 1min 7 Mb aif file and the end of it would not play back. I could get the first 35 seconds to playback but the last third of it just would preview. And if i moved the work area bar to just that few seconds and RAM previewed it, AE would start playing the .aif layer from it’s beginning instead of 35 seconds in. It didn’t work for me until I used a compressed version. Do you have a better solution?
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