Audio mixdown ala Avid

[Andy Mees]

all thigs seem to possible if you’re willing to duplicate your audio tracks in order to direct them to multiple output channels … a virtual audio patchbay seems to be missing.

of course you might also consider throwing a real mixer between FCP and your deck and doing it there
funny how these things seem to crop up in parallel eh?

cheers
Andy

[Bret Williams]

What? No no no. There is a virtual patch pay. It’s just a hidden cool feature. Just like all the cool features on Avid are hidden and undocumented.

Actually, it’s probably in the manual, but where does one start with those things!

Here’s how it works in FCP5. Open user prefs and in the audio outputs tab create a new 4 channel output preset.
Then, for your current sequence settings, make sure you’ve chosen that in the audio outputs tab there too.
You should now have 4 audio meters in the audio tool under MASTER.
Back in the sequence, right click in an audio area to the left of the timeline, like speaker icon, solo icon, etc. Just not the track patches. It’ll give to the choice to patch the track directly to an audio outptut.

So once again, the FCP way is more powerful, but more complex. In Avid, unless it’s changed recently, the patching is directly related to the audio output tool, which is an overall hardware function. Anyone who opens a sequence after you might not realize you’ve changed the patching. In FCP, the audio outputs and the audio mixer are directly connected with the sequence. So you could open one sequence and output a discreet mix. Then open another and output a stereo master. You could flip between the two instantly. It’s really nice. But it would be nice if the patching were visible in the audio tool somehow.

Wait, I’ll be damned. You can. Open the little panel on the left that lists all the tracks in the audio mixer. You can right click on them and patch the tracks.

Oh, and I can say right click now beause Apple has a new 2 button mouse.

HTH

[Videobiker]

Thanks HTH, I’ll check that out.

Have a great week-end!

Biker

[John Pale]

If you dont want to deal with the complexity of the earlier suggestions, you can achieve the same thing as an audio mixdown in Avid using the nest items function. Just select the audio tracks you wish to merge into a stereo pair and select “Nest Items”

[Bret Williams]

You’d still have to map the tracks to 3,4 or at least set up a dual stereo 4 track audio output. I think he misspoke when he said “mixdown” because an audio mixdown in avid is simply rendering all the files into one clip which then is automatically imported for you, but is a bad idea (like rendering out a quicktime and reimporting) in the fact that you lose all TC and batch capability from there on. In Avid we did it because it only had 8 real time audio tracks at the time, but you could put 24 in the sequence. FCP’s audio mixdown is the same thing, except it renders in place without creating any tracks.

He then asked how to map them particular tracks like a virtual patch pay and I realized he was talking about the audio tool in avid and how you can patch sequence tracks to particualar hardware output tracks. It’s a mixdown in the audio world, but it’s not called that in Avid or FCP. Unless they use the term for internal mixdown and for external output. Outputting is in a sense a mixdown of all your audio tracks to a stereo output.

[Bret Williams]

[videobiker] “Thanks HTH, I’ll check th”

HTH just means hope that helps. 🙂

[Andy Mees]

Hey Bret

thanks for the reply … (sadly though) i use that audio ouput assignment all the time, its not quite the ‘virtual patch bay’ i was bemoaning, and perhaps ‘patch bay’ is the wrong term

i guess what I’d like to see is a beefed up audio audio mixer tool which can let me assign audio inputs (from the timeline) to any number of audio outputs (to the deck in PTV/ETT) …. if I’m doing a four track output then I could, for example, patch A1 to A1,A3,A4 patch A2 to A2,A3,A4, patch A3 to A3 and patch A4 to A4

its not whether i could do this in an avid but just what i was looking for in FCP

perhaps i’ll add it to the fcp 6 wish list when it comes around 🙂
cheers
Andy

[Videobiker]

John Pale,

Thanks man, that is exactly what I was looking for!

Biker