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Audio Mixing
Hello everyone, I’m a longtime (10 years) FCP user trying to learn Premiere as well. As expected there are a lot of similarities, but the real roadblocks for me right now are some inefficiencies in my way of working. I think I’m trying to do things the way I did it in FCP and getting frustrated. As there are plenty of loyal Premiere users who love it, I’m pretty sure there’s no way that they are mixing audio the way I’m doing it in Premiere right now (very inefficiently). My question pertains more to editing in application – I’m cool with using Soundbooth (and eventually Audition when we upgrade to CS 5.5) for final mixes, but during the rough cut stages etc it’s not worth the time to jump between programs.
I’ve been looking everywhere for this and I can’t seem to figure out a solution.
How do you change your output audio levels of an individual clip beyond clicking and dragging the audio level bar on the timeline? It works, but it’s very sloppy (and small). The other way seems to be by adjusting the volume of the entire track, or using the live mixing function (which is pretty much useless to get accurate levels quickly).
In FCP, there were plenty of ways to change the audio levels of a clip: On the timeline (as here),
In the viewer (using either the volume bar, the slider, or manually entering the db) or by selecting the clip and pressing Ctrl [, +, ], or minus to add/subtract 1db or 3db (my preferred form of rough mixing).Is there anywhere else I can a) manually type in the output level and b) keyframe my audio without having to do it on the smaller area on the timeline?
And on another thing, some of the files I’ve imported (or that came in from my FCP XML) have two mono tracks instead of one stereo track. Which is fine, but now when I keyframe audio I have to do it twice – once on each track. How can I either make those into a stereo track, or keyframe both tracks at once?
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2 Replies
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You can expand (or magnify) the track view in the timeline, by dragging the entire track down (in the left column, drag underneath the name of the track, “Audio 2” for instance). This way, keyframing can be as large as you want it to be (and you can work on several tracks in this expanded view by hitting the tilde (~) key) – this saves scrolling up and down. Hit the tilde key again to return to a normal view.
In addition, you can right-click any audio clip and select Audio Gain. In this pop-up window, you can normalize levels, adjust dB levels numerically, etc. Like other Adobe applications, you can either click and type new values, or drag the existing value left or right.
As for the dual-mono->stereo fix, you need to specify this before dragging the cip to the timeline. Select it in the project window, go to Clip->Modify->Audio channels.
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Got it. I’m noticing that changing the levels in the timeline is not as bad as I thought. It’s much less sensitive than FCP.
Thanks.
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