Audio Only cross fade in X

[Tony West]

Hi Herb,

I’m with Bret on this, I don’t know why he used a gap clip. It works without that.

It’s not really something I use personally, I just saw the video last night. I just use the fade handles as I listen to each cut multiple times until it sounds right to me. It only took me like 15 seconds to create it in Motion one time and it’s in there for the future.

I just tossed it out there for the discussion.

I do now remember seeing that video for Alex’s plugin and forgot about it. It looks cool also.

I don’t know how often I will use it. I like doing it manually with the handles : )

Someone in my doc came over and wanted a change to something she said. I cut it out.

She looked at me and said, “wow, you can’t even tell” I thought to myself, yeah……that’s the point hahaha

[Herb Sevush]

[Charlie Austin] “Well, in that case you can apply audio transitions just like any other NLE.”

Well I could except for the fact that X doesn’t have sync indicators, so even though I prefer to untether it would be fairly suicidal to do it in X. So there you have it – I prefer un-linking audio but X punishes you for it because it lacks sync indicators, then if you keep the audio linked, applying audio crossfades throughout the show becomes a problem. Like I said — a product made for someone else.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[James Ewart]

I don’t know why he used a gap clip. It works without that.

I use a few frames of gap if I am wanting to anchor my music to the beginning of the timeline. Unless it’s a music cut thing in which case obviously better to have to on primary storyline.

I agree it’s kind of an unnecessary detail for this specific tutorial

[Richard Herd]

[Herb Sevush] “For me the biggest pluses are in it’s handling of audio – the track mixer is great and the ability to send to audition for audio repair with the spectrum analyzer has been an incredible help for the work I do”

Really this cannot be overstated. Audition is magic. It’s also an excellent DAW, with side chain dynamic compression, some great mastering tools, and the frequency analyzer is also magic.

Two big giant complaints, for me, about the Audition and PP workflow (CS6 at least) is this:

1. When the audio is sent to Audition it rewrites the audio’s timecode as wherever it is in the sequence. This is a real pain.

2. No way to conform the picture edit changes with audio (like STP and Legacy did).

So I use OMF. If anyone has any details or workflow tips, I’m all ears.

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Also, for the record, they did not have to use a gap clip, they could have used a secondary. It also seems the audio issues with X are moot if the audio is sent to a DAW. But!! there is no OMF out of X and so there is no good way (I can figure) to get an X timeline into Audition. Why anyone is NOT using Audition boggles the mind. It really is that amazing!

[Steve Connor]

[Herb Sevush] “Well I could except for the fact that X doesn’t have sync indicators, so even though I prefer to untether it would be fairly suicidal to do it in X”

But surely sync indicators are “the old way”? 🙂

[James Ewart]

Lack of sync indicators annoyed me too because the first thing I did to make FCPX work like 7 was detach the audio.

I still find the notion annoying but I found that once I started working the FCPX way I almost never detach the audio because I never need to.

I campaigned hard for “Override Connections” too. But I never use the tilde key function or hardly ever anyway.

[Tony West]

[Richard Herd] “It also seems the audio issues with X are moot if the audio is sent to a DAW”

Richard, this has been puzzling me for a while on here. If you are sending audio out anyway how big a deal is it.

Am I wrong in thinking that X is geared toward someone who wants to do everything inside this one program?

Isn’t that why logic’s tools and all the plugins and color have been moved inside X?

If I could do everything I needed to do inside one program I would prefer that.

[Howard Duy vu]

I don’t see the lack of being able to add the audio dissolve to connected audio as being that major. It’s a “nice to have” but it’s hardly a deal-breaker. That’s because you can get way more precise with manually adjusting the fade handles, and it really only takes a few more clicks.

I know there’s certainly a speed advantage to selecting all the audio cuts and pressing a hotkey to instantly add audio dissolves, BUT in reality you will have to listen to every audio cut anyway to hear if they work. So… you’ll have listen and adjust anyway, and you have FAR more control with the manual fade handles, with the way you can easily fade to the subframe level. If you’re not listening and adjusting each audio cut, well what can I say other than: don’t be lazy! This is especially true if you’re finishing and mixing the audio in the NLE.

To sum up: it would be nice to have, but the fade handles are superior even though they take a bit more time.

[Richard Herd]

[tony west] “Richard, this has been puzzling me for a while on here. If you are sending audio out anyway how big a deal is it.

Am I wrong in thinking that X is geared toward someone who wants to do everything inside this one program?

Isn’t that why logic’s tools and all the plugins and color have been moved inside X?

If I could do everything I needed to do inside one program I would prefer that.”

Tony,

There are some very specific tools in a DAW that I absolutely love, and I do not see why they cannot be in an NLE. I will try to explain them in this post, and I hope X adds them, and I hope other folks can get a chance to use them. These are things you cannot do in Premiere’s mixer, but you can do in Audition, or any pro DAW. If Apple are going to add this capability, then they absolutely must have a mixer, fx loops, sends, faders. In other posts, I have referred to this as the hypothetical Roles Inspector. It’s basically just a grid based on Roles. Once those are in place, any manufacturer should be able to develop a set of audio effects to do the following type of stuff.

Here’s a picture of my mixer board, for a commercial. It’s all sync audio, shot for a local business. The sync audio was captured in various states of good-to-bad. The fix-it-in-post tools in Audition are pretty cool, and I will show that last, because it is unique to Audition.

If you look through the picture, you can see there is a bus, fx loop, sends, eq, and a cool switch for post and pre, and so on.

This next stuff is sidechain dynamic compression. What ever happens on this channel (this picture)…

then make the music do this. Whenever the volume on the first picture reaches the levels assigned in the second picture, then basically the volume turns down on the music. Sidechaining is pretty cool. The other way to do that is with keyframes or automation. I rarely use those methods because I feel there is more control in the dynamics compression fx.

This image is mastering effect for “spreading out the audio.” It’s almost like squishing out the stuff you don’t want. In this case, the actors dumped a bunch of boxes on the table, while delivering a line and someone else giggled. So I wanted to keep the boxes’ audio present in the mix without sacrificing the dialogue and giggle. Everything was recorded separately. If it was not recorded separately, I would do something slightly different: set up a send to a new channel and eq it to the boxes, and still spread it out. You can also notice I added reverb and the exciter so the sound of the boxes was in a slightly different space.

Here is the last pic, and it is simply crazy because the volume is louder as it moves toward white, and quieter as it is black. You can see in the top left a bunch of Photoshop type of tools, where it’s literally possible to paint out sounds. In this case , I erased a whirring heater that we could not turn off because it was 17 degrees that day.

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “Like I said — a product made for someone else.”

Fair enough. 🙂

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~