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Editing Disconnected Audio
In the gigantic Avid thread below, a discussion of this subtopic appeared and, rather than reply to disparate comments in that thread, I thought I’d make this one. The subject was “how do you edit disconnected audio without sync markers?” the main solution offered seemed to be “don’t disconnect it”
Now, I like that sync audio can ride with a video clip, and all the nice audio component features that are available. But I also understand where folks like Herb and Chris H are coming from. I too like to disconnect my audio. It’s a totally valid, and easy workflow in X, even without sync markers.
I’l preface this by saying that it would be nice to have sync markers back, but their absence hasn’t been an issue for me. And like everyone else, I think Roles should be Groupable, perhaps color codeable, and, when grouped, should try to maintain their vertical position relative to one another. The organization (Roles containing subroles) is already there, hopefully the behavior will come. In any case, here are my replies to a couple specific comments from the last thread…
[Herb Sevush] “OK, so now I’ve got this copied audio, it’s from a talking head clip, and it’s acting as VO for a montage of action shots. Now the client wants me to break up the action shots with a little bit of the talking head video (it’s very emotional, he’s talking about his pet rock here). How do I “turn on” the video from this audio copy?”
I’d do it just like any other NLE. If I’m understanding you, you’ve got a disconnected DIA bite running under, for arguments sake, 6 action shots. You want to replace shot #3 with sync picture. So just park the playhead at the first frame of shot #3. select the audio under that frame and match back. Just like 7, it’ll select the whole clip and park the playhead on the matching frame. then just hit “I”, select shot 3 (or just SHIFT-CMD-A to deselect everything) and hit OPT-R. Shot 3 is replaced with pix synced to that bit of audio. Like I said, same as 7. The nice thing is you never need to click on anything, all KB shortcuts, even when selecting clips (hover pointer over clip and hit C) The not nice thing is that the “replace” command always cuts in both video *and* audio regardless of your edit type selection. This should be fixed, and I’ve sent feedback. So the extra step is to disconnect and delete it. 2 keystrokes.
That was a long winded description of something you know how to do I guess. 🙂 Point is, it’s pretty much the same, and possibly quicker, than in 7. If you want, you can change the DIA connection point to link it to the sync picture and you won’t lose sync.
There are a lot of complaints about the way clips are linked in X, but I think of the connection points like linking and/or grouping clips in other NLE’s. Linking/grouping is just always on by default. Move a clip, the audio “linked” to it moves as well, move a group of clips, the group moves. You can override it, and it would be nice to be able to optionally link a clip to time (without the “don’t cut in the primary” workaround) , or unlink it completely so it just floats if you want, but it’s not really behaviorally different than “link” or “group clips”.
[Chris Harlan] “Well, I’m fascinated by that. I have to clip chunks out of sentences, slide a clause a few frames this way or that under a cut-away, only to have to reconnect it in a different version of the edit. I have to retime dialog, drop in ADR, shave this way and shave that way, constantly. Me? I use sync markers and TC. How you are doing all that fine-tuning and finessing without have to separate audio from video and slide it around, I would truly like to hear.”
You can’t do that without separating the audio. 🙂 You can do leveling/extending/deleting/renaming/erassigning of audio components, but you can’t cheat dialog. I mean, maybe by opening the clip in it’s own timeline you could, but if you’re cutting audio for a sync clip and some cutaways that won’t work. That said, like you, I do that all the time. And frankly, as i’ve said before, it’s an absolute pleasure cutting/cheating dialog in X. Having the app generate sync markers should definitely happen. I think the info is in the XML (I’m a dork, i’ve looked) they just need to express it the timeline. Slipping/sliding clips into sync is a feature that should come back. In any case, when working specifically with disconnected (er… connected clips in X) lol…
if I need a hard sync point (or mark) I can either move the audio connection point to the frame I want locked, or just make put a marker on the “sync” frame of the audio and video clip(s) I want to keep aligned. If I move a clause under a cutaway and need to extend the picture and put it back I’d do just what i’d do in anything else… delete the out of sync clause and extend the sync audio with the picture.
Retiming/ADR etc cuts just the same as connected clips in X as anything else. And when cheating dialog, being able to slide clips in subframe increments is a gigantic plus in X. Huge for any audio editing in X, but dialog particularly. I get angry trying to cheat stuff in other NLE’s now. 🙂 And as to sync, once i’ve got my brilliant cheat cut, I’ll just compound it, sometimes audio only putting the connection point on the best sync frame, or sometimes both the audio and video together. The nice thing here is that, since CC’s appear in the event, and X will stick them all in a smart collection containing all CC’s I’ve made, I can just grab and reuse them from there without hunting through a million cuts I did 2 months ago to try and find that awesome cheat that got killed in one of 10 versions of one of 10 dead spots but now they remember hearing it and want it back in but i can’t remember where i did it. Bastards!Sorry.
Anyway… sorry for the long post. Any questions? lol
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
77 Replies
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Charlie! You’re my hope, man. You’ve got me convinced that I’ll definitely surf X one of these days. I find that Ad someone posted about an audio designer for X a hopeful thing. Sandeep posted a little primmer on channels that I quite enjoyed. Its definitely moving in the right direction for me. I can’t deny that. And, I truly like reading about your adventures and methods. Color-coded roles might be enough might be enough for me to wax X up and float it on out.
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To be clear, my answer wasn’t necessarily “never disconnect”.
It is really hard to explain to someone who hasn’t really worked with X, but when you edit with audio components, it is really easy to select a range, copy, trim it out to “hide” it, and paste.
This adds another instance of the dialog clip where you want it and is connected to the video above it where it needs to be.
If I ever need to go back to the original sync, I simply trim it back in on the original clip non destructively.
I need to try and explain how the timeline in fcpx allows you to hold a lot of material in the timeline that you aren’t using without penalty. I could show people in a few minutes, but its hard to put in to words and have people “get it”. I’m not saying this as a “you just don’t get it” type of way, I’m saying it as that it works in ways that I wasn’t used to, and I certainly think about how to perform every day editing (like slipping dialogue) differently.
It would be nice to be able to slip audio components, but I can’t, so I don’t and work around it.
In the case of audio components, sync markers would be nice, but with connected clips it would be harder as the connection is the sync point.
Herb asked specifically if he had a slipped piece of audio and needed to bring back the video, how would you do it?
I find that working with multiple instances of a clip (be it audio or video or both) is the way I like to tackle it because all of my elements are in the timeline at my fingertips, which in essense, is why sync markers work so well; you can get elements back in to sync using slip or move, at any time.
In X and using multiple instances, I turn on what was off and I have my sync back (or trim in what I trimmed out). Fortunately, Fcpx is really great in its ability to turn on and off audio at will (or enable/disable as a different function as well). Unfortunately, X is not so great at turning off video only (a feature request). So, that’s why I sometimes put video under the timeline as I always have the audio I need in the correct place and time, as well as the video. I wish we could turn video on and off like we can audio, but alas fcpx is still young yet. In the meantime, I try and leverage the timeline’s strengths and it looks completely different from how I’d go about things in fcp7. I’m alright with that.
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Slightly off topic, but this week we got a note about a character’s voice being out of sync in a rough cut. We were all mystified because we don’t typically break apart audio. We checked our comp and the clip was not in fact detached.
Turns out that whoever edited the episode delivered a final to the network with that character’s bite about 6 frames offset.
They should have used FCPX :).
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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I could be reading this wrong – but do you mean that any time you want to do this – you have to duplicate the audio?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[John Davidson] “They should have used FCPX :).
“Perhaps they were. 😉
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I could be reading this wrong – but do you mean that any time you want to do this – you have to duplicate the audio?”
I think you’re responding to this:
[Jeremy Garchow] “This adds another instance of the dialog clip where you want it and is connected to the video above it where it needs to be.
If I ever need to go back to the original sync, I simply trim it back in on the original clip non destructively. “
And I’ll admit to being a bit confused by it, but maybe I get it now. You don’t “have” to dupe the audio, you can just work with connected clips as normal but… I think he’s saying that, if you need to do some dialog upcutting or whatever, rather than disconnecting the audio, simply select the range you need, copy it, disable the component channel (V) Paste the copied audio as a connected track, do whatever you want, but if you need sync audio back, or even just a sync reference, simply reenable the component channel. Essentially once you cut in pix with sync audio you never need to “match back” to get the sync sound back, it’s always there. Nice trick. 🙂
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
[Charlie Austin] “And I’ll admit to being a bit confused by it, but maybe I get it now. You don’t “have” to dupe the audio, you can just work with connected clips as normal but… I think he’s saying that, if you need to do some dialog upcutting or whatever, rather than disconnecting the audio, simply select the range you need, copy it, disable the component channel (V) Paste the copied audio as a connected track, do whatever you want, but if you need sync audio back, or even just a sync reference, simply reenable the component channel. Essentially once you cut in pix with sync audio you never need to “match back” to get the sync sound back,”
man Charlie, I don’t know – this seems really arcane bandage workflow stuff – if 80-90% percent of employed editors (thats a minimum realistically) are operating on systems (avid, FCP, Premiere) that bear no resemblance to this X timeline and these kind of limitations, these kind of workarounds, what exactly is the chance of this kind of macgyver jerry rigging taking off in broad practise?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Charlie Austin] “Essentially once you cut in pix with sync audio you never need to “match back” to get the sync sound back, it’s always there. “
That’s right.
I can keep so much information and choices stored and out of the way in X right in the timeline. It is an aspect of the X timeline that I like a lot.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “man Charlie, I don’t know – this seems really arcane bandage workflow stuff – if 80-90% percent of employed editors (thats a minimum realistically) are operating on systems (avid, FCP, Premiere) that bear no resemblance to this X timeline and these kind of limitations, these kind of workarounds, what exactly is the chance of this kind of macgyver jerry rigging taking off in broad practise?”
Well, I honestly think that what we’re talking about isn’t a workaround or a limitation at all. I mean, to me, the X timeline can function just like any other timeline if you want it to. In this case, you could just cut your stuff in as disconnected A/V clips and work exactly like you’d work in anything else. But, if you think you might like to have instant access to your original sync, without matching back, or clicking a sync marker or whatever you’d “normally” do, just do this one extra 2-3 keystroke operation. This isn’t a workaround at all. It’s a new, and pretty useful, workflow technique.
I really, to this day, don’t get all the fuss about the X timeline. I’ll admit that maybe sync markers would be nice for connected (disconnected) clips. Maybe. And yes, the fact that Clips/Roles don’t stick together, and try to glue themselves as close to the Primary Storyline as they can *is* annoying and needs a fix of some sort. (not fixed tracks though!) 😛
At the end of the day though, now that I know it, I cut in X just the same as i do in anything else. It’s just a freaking timeline. A timeline that I can just focus on cutting, and let the app figure iut some of the stuff that forces me to stop and think how to patch something. Maybe because I’ve cut Film, Tape to Tape, and on MC and get the gap as media idea? I dunno. You can cut like you do in 7, or use the Ripple as default MC style, or any combination you want. Once you learn the commands, which you need to do when you learn anything new, It’s not limiting at all. It’s not perfect either, a lot of stuff needs work, but limiting is the last word I’d use.
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
[Charlie Austin] “(not fixed tracks though!)”
I don’t think X should have tracks, either. It is a big part of what it is, and I do like that there is something quite different out there. I’m more than willing to not have tracks as long as there is an adequate mapping system to replace it. Color-coded roles could be the answer. All I really want is to be able to look and see exactly where everything is without having to click things on and off. I can adjust to the vertical instability if there are strong, tangible indicators that allow for instant assessment. Purple dialog, green SFX, red MU, and blue VO would probably go a long way to making this happen. Maybe add to that a quick view where you could get a navigable snapshot of the different audio roles laid out in parallel horizontal lines (same types of audio could overlap on the same line; a blob of green just means there are sfx, and clicking on it takes me to that part of the actual timeline, not a specific sfx) and I think you would probably mollify my objections to tracklessness.
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