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Sub-frame Audio editing – FCP X vs Premiere
For the record, with the addition of Adobe Audition, editors using Premiere can edit down to the sample level of 1/48000th of a frame – FCP X also supports sub-frame audio editing, but at 1/100th of a frame. (***Oops, my Bad!!! As David H. Lawrence points out, I should have stated that Premiere on its own, without Audition, supports sub-frame audio editing down to 1/48000th of a frame)
Does that REALLY make a difference to most of you, or to most editors? The answer is maybe not, at least not until you really think hard about it.
At 1/48000th of a frame, you can select extraneous or unwanted noises in your tracks and simply erase them imperceptibly, without the need to fill with room tone. You’d have a tough time doing the same thing in X at a sample rate of just 100th of a frame.
However, Audition also has among it’s powerful toolset, a “Repair Tool” similar to the one in Photoshop, which can delete a selection and fill the erased gap with information from surrounding samples. And, that’s just one example of the power that the 1/48000th sample rate can give you.
In addition, Oliver Peters suggests there is apparently an issue in FCP X with sub-frame audio editing… He writes: “The odd thing that some folks have experienced is that it if you make the primary storyline an audio clip it can cause problems with accurate frame boundaries. Connected clips don’t actually match up against each other, but instead leave gaps. However, these gaps don’t seem to be visible during actual video playback.”
Does the information above mean that FCP X is a toy, or that users are amateurs? Of course not… But, when you hear all the back and forth about why some users prefer some tools over FCP X for their audio capabilities, there’s a lot more to discuss than just the virtues or lack of virtues of the magnetic timeline.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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41 Replies
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[David Roth Weiss] “For the record, with the addition of Adobe Audition, editors using Premiere can edit down to the sample level of 1/48000th of a frame – FCP X also supports sub-frame audio editing, but at 1/100th of a frame.”
Actually David, you can edit down to the sample in Premiere Pro too. Just toggle “Show Audio Time Units” in the sequence panel drop down. I do this so often I’ve assigned it a keyboard shortcut. 😉
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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence] “Actually David, you can edit down to the sample in Premiere Pro too. Just toggle “Show Audio Time Units” in the sequence panel drop down. I do this so often I’ve assigned it a keyboard shortcut. ;)”
Excellent info David…
For the record, my information came from Larry Jordan, who also seems to have missed that important point. I’ll let him know ASAP.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Here’s what I don’t get with FCPX. It appears that the edit accuracy with audio is actually greater than 1/100th of a frame. For example, if you have a connected audio clip. Zoom the timeline in to the max and the playhead bar will nearly fill the window. The range of 1 frame. As you move the connected clip left of right you see it change by + or – .01. But, the clip isn’t locked to the point where it changes subframes. You can move the audio to any point between two subframe numbers. So audio edit accuracy might be subframes, but sync/slipping audio seems to have a larger level of precision.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
For the record, I just received a reply from Larry Jordan who wrote:
“Cool – an improvement I was not aware of.
Thanks for letting me know.”
Larry
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Some more interesting things with X. If you split (blade) a connected audio clip you can edit anywhere inside that frame (or so it seems). But when you make the next edit it has to be at least 1 full frame later, starting from the previous edit made at the subframe level. Again that edit can be within the frame, as long as it is at least a full frame later. Yet, you can still grab the edge of the edited clip and trim it at what appears to be a more precise amount than 1/100th of a frame.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[David Roth Weiss] “For the record, I just received a reply from Larry Jordan who wrote:
“Cool – an improvement I was not aware of.
Thanks for letting me know.”
Larry”
Sweet, thanks for passing the word along.
BTW, “Show Audio Time Units” isn’t even new. You can do it in Premiere CS6 too.
Premiere is a deep program with lots of features so unless you’re looking, you might miss this one. Did you know you can get sub-frame audio editing in FCP Legacy too?
I know plenty of people who don’t use a DAW because they can do every thing they need in their NLE. Unless you need MIDI or some specialized plugins or routing, the right NLE might have you covered for sound too.
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David Lawrence
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Yes David, I knew FCP Legacy had sub-frame audio editing, but nothing close to 1/48000th of a frame. At that level of granularity, as I mentioned earlier in reference to Audition, one can quickly and easily delete many extraneous sounds from tracks imperceptibly, without filling with room tone. That means an audio clean-up can go incredibly fast, at the very highest level of precision. That should be pretty exciting even for the most hardened of FCP X fans.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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1/100th is timecode based. Timecode has 100 sub frames at 30fps. At 25 fps it is 1/80th. At 24 it will be slightly less. So ironically as the frame rate drops, using timecode subframes as edit boundaries gets coarser.
I can attest to the common occurrence of slicing audio down to the sample in post sound. It can be the difference when either cutting the ‘s’ off the end of a word to remove a plural or slicing off an ‘s’ and adding it to another word to make the plural. It sometimes matters to have the ability to trim a clip both top and tail to sample accuracy and then place it with sample accuracy to make it work.
And just in the interest of accuracy DRW is not correct in saying accuracy of 1/48000 of a frame as the sample rate of 48khz is per second, so at 25fps there are 1920 samples per frame and 2000 at 24fps. So the accuracy is of an order of magnitude of 20 times approx. For the most part 1/100th is often all you need. There is however, no technical reason why an NLE should not be able to edit sample accurate. It would be a design decision.
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[Michael Gissing] “And just in the interest of accuracy DRW is not correct in saying accuracy of 1/48000 of a frame as the sample rate of 48khz is per second, so at 25fps there are 1920 samples per frame and 2000 at 24fps. “
Thanks for offering the correction Michael, again my info came from Larry Jordan, and again I will let him know the accurate information so he does not pass misinformation along to masses of people in his webinars and his training materials.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I’m always amazed by what Larry doesn’t know. I’ve edited one project in Premiere CC and I was aware of this. I found that accessing the sub frame mode was a complete PIA though and I’ll take X’s method any day. There has never been any audio I couldn’t massage at 1/100th and Oliver you may be right. It just reports to the 100th, but seems you can adjust to anything. I think legacy could slip audio to the 1/1000th on version 1.0.
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