Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Adobe® TV Presents "Short and Suite": On the Road with Jason and Karl]
Hello and welcome to another episode of Short and Suite.
My name is Jason Levine, principal, worldwide evangelist for Adobe's audio and video tools.
In this episode we're going to take a look at the dual-system sound workflow in Premier Pro CS5.5,
and specifically, how you can merge and synchronize clips together
when you have video and audio shot from your camera
synchronized to external audio captured with extra devices,
and specifically when you don't have timecode.
This is kind of the old-school method or the method that you have
if you're shooting with a DSL-R or any kind of consumer camera
where it's not actually capturing timecode and embedding that in the files.
What I have here is a scene from a commercial that I shot earlier this year,
and again, as in often the case, in track 1 we have the original footage shot on
a Canon 7d with the audio coming off the camera with its auto-game control enabled.
If we just go ahead and play a couple seconds of this, you'll hear what that sounds like.
Business card allows you to have your own website. We allow you to have social media integration--
It sounds okay but of course it's fairly echo-y. You're hearing all the echo of the room.
It's highly compressed sounding.
You can even hear the breaths kind of popping in and out,
and naturally, even though there are things that we could do in Audition to repair this a bit,
that's not the sound we want to use.
Of course, I captured sound separately with an external device using a lav mic,
which you can't see in this particular shot, and that's the audio that we want to use.
So just like you would have done in the past versions of Premier Pro,
we're going to visually line up these clips and synchronize them together,
but once we actually begin the synchronization process,
you'll see how it differs from the previous workflow.
Here we have inside of this particular timeline our audio on track 2--
this is the actual audio that we want to use--and the camera audio on track 1.
What we're typically looking for is some kind of a clapboard
or something that we can synchronize to. That's why we do that, right?
I will often make this full screen just to make it a bit easier, expand these,
and I can see right away--if you look right here, there's the clapboard.
In fact, that's just my hand. This was so low budget that I just did it with my hand.
It works too. Makes a nice little attack transient that we can visually spot.
I'm going to shrink this clip up a bit, and drag these over.
Now something to keep in mind when you're drag syncing things together,
we've got this little snapping option, which is typically enabled by default.
You'll want to make sure that you uncheck that just because then you'll get--
well, it'll just be much smoother when you're actually trying to move the clips around.
With it on you're going to snap to edges.
If you have multiple edits in there, it can be very painful.
If you don't know why that's happening, that's the little icon that will disable that.
Again, we can zoom in. I'm looking at this clapboard marker right about here.
I can just keep shifting this until I get them just about right--maybe just one more frame--
and that looks absolutely perfect.
Now let's go ahead and shrink this back up and go back out here.
Let's disable the camera sound and enable the external sound and start playback.
The problem is that small businesses need help marketing themselves online.
Perfect. If you want to hear what the camera audio sounds like, let's turn that back on now.
We need to save you time. We need to save you money.
Now you can see why we use this in the first place.
Now, traditionally, what you would do is--
well, and just for cleaning things up you might want to turn snapping back on
so that you can make all of your clips the proper length.
Again, my OCD is kicking in here.
What you would traditionally have done is once you had them in place
you would then select all of these clips and you would chose to group them.
Now, no matter where you move this around everything stays together,
and of course we'll turn off the camera audio and turn back on the regular audio.
But there is a problem. What if I want to begin color correcting this clip?
Or what if I want to add even any kind of effects or transitions?
Well, if I go up to "Effects"--or in fact, let's just go ahead and chose fast color correcter.
Type in "fast." Let's go into our "Effects" panel here as well so that you can see.
It's already telling us that multiple clips are selected, because they are.
That's the nature of grouping.
If I take the fast color correcter it doesn't do anything.
It won't drag it on there because multiple clips are selected. What do you do?
Well, traditionally what you would do is you would ungroup.
Now you would apply the fast color correcter--like so--and then regroup.
The problem with that is that over time you're grouping, ungrouping, grouping, ungrouping,
and it's very easy just to sort of lose track of what you've done.
Very easily you can start putting things out of sync.
This new method of working with dual-system sound using the "merge clips" feature
prevents that from happening, makes it very, very simple,
and again, gives you an expanded amount of flexibility.
Again, with everything already synchronized beautifully,
I can select all of my clips, I can right click, and I can chose to merge my clips--like this.
Now I can call this "BizzCommercial-MERGE." Click "okay."
Immediately what it's going to do is build one single clip for me
that houses all of that audio together already synchronized,
so now I can right click on this, chose new sequence from clip--
or again I could just replace that with the others.
Now we can see the audios living down here because we had a mix of stereo and mono files.
Let's go ahead and right click on these blank audio tracks
and delete all the blank audio tracks. There it is up at the top.
You'll also notice that all the audio tracks are enabled.
If we play this back right now you're going to hear the proper captured audio
and the camera audio. >>Self publishing--
It's distorting. We don't want that.
You will have to disable those additional tracks. >>Analytics and measurements tools to really--
And we're good to go. Right?
The other thing to keep in mind--when you're synchronizing these manually,
something that tends to sometimes elude people is what happens
if the audio market doesn't fall on a frame boundary?
Video we're dealing with frames. Audio we're dealing in samples.
You can't slip more than a frame at a time.
Well, you can slip, but you're slipping between frames.
How do I get down to a granular level? I want to get down to sample level.
Well, to access sample level in Premier Pro we call this audio units,
and if you've never done this before, if you've never seen it before,
if you never used it before, it's probably unlikely that you'd even find it.
So within the sequence menu here--the little flyout--
you will see that we have this option "show audio time units."
Now based on the sample rate of your audio--in this case we're in 48 K.
That's 48,000 samples per second.
Now, if I just--well, I'm already zoomed in here,
but now if we zoom down, you'll see that we are not at frame boundaries any more.
We're actually at sample-level boundaries. These are really small increments.
You see I'm scrubbing here and the video isn't moving. Why?
Because there are 48,000 of these per second.
We're now down at sample level.
This is useful if again you're working with audio where your marker
or your clapboard doesn't properly fall on a frame boundary.
This can sometimes cause issues too. You have to be careful.
Typically, you'll want to stay in frames to make sure that everything lines up properly,
but if everything has been recorded digitally
and if everything's been recorded at the same sample rate to begin with,
this is a really great way to work.
It's a very easy way to synchronize things properly, accurately, and quickly.
Then immediately once you've done that, switch back to frames, and you're good to go.
Very simply you can use the method that you've already been implementing forever,
but once everything is synchronized, now, because it's treated as a merged clip,
when I grab my fast color correcter, it automatically adds it.
I don't have that multiple clips selected issue because it just sees it as one clip.
Taking audio, synchronizing it, using the merge clips features, adding audio facts,
and also the ability to go down to audio units if you need to slip things at sample level.
That's it for this episode of Short and Suite. My name is Jason Levine. We'll see you next time.
[Executive Producer - Bob Donlon, Producer - Karl Miller, Director - Kush Amerasinghe, Post-production - Erik Spera]
[Adobe® TV Productions - tv.adobe.com]
