Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Adobe TV Presents]
[Jason Levine]
[Karl Soule]
[Short and Suite] [On the Road with Jason and Karl]
Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Short and Suite.
My name is Jason Levine, Principal Worldwide Evangelist for Adobe's video and audio tools.
And in this episode, I'm going to talk to you about mixer automation
inside Adobe Audition 5.5.
Now, it's changed a bit, and if you were previously on the last version on Windows,
you may notice things look a bit the same, but some things are missing.
But the basic idea and the basic concepts are the same.
And at the moment, most of what you're going to do
to automate involves using the envelopes.
Now, you still have control over how many you use.
You can still enable Beziers or spline curves as they're referred to in Audition.
But a lot of it is pointing and clicking with the mouse.
So, I want to showcase not only how you do basic volume and pan on a clip,
volume and pan for the entire track or mixer,
and then also automating parameters in Effects or automating things inside the 5.1 panner.
So, let's get started.
So, if we take a quick listen to this, this is a piece that I composed--
used I think a couple episodes ago, or quite some time ago,
an evangelist theme where I'm whistling, and you'll hear,
there's some pizzicato strings and some cool stuff in here.
Take a quick listen to this.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay. All right, so in this case, I might want to automate volume or pan
on particular instruments or some of those particular tracks.
Now, as you look at the clips, as you look at the actual individual audio clips here,
what you need to know is that much like using Effects,
and you know that in our Effects rack we have clip effects and track effects,
well, you also have clip-based automation, and then you have track-based automation.
So, by default, if I wanted to, say, increase the volume
or change the pan of this flute track that you see here--
and I'm going to put the headphones on so I can hear it--
if I wanted to adjust the pan and volume solely on this clip,
I'm going to use the green and blue lines that you see here.
So, if we wind back, you notice I have it soloed.
I can simply click on the line itself, click two points, and drag.
And over time, now, that whistle's going to increase by 11 dB.
Let's hope it doesn't clip it. Let's take a listen.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay, so you can really hear that it's changing in volume over time.
And similarly, if I wanted to then have it pan
left to right or whatever--I don't know why you would,
but sometimes you do--that's also done here.
And again, this is clip based. So, it's only panning this particular clip.
We can start, perhaps, by having it all the way left,
and by the time it finishes, it ends up on the right side.
Wind it back and take a listen.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay, now everything's on the right side, okay?
Now, that's clip based.So again, that's only happening on that clip.
If I drop something else in this track in its place,
all that automation goes away.
So, basic pan, basic volume specific to the clip are found right there, okay?
And you can do that for every and any clip inside your multi-track session.
Now, if you want to remove these automation points,
you can right-click and select all of them.
By the way, you'll also see that we have spline.
Again, this is the equivalent of Bezier, so if we enable spline curves,
now you can see you have a much more non-linear type movement.
This is going to give you a smoother transition, particularly where you're
increasing volume or panning.
You're not going to get those kind of very harsh, very hard changes.
Splines are great for that.
So, if we want to remove them, however, we can select all the key frames--
and I'm right-clicking here--choose "Delete selected key frames," and they're gone.
Also, if I go back to volume, you can also remove them
simply by clicking and dragging them directly off the clip.
So, just click, drag off the clip or drag it off beyond the track, and they'll go away.
Okay, so that's clip-based volume and pan, but that's not fun. That's not fun to watch.
I want to be able to see the faders move and the pan knobs move and all that.
So, that's where I go to the actual mixer-based automation.
Now, if we bounce over to the mixer for a second here, and in fact,
maybe I can have these--let's do these side by side.
This is the wonderful thing about our dockable interface is that you can
have this stuff living side by side.
You'll see here that if we twirl down, under Read, you have the ability to show envelopes.
Now, by the way, before we even get any further,
if you click on this, previously, in the last version of Audition and in Premiere Pro,
you would have seen Read, Write, Touch and Latch,
all standards for mixer automation, particularly where using external devices are concerned.
Well, sadly, at the moment, in this first new version reintroduced to Creative Suite,
we don't have all of those options.
We just have Off and Read. We're going to leave it in Read mode, and again,
this is because we're going to control the automation via the mouse.
Now, again, you still have the ability to see the faders move and the pan knobs move.
Anything that you're going to do here, you'll see that reflected inside the mixer.
So, if I first want to start with a volume change over time,
I can wind back like this.
You'll see that the volume selection is already displayed.
Once again, I'll go ahead and click a point,
and you'll see here that you have the ability to add or remove key frames.
You can advance to the next, or you can just erase them.
Let's go ahead and move forward, click another one here,
and let's just increase it.
And once again, we'll go up to around 11 dB.
So, after that, perhaps we'll have it drop back down, say, to minus 10, something like that.
So now when I play this, if you take a look at the fader,
watch what happens as I play this back.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay. So, standard fader automation.
However, without the right mode,
you can't just go into record automation mode and click on the slider.
You have to do that with the mouse.
This will likely change, but for now, that's how you do it.
Similarly, with pan, now again, by default, you only see the volume here.
If you go under Show Envelopes, now you can see all the things that
by default you can choose to view.
And in this case, I'm just going to choose the pan.
So, let's go ahead and choose the Pan Stereo Spread here.
So again, we could choose something like this
where we start like that and come down here.
And by the way, these are all 5.1 tracks, so if you go into the panner,
you can actually see different things happening as we're automating
these changes as well.
So, take a look here.
[♪ Music ♪]
And that was adjusting the stereo spread, which is part of this 5.1 panner here,
not the actual track pan here.
So, again, pretty cool.
Great, but it's all done with the mouse.
And for each parameter that you want to affect, you have to first tell it
to show those parameters.
Now, this also includes Track EQ.
So again, if you enable Track EQ automation,
you have individually colored lines for every single parameter.
Now, there's too many here to do in the Track EQ,
so let's just go ahead--let's twirl this up for the moment,
and let's go to something like this Pizzicato, and I'll show this to you
with some actual effects.
So, let's go into Effects here, where we have an analog delay already added.
Let's go ahead and wind this back.
And let's go ahead and open this dialog here,
and let's take a listen to what this sounds like.
[♪ Music ♪]
So, you can hear, it's just a very basic kind of delay.
[Singing]
So, maybe what we want to do is increase the amount of feedback over time.
In other words, instead of just having three or four repeats--
[Singing]
we want it to repeat 10, 20 times.
[Singing]
And as you increase the feedback, if you go too far, you'll actually start introducing
distortion or actual feedback, right?
It will sort of feed back on itself.
So, we could do that, again, also with automation
simply by enabling those parameters and telling the mixer
what exactly it is that we want to automate.
So, if I go up into Show Envelopes, now, because it sees an effect there,
I can say I want to automate the feedback.
So, we can go ahead and turn that on, but we want to show that.
Sorry, it was already on. There we go.
We're seeing it. We're seeing Analog Delay Feedback like this.
And we just need to pick a spot where we want it to do that, maybe here.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay, right about there sounds pretty good.
Maybe we'll start with the feedback as it is here,
and then as it gets to here, I'm going to increase that feedback pretty significantly
and then drop it back down again.
You should hear now more repeated echoes based on that parameter.
And again, we can probably open this,
and you'll also see the feedback slider changing.
Well, I hope so. Let's take a listen.
[♪ Music ♪]
Okay. That's it.
That's the magic involved.
And again, anything that you're doing in terms of 5.1,
you can double-click on this, and you can choose
which actual parameter you're going to affect.
Now, traditionally, again, what someone might do
is they want to perform something like a left front to right rear.
And traditionally, and what we would have done in the previous version of Audition
in our Surround Encoder, is actually just click and draw those key frames really easily.
Now you have to do it with the actual individual parameters here
and draw it on the waveform, or rather, in the display.
But now you know how to access all of those.
Again, I would be able to go to LFE or Center or Angle,
and I could make those changes.
And again, you can also see by changing them here what that does,
and you can see it affecting that blue envelope line there.
So you've got a lot of flexibility here, but it does have to be implemented manually
by actually clicking and creating those animation key frames.
The key is that every part, every parameter of those effects
and all of the things that you see in the track panel here
can all be automated over time really simply, just with a couple clicks of the mouse.
So, that's it for this episode of Short and Suite.
My name is Jason Levine. We'll see you next time.
[Adobe TV Productions] [tv.adobe.com]
