What's New in Audition CS6

[CS6] Hi--I'm Jason Levine, Principal Worldwide Evangelist for Adobe's Video and Audio tools. And today I'm going to talk to you about some of the new features In Adobe Audition CS6. So I'll start here in the Multitrack View. And one of the things that we've done is we've made it easy to begin the process of recording. Whether you're working with a band--a full band-- or whether you're doing any kind of broadcast, whether you're trying to Duck audio against music-- we've got Session Templates to get you started-- big feature request; it's now in there. So to begin the process with a Session Template, we can go up to the File>New>Multitrack Session here and we can give it a name. We can call this one VoiceOver. And then if we go to Template, you'll see that we have all different types of specific templates here: 24 Track Music Session, Full Rock Band, Podcast, Radio Voice Over with Music Ducking--interesting. Let's go ahead and choose that one--and that's just going to show you kind of what this looks like--click OK and when we actually select that now, you'll see that we have a VoiceOver track and a Music track and a Master. And if we actually go into the Mixer here, what you'll see is that on the Music track, we've implemented the Dynamics Processor. So we'll get back to that later because it's already set up a Side-Chain to automatically Duck the music against the voice over. Let's try another one here: File>New>Multitrack Session-- and choose something like Full Rock Band, and click OK. And when we do that--now you'll see that we have all these different tracks--we've even got a metronome in there, [sound of metronome] the metronome whose properties can be adjusted inside the Properties panel so you can adjust the Tempo and the Time Signature--you can even adjust the subdivisions and the actual sound of the metronome. But you'll see that we've gone ahead and pre-labeled all of your tracks. You've got Kick, Snare, Toms, Overheads. We've got a subgroup of the Drums with Compression already added. So again, these templates are just an effort to really get you started and to speed up that process of working inside of Audition-- and to really make that experience the most effective. Now beyond simple Session Templates, we've also got new ways to actually access your media inside of Audition. And that, of course, is leveraging the new Media Browser. Now, if you've ever worked in Premier Pro, this is probably going to look pretty familiar to you. It's the same--it's the same Media Browser where you can navigate to drives--removable drives or cards attached to your machine in any way, shape, or form. Again--we can navigate to a folder here. You've got different options for Previewing your media. So you'll see here that you have this Autoplay button. We've got our Loop button here--so simply by selecting a clip: [Male speaking in Spanish: Red Rider, espero quedarse dormido en poco.] So directly from the Media Browser, we can Preview, Autoplay, Loop, and then Drag and Drop directly into the Multitrack Editor. Now going beyond templates and actually accessing your files and the process of starting a project, we also allow you to manipulate your audio in a lot of new different ways, directly inside the Multitrack--in Realtime. And to showcase this, I'm going to talk a little bit about Clip Time Stretchng. So if I zoom in on this track here, you'll see that we have a couple of clips that are already grouped. And we're going to use Global Clip Time Stretching. Now this is implemented by turning on this Radio button up here. You can see Toggle Global Clip Time Stretch, and when we turn that on, you're going to see these little white handles appear in the upper left and right-hand corners of your clips. Now, again--these clips are already grouped together, but if we want to actually adjust the duration of a clip and again, we have complete control and independent control--over Time and Pitch. We can simply grab the arrows here, stretch it out to fill a particular duration, and it will restretch. How do we set the properties for that? Well, that's all done inside the Properties panel. So, again--if we go down to Stretch Methods here, here's where you can choose whether you're in Realtime or Rendered. And again, these are already grouped, so we might want different Stretch Methods for each clip. So we can simply Ungroup these. Let's just Suspend the group-- or even Ungroup the Selected Clips-- choose an individual clip, go down to Stretch, and now I can choose whether I want Realtime, Rendered, and the actual type-- whether I want a Monophonic or Polyphonic stretch, which is going to allow me or give me independent control over Pitch and Time or Vary Speed, which basically emulates classic resampling or classic tape style Vary Speeding-- which, of course, is going to affect pitch, based on the duration. So if you slow something down, it gradually gets longer. If you speed it up, it's shorter in duration. So that's what Vary Speed is going to give you, and that's really great for all different types of sound effects work. Now when we're talking with Stretching, one of the cool new features that we've added actually deals directly with working with ADR--or Dialogue Replacement tracks-- and that's a new feature called Auto Speech Alignment. So if I scroll up here, you'll see that we have some dialogue-- and actually, this is in a different session, so let's go to this one here-- that we wanted to replace. So here is the original Voice Over: [Male Voice Over: Red Rider, I trust you got some sleep last night.] And here is the new VoiceOver: [Male Voice Over: Red Rider, I trust you got some sleep last night.] It kind of sounds familiar--and if I actually wanted to align these together, again--previously, this would have been fairly difficult. You'd be doing a lot of spotting,a lot of manual moving around, and you'd probably never get it exactly right. Well, in Adobe Audition CS6, with Automatic Speech Alignment, it's very simple. Let's go ahead and Solo both of these. I'm going to select both of my clips, go up to the Clip menu and choose Automatic Speech Alignment. Go to choose what the Reference Clip is. So again, the Reference Clip is going to be the original. Now, typically this would be the audio that was captured on the camera. So if you were replacing the dialogue and you wanted it to be in sync, you would reference the original camera audio. In this case, for us, it's this clip here: DIA Red Stunt Voice. You can then choose the type of alignment that you want to implement. You can either use the Tightest alignment, Balanced alignment and stretching or the Smoothest stretching. I typically use this Balanced alignment and stretching. That tends to give me the best results. You can see that the Reference Clip here is noisy, so if you have a noisy Reference Clip, it'll take that into account when it's actually to stretch, to match these clips together. Add Align Clip to a new track, click OK. It happens very quickly. And now you can see--we have our Align Clip here in Track 3, and we can play a bit of this back.--and let's play this against the original. [Male Voice Over: I'll take that as a Yes. I think we have something you might enjoy.] And they're brilliantly aligned-- literally done with a single operation--very, very quickly. And this really saves you an enormous amount of time, because if you had to manually sync ADR-- well, it could take forever and you might just not ever get it right-- fantastic new feature. Now, with Automatic Speech Alignment, we also have Automatic Pitch Correction. So you now have the ability to actually correct Pitch with vocals or instruments that are out of key or out of tune, very simply. And you can do that either in Realtime, in the Multitrack--or in the Edit View. So let's go ahead and pull up another session here and, very quickly show this to you. So I'm going to choose my Pitch Correction Session and if you take a quick listen to this vocal, you'll hear what I'm talking about It needs a little help. [audio playback of female singing "Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore] Okay--so again, let's go over to our Effects panel> Time and Pitch>Automatic Pitch Correction-- once again, lots of different options. The first thing you need to do is choose the Scale and the Key. If you don't know the Scale and the Key, you have a Chromatic option. But typically, you're going to get better results if you use the actual Scale and Key of the song, so you need to kind of know that. If you don't, you can use Chromatic; you'll still get pretty good results. You then have your Attack and Sensitivity--I'm going to leave these at the defaults. If you want really aggressive or very sort of modern Pop record sounding correction, you can adjust that Attack to a very fast Attack-- and, maybe, let's increase it just a little, to around 5 or so. Your Reference Channel--doesn't matter if it's a Mono file, in this case. And your FFT size--this is effectively the number of slices that the Automatic Pitch Corrector looks at when it's looking at each individual Pitch. It's my preference that fewer slices give you better Pitch Correction so I'll typically set this to around an FFT of 1024. Go ahead and hit Play; let's wind this back a little bit, [playback of woman singing "Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore"] and you'll actually see how much it's correcting, in cents, with this very nice Correction Meter here, whether it's Flat or Sharp. So a great way to automatically correct your pitches, in Realtime, in the Multitrack-- absolutely fantastic. Now I've been talking a lot about voices and speech and Voice Over and Vocals, and one of the most requested features that people have been asking for in Adobe Audition is: I just want to be able to Side-chain a Compressor--in other words, I have music, I have a Voice Over, and when the Voice Over starts going, I want the music to Duck down-- right--so that the voice is prominent. And when the voice stops, the music comes back up. Well, this is known as Side-Chaining, and now we have Side-Chaining in Adobe Audition CS6. Now you'll recall--at the beginning of this, we actually have a Session Template for Ducking--with Voice Over and Music. So let's go back to that session here--VoiceOver. Again, this is already created for you--everything is already set up for you. So I'll go over to my Files panel and let's go ahead and choose our VoiceOver-- which is already labeled, so we're going to stick that in Track 1. We're going to convert it if the Sample Type doesn't match. And let's go ahead and take our Music and drag that into Track 2. Same thing--it's going to convert the Sample Type. Okay. Now, for best practices, I will typically normalize or maximize the volume of these clips, just to give you better results. You don't have to do this, but I find that this generally works better. So I can double-click to bring this into the Edit view--again, very fast editing. And with my Heads-up display here, we have a nice little Decibel adjustment--I can simply make this a little bit louder. Let's go about 5 dB louder. Looks good, and we're going to do the same on the music here. Let's just increase this by just about 4, 4 and a half dB or so--great. So now, inside the Multitrack--if I go into the Mixer-- again--on the music, you'll see that we have a Dynamics Processor added where we've already told it we've got a SideChain effect If you look at the little tool tip here, you can see Set Side-Chain Input. In this case, it's coming from Stereo. And then you have your Side-Chain Routing--again, this is all done for you--you don't even have to change any of these things. Click it out here; on Track 1 where you have the Voice Over--under the Sends, is actually where you choose what input this is going to use. This is already preset for you, as well. So once again, let's twirl these up so I can show it to you. You can see here--we've got Side-Chain. It's automatically going to Music - Slot 1, the Dynamics Processor right there. Let's go ahead and play this back--and now, when the Voice kicks in, you'll hear the music Duck down. Take a listen: [♫music] [Male Voice Over: Red Rider, I trust you got some sleep last night.] [♪rock music] [Male Voice Over: I'll take that as a Yes.] Now, if we turn the Side-chain off--in case you're wondering, well--sounds pretty good, but how loud was the music to begin with? Well, let's just go ahead and turn off the Dynamics Processor all together, and now take a listen: [♫rock music][Male Voice Over: Red Rider, I trust you got some sleep last night.] Okay. So a nice way to see it is to actually look inside the Mixer if you weren't exactly hearing what was happening. So if you pay attention, down here we actually have the peak levels of the audio, as it's playing back and you'll see that when the Voice Over starts talking, it's going to drop down to below minus 10, minus 14 and when the Voice Over stops speaking, the music is going to go back up--take a listen. [♫ Rock music] [Male Voice Over: I'll take that as a Yes.] [♫music only] [Male Voice Over: I think we have something you might enjoy.] Now if you want to send more Voice to the Compressor-- if you actually want to adjust those levels so that the Voice is really significantly louder than the actual Music itself, you can actually readjust those settings by adjusting the Send level here on the Voice Track. So if I increase that even more, wind this back, and hit Play-- [♫Rock music] [Male Voice Over: Red Rider, I trust you got some sleep last night.] Now you can really hear--there's a very large difference between when the voice is on, the music is much lower; when it stops talking, the music goes up much faster. So again--you can adjust those Send levels right there to really fine tune how you want that Ducking to sound. Very cool, very fast, and very effective--and again, probably one of the most highly requested things I've heard over the years. Now beyond working with that, we also have all kinds of new formats and export options to work with when you're in Audition CS6. So when it's time to actually export your Multitrack creations or your edited creations, we can go: File>Export>Time Selection-- or Entire Session. And here's where you can choose to do things like create either Stems or a Stereo or a Mono file, and, once again, choose the format that you're going to go to. Lots of new formats for Import and Export in Adobe Audition CS6. You go into the Mix Down options here. Here's where you can choose Mono, Stereo, or a 5.1 if you're working in a Surround Sound mix, and this is where you can also export individual track Stems, if you so desire. So we can go ahead and do that if we want, but you've got to cancel out of this. Now, beyond formats for Import and Export, one of the other great things that we have added back to Adobe Audition CS6 is CD Burning. So directly from the Waveform Editor here, you can select your clips or you can use markers, go to the File menu, Export, and choose Burn Audio to CD. Again, you can choose the speed, the write mode, the number of copies. You can add verification if you so desire. It's just a very quick way to create a Red Book Standard Disk, right from the Waveform Editor, right out of Audition--really optimizing that Workflow and again, just giving you more flexibility in things that you didn't have before. So we've talked about CD Burning, new formats, Side-Chaining, Pitch Correction, Speech Alignment, new editing methods, Clip Stretching-- that's really just a taste of some of the new incredible features in Adobe Audition CS6. [Adobe]