Starting out in Audition

- [Voiceover] One of the best features about sound designing in Adobe Audition is the seamless workflow with other Adobe products. And the flexibility to accommodate all styles of audio-based projects. Even ones with a video component. Here, we'll get an up close look at this as we transfer our Premier video edit into Audition. So we can work on our sound design. So here in Premier, we have our edited video project. Notice it has two audio tracks. The top track contains a voiceover, and the bottom track contains the music. And as I scroll through, we can see our finished motion pictures graphics project. Now, this is a simple example. You can imagine we might have several tracks with a bunch of edits. And more than two audio tracks here. Since it's an animation project, also, it might have components that were originally developed in Adobe AfterEffects for example. And when you send over the project to Adobe Audition to start our sound design, we might not always have a other sound element or stems. Like the VO in music completed by the time you begin the work. But you usually at least have some reference or temp audio in the video edit that you'll want to bring over to Audition to work on. Now our goal here is to send the video, as well as the corresponding two audio tracks from our Premier timeline into Audition. So we can work on our sound design in Audition. So to send our project to Audition, I'm gonna bring the playhead back to the beginning and I wanna keep the sequence area selected. Now notice I can select different panels and they get a highlighted blue around those panels. I wanna make sure the Sequence panel is selected. And once that's selected, we can go up into the Edit menu and we can choose Edit in Adobe Audition. And we're gonna choose to edit the whole sequence. So once I click on this, we have some settings to work through. First of all, we'll name it Pedal Stroke Assembly. That was the name of our project here. And we can name the Adobe Audition file the same thing. Now, I'm gonna choose a Path. And when I hit Browse, I'm gonna go to my Desktop into my Exercise files. And it automatically places a folder on there called Adobe Audition Interchange. And this is an internal folder for Adobe products. And because we're going into Audition and we may later come back to Premier, we're gonna keep our projects in the Adobe Audition Interchange folder as we work. So I'll choose that folder. And then I'll go down and I wanna make sure we take the entire sequence. Although, we could choose to have a smaller portion of the Sequence if we had a certain area selected in our timeline. We can just bring that area in, only this case, we're gonna keep the entire sequence. Now here, where it says Audio Handles, the default of this is actually set to one. So when you open it up for the first time, you'll see one second audio handles. Now we wanna actually have more than one second audio handle. We wanna get as much as possible when we bring our files into Audition. Because that way we can have access to any media outside the edit boundaries of our clips. And that'll give us the opportunity to do more crossfading or be able to pull out the clip handle to find any audio we might need. So I definitely urge you to go more than one second here. I like to put in the maximum. If I type in 10, it tells me the maximum is 9.99. So I'll take the maximum amount of audio handles if I can get it. Of course the trade-off it'll take up more space on our disk drive. And the case of this project, there's very little audio so it's not gonna take up too much more space. Now I definitely want Export Preview Video checked. That'll give me video to work with in Audition. Audition allows you to bring in video. And if I keep this checked, it'll send that along with all the other information. Now the next two check marks are if you have any clip effects in Premier or you have any volume keyframing automation done in Premier. You can choose to send that across. Now I don't recommend it because Adobe Audition by itself is an audio production software. And that's the best place, in my opinion, to do any audio effects. And also, any mixing automation. That's where we're gonna finish our project. So, I like to choose tho keep these unchecked. Although, if you wanted to send that information over, you can check those and it'll send all that information into Audition and you can work from there. For now, I'll keep them unchecked. Finally, I'll keep Open in Adobe Audition checked. And that way, as soon as we hit OK, it's gonna send the information over and it'll automatically open Audition with our new sequence all set up. Here we go. So here we are in Audition, and it opened automatically. And we can see the names of the clips, Pedal VO showed up on the audio one track. And Pedal Music showed up on the audio two track. We also have our Pedal Stroke Assembly Rendered Movie. So it rendered out the movie, and brought it right into our timeline. Now I'm just quickly hit Play and see if we're hearing everything and seeing everything that we should see. So it's pretty clear that our video came in and the audio is all there. Now a couple things I wanna do before I start working is I wanna actually optimize our view in Audition. Right now, it's pretty hard to see the video. It's way down here, it's very small. There's actually a preset view template that's made for editing audio for video. So if I go up into the Window menu, and I choose Workspace, Edit Audio to Video, this is a pre-made workspace. All it does is rearrange our panels to optimize them for this type of work. As you can see, it's much clearer to look at. Our video's nice and big over here. And all of our file browsers are set up for this kind of work. And one other thing I wanna do just to be clear, about what's on our tracks, is rename our tracks according to what is in them. So I'll click into Audio One and I'll call this VO, for our voiceover track. And I'll click into Audio Two, and I'll call this Music to let me know that's what's in those tracks. Now, I wanna take a look quickly into our Adobe Audition settings. And before I do that, if I have the video clip selected, I can click over to Properties in the top left. And that tells me a couple of things about the video. First of all, it tells me our clip's start time. In Premier, we had our timeline starting at hour one, which is the standard for how video projects start. They like to start at 01:00:00:00 and everything goes up from there. And you notice our Audition timeline also, if I bring the playhead back to the beginning, our Audition timeline starts there as well. Now, one other thing I wanna look at is our frame rate. So it tells me here that the frame rate of our video clip is 29.97 frames per second. Now, I'm gonna go back here to video and I wanna go up into our Adobe Audition Preferences. I'll start with the General Preferences. Now I just wanna take a look at a couple things. And if I go into Multi-track here, this tells me that the default start time of any new Audition session is set to start at 00. So, in this case, we weren't starting from scratch. We started from importing out of Premier. So it automatically set up our default start time to hour one. In the future, if you wanna make Adobe Audition projects from scratch, and you want it to start at the standard of time called code hour one, you can go in here and change this to hour one. And that'll conform to, you know, typical video settings where everything starts at hour one. Now I'm gonna go back to Preferences for a second. And one other thing I wanna look at is our Time Display. Now notice here, it says our Time Format is SPMTE 29.97. And that's good, and that's what we want it to be on. since our movie is at that frames per second. That's what we want our time format to mimic. Now by default, Adobe Audition is set to look at time in terms of decimals. So we'll see minutes, seconds in decimals. So then, if we had this setting like this, our timeline would not display time code. We wanna make sure that this is set, in this case, to the same time code as our video. So we're gonna keep that at SMPTE 29.97 frames per second. Now one thing that can throw you off is I notice here it says, Custom Frame Rate 12 frames per second. Now that's not something that we want. Our frames per second, as we know, is 29.97. This is a little misleading. But if I hover over it, it tells me that this sets the Custom Frame Rate and is only used when custom time format is active. So if you look in here, you notice there is a custom time format. So, you know, we're not using that so this doesn't mean anything for me. But, it was a little bit confusing at first when I saw that because I wanted it to be the same frame rate as our movie. That's only active if our time format is set to custom, which it's not so we're okay. So I'll click OK. And we're all set up there. And one last thing before we get into the sound design, is because the movie and these two sound tracks should be locked in time. And we don't want to ever have them move. They're our rock-solid reference. It'd be nice to lock them in time. So to do that, I'll just drag a selection around all three of those clips. And then, I can right-click on any one of them. And I can say Lock in Time. And once I do that, you'll see a little lock icon in all three of those clips. And that way, they can't move around. And they'll never get out of sync from each other. They're locked perfectly in time starting at hour one. So at this point, we're ready to begin our sound design. Let's save this project and move forward. When I choose File, Save, Audition will ask me a couple things. It'll ask me where I wanna put it. So I wanna make sure the name is right. I wanna make sure it's located to the right place. Like I said, we're keeping it in our Adobe Audition Interchange folder. And it's gonna be in a folder called Pedal Stroke Assembly. So I'll make sure that that's all good. And we're saving it as a .scsx file. That's the file suffix for any Audition session. And we'll keep our Sample Type 48,000 or 48 kilohertz. And 32-bit is an internal bit rate. It's a very high bit rate that Audition uses. Now we'll keep Include Markers in Other Metadata checked. And we'll click OK.