audition_broadcast_wp - Wireless LAN Professionals

White Paper
Adobe Audition 3
®
®
Built for speed and quality, Adobe Audition has the tools that
broadcast audio engineers need
Table of contents
1 Advantages of using Adobe
Audition
2 Audio broadcast production
4 TV broadcast preproduction
5 Video post-production
7 Summary
For broadcast professionals, the world of TV and audio broadcast is often unpredictable and
chaotic. The one thing broadcast professionals can count on is having almost no time to produce
the top-quality work demanded of them. When that red light goes on, an audio engineer must be
ready for anything, and the entire production hinges on the engineer’s ability to deliver audio at
just the right time and in just the right way.
That’s why you usually don’t find a lot of music software on the computers in broadcast facilities.
Complex programs that emulate entire recording studios and do a million things are simply not
the right tools for the job. And frankly, no one in the facility would ever have time to learn how
to use such a program, even if it was just the ticket.
Advantages of using Adobe Audition
Since the mid-1990s, however, one audio program is almost ubiquitous in broadcast and post
facilities around the world. Adobe Audition, originally known as Cool Edit Pro, has always
appealed to engineers for a number of reasons, including:
• Ability to read and write a wide variety of audio file formats
• Works efficiently and quickly
• Converts sample rates quickly with guaranteed good results
• Useful effects for broadcast applications
• All audio editing and effects parameters are displayed in ways that engineers understand
instantly
With Adobe Audition, an engineer can take any submitted audio and quickly edit it, mix it, and
deliver a final product.
New features in Adobe Audition 3
Adobe Audition is built for speed, and it’s perfect for the broadcast engineer with no extra
time—which is to say, Audition 3 offers every engineer many new features that fit the needs of a
broadcast or post facility:
• Ability to take advantage of cutting-edge computers, with support for Windows Vista® and
multicore processors
• Wide range of effects and analysis tools, taking sound design to new levels
• Improved waveform editing, with top and tail views that help you zero in on critical elements
of a file
• Enhanced multitrack editing and mixing, with the ability to apply and edit quick fades across
multiple tracks simultaneously
• Audio exporting optimized for web destinations
• Loopology music tracks that let engineers easily create soundtracks and music beds
With the revolution that’s hit the broadcast industry since the advent of Internet broadcasting—
giving engineers additional delivery formats to take into account—Audition more than ever is
the best audio program for broadcast and post engineers to have in their toolkit. Let’s take a look
at some specific ways Audition can make your work go smoother.
Audio broadcast production
What must a broadcast audio engineer cope with besides working the board and keeping the
talent from violating FCC guidelines? The widest variety of source audio imaginable, that’s what.
Phone interviews, live studio music performances, historical material on vinyl and cassette,
MP3s from voice recorders, and many other formats might be integrated into a single segment.
Audition makes the job easier with a host of broadcast-ready tools.
For starters, recording new audio into Audition from turntables, cassette players, and voice
transcribers is straightforward. Audition works with a variety of audio interfaces, giving you lots
of options for pro or budget gear. You can even select the input source from within the individual track, so you don’t have to reconfigure your patch bay for every source.
To match the file format of your newly recorded audio with that taken from field recorders and
CD audio files, simply import other audio into your Audition session from the Open dialog box
when you’re in Edit view. When the files are all in your session, use the Batch Processing tool to
quickly process all the audio files at once.
The Batch Processing tool speeds up the conversion process, turning a pile of audio in different file formats into
a format that matches your needs. You can also normalize or apply compression and other effects to a number
of files simultaneously
With other audio editing programs, when your source audio is less than perfect, you still have
your work cut out for you after you get all your files in the same format. Fortunately for broadcasters, the Adobe Audition restoration and noise reduction tools are the best in its class, and as
with all of the features in Audition, they’re easy to use. You can use the Spectral Display to
search for and remove unwanted noise. Then you can simply rub out the offending sound with
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the Healing Brush. The Lasso tool makes it easy to select only the particular harmonics of an
artifact, delete them, and leave the original sound almost untouched. If the unwanted sound is
off to one side of the stereo field, the Spectral Pan Display gives you the best shot at isolating and
deleting it. Similarly, rumble and hum are clearly visible when present in the lower part of the
display, and when hiss is present, it appears as almost a fog in the upper part of the display. You
can select any problem you see in Spectral view, and—if you’ve activated the feature to “play
selected frequencies only”—listen to only what you’ve selected. If what you hear encompasses the
offending noise but leaves your signal alone, delete it.
Or use whichever restoration effect most closely targets your problem. Some of these tools are
available in real time, such as the Automatic Click Remover and Adaptive Noise Reduction VST
effects. To target a particular track, just activate one of these effects in the Effects Rack. To affect
the entire mix, tweak the simple controls in the Mastering Rack. You can also apply these same
effects, as well as Hiss Reduction, to files offline using the Edit view.
In the Spectral Display, you
can view the problems in your
audio file and remove them.
Here we’re editing out a piano
stool squeak in an otherwise
perfect piano track. The squeak
has three partials visible in the
Spectral Frequency Display
that are rising in pitch. On
the left, the middle partial is
selected with the Lasso tool.
You can remove this part of
the squeak just by pressing the
Delete key or by trimming the
onscreen Gain Control. On the
right, the Spectral Pan Display
shows that the squeak is way
off to one side of the stereo
field (the red lines at the top),
making it easier to select and
delete it without affecting the
piano sound.
For projects such as station IDs and advertising spots, audio engineers are called upon to create
new audio rather than fix it. Audition includes preconfigured effects with presets that are perfect
for sound design. The Generate Tones effect is basically a synthesizer oscillator that you can
configure for modulation effects that sound like they’re right out of Lost in Space. Other
time-saving presets can be found in the Distortion, Echo, Doppler Shifter, and Pitch Bender
effects—the latter offering a very convincing power-down effect.
When all your audio file edits are complete, add the fully programmable and superb-sounding
EQ and Reverb to the Mastering Rack to give all your audio files the same professional polish.
Then it’s a simple matter of exporting your clips in the format that your playout system requires,
where you’ll trigger them as needed, on time. While the segment is airing, capture all of the
audio in Audition—from on-air interviews and live multitrack studio performances to music
beds and sound FX—add ID segments, mix it down, and save it as an MP3 file, and then upload
the file to your station’s website podcast directory before your shift ends.
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Got some anxiety about mixing? The final phase of a multitrack job—the mix—has a reputation
for being time-intensive and difficult, especially on projects with dialogue, music, and FX. With
all those tracks needing individual level and stereo position adjustments relative to every other
track, it’s easy to see why. Audition has several ways to simplfy the process with automated
control of volume, pan position, muting, effects mixes, and other elements. Just by clicking on an
individual clip, you add edit points to a volume or pan envelope, which you can then easily adjust
by dragging up or down to change the setting, or back and forward in time to match a precise
point in the waveform display. Track automation works similarly: Open an automation lane
below the target track, set the parameter that you want to control, and then add edit points and
adjust them until the track is sitting just the way you want it.
If you mix faster by moving faders and twisting knobs as the music plays, Audition can record
fader and pan knob moves from its onscreen mixer or from a controller. The onscreen mixer
offers other tools to speed up your mix. Make parametric EQ adjustments instantly by dragging
on the frequency and level values in a channel, or click through to open the visual editor and
adjust the Q shape as well. Click on an effects slot in the channel, and select the kind of effect to
apply to the corresponding track from a number of top-quality reverbs, delays, and other
dynamic and modulation effects.
Envelope automation gives you quick and precise control of volume, pan, and other mix
parameters. You can create envelopes directly on individual clips by clicking and dragging edit
points. Make an envelope for an entire track by opening up automation lanes and clicking to
create edit points.
(1) Create curved clip envelopes for volume or pan directly on the waveform display by using splines. Right-click
the clip and then select Clip Envelopes > Volume (or Pan) > Use Splines. (2) The volume data in this automation
lane was recorded in real time by moving the mixer fader. You can also use a fader or knob on a MIDI controller.
(3) With a normal clip envelope, you create linear automation, as in this fade-out. You can easily add more edit
points, move them, and delete them. (4) Drag on the fade boxes in the upper corners of a clip to create fade-ins
and fade-outs. (5) Open up additional lanes to automate more parameters.
TV broadcast preproduction
If audio broadcast seems like a stressful profession, try live TV. Whether a show is a sitcom or a
talk show, if there’s a live audience and a broadcast deadline, the audio engineer is not the one
who wants to force the crew to retake a scene or segment by blowing a sound effect. Speedy
preparation is key—and that’s where Audition shines.
In preproduction, the ideas flow fast and furious between writers, producers, and talent.
Last-minute changes are the norm. Musical numbers and background beds might be included in
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one revision of the script and then replaced by the next. On top late-night talk shows, live
musicians often handle a great deal of the musical preparation by making arrangements for
guest artists and performing sound effects—and even improvising to match any on-camera
changes by the host and guests. But on most shows, it’s the audio engineer who has to trigger the
voice-overs, music, transitions, and any other audio.
Adobe Audition Edit view is particularly useful for creating an edit of a music file to match a
particular arrangement for an on-camera guest, for example. With its rapidly scalable view
magnifications, Audition lets you zoom in and locate precise points—down to the individual
sample — in a long audio file. With this level of control, you can easily select sections to copy
and paste into a new arrangement. But Adobe Audition offers an even easier and faster way by
using Markers. Each Marker can encompass a location and a range of time, including start and
endpoints that you specify or that Audition determines automatically with the Auto-Mark
feature, based on its analysis of the song’s phrase structure or beat patterns. After marking your
song section, you can set up a playlist to play back the sections in any order and for any number
of times, without ever having to slice and dice the waveform.
When you need to adjust
the volume of a soundtrack
beneath a voice-over track,
select the segment of the
soundtrack that matches
the duration of the voiceover phrase and adjust the
onscreen Gain Control while
you keep your eye on the
waveform.
Assembling voice-overs are often the audio engineer’s task. With Adobe Audition, it’s easy to
comp together a finished voice-over track in a short time because you can insert audio files at
particular points in a multitrack session and then apply fades to multiple clips simultaneously. If
the voice-over is over a music bed that’s a bit too loud you can use the onscreen Gain Control in
Edit view to bring down a selected section of the music bed and see the result immediately in the
waveform display.
You can easily add
hits that are synced
with individual
frames by selecting
Thumbnail Options
> Display All, which
which then displays a thumbnail
for every frame in
the video when the
session’s horizontal
zoom setting is
maximized.
Video post-production
A video post suite might be quieter than a TV soundstage, but it’s no less challenging for the
audio engineer working with video footage. Audition is tailor-made to work seamlessly with
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common tools in the video world, such as Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4. If you have a video clip
running in Adobe Premiere Pro, you can open the audio track in Audition from within Premiere
Pro. Then you can apply the Adobe Audition restoration and mastering effects to enhance the
audio quality. When you save your changes, they are applied automatically to the video
soundtrack that is open in Adobe Premiere Pro, saving you lots of time otherwise spent
importing and exporting the audio.
Audition has several useful tools for adding new audio to an existing video track, starting with
the ability to open video in AVI, QuickTime, and WMV formats. Syncing the new audio to the
video is easy with the time display set to SMPTE, corresponding to the frame rate of the clip and
the Snap to Frames option selected in the Snapping dialog box.
Create a soundtrack with the Loopology library
Often a composer is responsible for all the music in a video. But there are many times when a
last-minute transition, ID spot, or promo needs appropriate music, and you, the audio engineer,
are the only one around who can help. Audition is ready for the task with its Loopology libary of
themed, professional-sounding music loops. You can configure the sound of any loop by
changing its key, tempo, length, and number of repetitions. The Loopology library includes
intros, endings, as well as different multitrack sections, so you can create an appropriate
soundtrack in minutes instead of hours. You can even synchronize a loop to end at a precise hit
point in the video and stretch or shrink your music bed to fit the exact length of your video
segment without reediting.
Sometimes you’re the only one in the room who can create a music bed. With the Loopology library you can
create a soundtrack that matches the mood, tempo, and timing of a scene. Preview Loopology tracks to find
what you need, and then import it into the track, and drag its endpoint to make it fill the time required. The
loop automatically keeps in sync with your video track.
When your soundtrack is complete and mastered, you can preview the video and soundtrack
together in the Video panel. Then export the video in the same format in which you imported it,
or use the bounce function to create an audio mix, and your clip is ready for delivery.
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Preview your soundtrack with video playback right in
the main Multitrack Display. When you’ve got it the
way you want it, select from a variety of audio export
formats and then save your video and soundtack as a
QuickTime file
Summary
If your challenges tend to be at the prep phase of your projects, the Adobe Audition editing and
cleanup features, such as spectral editing, analysis tools, waveform top and tail view, restoration
effects, and the onscreen Gain Control, can help you get the job done sooner. Even when the task
involves multiple tracks, music beds, and video, Adobe Audition playlist markers, frame-accurate audio sync, Loopology music clips, and clip and track automation let you meet your
deadlines with finished mixes that sound great.
Adobe Audition is ready for anything and is optimized to work fast, without sacrificing quality
for speed. At all phases of your audio project, Audition delivers top-quality audio at any sample
rate. Music, voice-overs, and soundtracks created in Audition are broadcast-ready in multiple
formats and for any market.
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
USA
www.adobe.com
Adobe, the Adobe logo, and Reader are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
© 2007 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
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