Moving from Soundtrack to Audition

Since the release of CS6, we’ve been taking a closer look at our workflow and procedures here at fxphd and fxguide. John’s been blogging about his transition from Final Cut to Premiere and another area we’ve been evaluating is the audio cleanup work for our classes. On average, we release over ten hours of content a week, so we’re always on the lookout for ways to improve our pipeline.

We were previously using Soundtrack pro for our audio work, but with the recent advancements to Audition we decided to take a look to see how it could fit into our environment. Our typical tasks involve cleaning up background noise, adjusting the volume levels, peak limiting, etc… all things Audition is proving to do well! We can do all of this work in the Waveform editor, directly to our files. We don’t need to over complicate things; just bring the file in, clean it up and export it out. Audition is intuitive and very approachable, if you’re familiar with Adobe interfaces, you’ll be right at home. Plus, since it’s included with Production Premium CS6, you may already have it installed.

Overall impressions
Switching from Soundtrack Pro, it didn’t take long to get up to speed in Audition, once we got over the interface differences. The bin is called files, Actions are now listed in History, stuff like that. And other than a few things I’ll describe below, I’ve found Audition to be intuitive, stable and full featured in it’s offering. I personally have been working with the product since it was called Cool Edit Pro (before Adobe bought it) and am impressed with what it has become now with the new version.

Preferences > Media & Disk Cache

Enable DLMS Format Support. This allows you to play back any video format Premiere supports in Audition. You should enable this if you are having trouble with your video files.

 

Preferences > Time Display

Since the majority of people reading this are working on video based projects. You will probably want to be looking at timecode in the timeline. You can change this from the Preferences > Time Display > Time Format menu.

 

Spectral Display Auto Heal & Noise Reduction (Process)

In this video below, we take a closer look at the Spectral Display editor and some of it’s preferences. Then take a look at how to use the Noise Reduction (Process) plugin in the Waveform editor.

[fx_video src=”/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Audition-Tips.mov” link=”/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Audition-Tips.mov”]

 

Check out our AUD205 course

And, since training is what we do at fxphd…

If you’re looking to get up to speed on Audition, I’m teaching a new course this term: AUD205: Practical Audio Techniques in Audition. The course looks at common audio tasks and challenges, and gives practical examples and steps to deal with them.

For more information about AUD205: Practical Audio Techniques in Audition, check out the course info page. But in the meantime, here are a few tips for working with Audition….