Sound and music
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Video may be thought of as primarily a visual medium, but the role of sound in your movies is often no less important than that of the images on the screen.
Feature film and television productions include numerous types of audio, beginning with the dialog and other sounds created during live action. In your movies, that raw soundtrack – the original or synchronous audio – is imported along with the video, and remains bound to it unless you explicitly separate them.
Most commercial productions also require sound effects – slamming doors, crashing cars, barking dogs – and incidental music, which may consist of music created especially for the production, songs taken from recordings, or both. With the ScoreFitter tool, you can even create a full-length musical background track at the press of a button. Voice-overs and other types of customized audio are also often needed.
On the project timeline, audio clips behave very similarly to clips of other types, but the timeline also has some features just for audio.
For instance, the timeline header area includes a pop-out mixer panel, and the timeline toolbar includes a button for controlling clip dynamics with keyframes.
Some of the other buttons on the timeline toolbar also provide audio features. One lets you create a ScoreFitter background music clip; another in the same group lets you record a voice-over. Further along on the toolbar is a toggle button for audio scrubbing; which allows you to monitor audio in brief snatches as you drag the scrubber along the timeline.
The Library
Audio and music clips enter your productions via the Library, which handles audio files in wav, mp3 and other standard formats. When you want to add audio files to your production, you can do so by dragging the desired asset from the Library Browser directly onto the project timeline.
Corrections and effects
The correction tools in the Audio Editor let you apply various repairs and customizations, including noise reduction, compression and equalization, to audio clips in your project. Unlike effects (discussed next), these tools can also be applied to audio assets in the Library. When you later use the asset in a project, the corrections will come with it; you can modify them further from the timeline if you choose. Corrections are non-destructive, meaning that the corrected audio file is not modified in any way.
The effects in the Audio Editor provide a number of ways of enhancing, transforming or having fun with sound clips on the project timeline. Unlike the correction tools just discussed, effects can’t be applied directly to Library assets, but only within a project. The effects come with preset parameter combinations that you can further edit according to your needs.