As a video producer, audio editing is a part of what I need to do on a regular basis. Sometimes that's just tweaking the audio track on a video segment; other times it's recording a voice-over; it can even involve a full multi-track mix-down of a band.
While most video editing applications provide some amount of audio editing capability, it is often easier (and sometimes downright necessary) to bring the audio into software designed for audio production work. In this article, we're taking a quick look at Adobe Audition CS6 (Creative Suite 6) that was released in April 2012.
Audition, of course, is designed for more than just audio processing for video. If your focus is purely audio recording and post-production, Audition is absolutely designed for your needs. In CS6, however, many of the newest features are designed to make audio production for video easier, simpler, and better.
It's been a few years since we've reviewed Audition, so let's take a quick look at its features and capabilities.
OVERVIEW
Adobe Audition is an audio production program that includes simple audio recording of one audio file; full multi-track recording; audio file editing; and multi-track mixing and editing. It can interface with a wide range of audio recording and playback hardware—if your computer system can “see” it, Audition can probably use it.
Unlike some multi-track audio apps, Audition lets you manipulate the actual audio files themselves, permanently adding effects and processing to the file. Have an audio file you need to add some compression to, normalize and resave? Audition can do it. Want to do it non-destructively, in a way that you can tweak over and over? Bring it into Audition's Multi-track Editor and add real time effects to compress and normalize the track. Then, render it out to a new file.
Recording works similarly—you can record in editing mode for a single file, or record multiple channels at one time from different audio inputs in multi-track mode. Want to edit one clip on a track when you're in Multi-track mode? Double click on the clip, and it opens in the file editor.
In the Waveform Editor, you can view the file as a typical waveform, but you can also view and edit it in a spectrum view. Whereas the typical waveform display shows the amplitude of the wave form at any given point in time, Spectral Frequency Display shows the frequency content. Part of the spectrum can be edited.
What does that mean? Well, let's say you have an audio recording where in the middle of recording an interview, someone dropped a dime on a granite counter. When viewing the spectrum, you can see the high-frequency tones of the sound of the dime on the display. Not only that, you can “lasso” those frequencies and delete them. It is rare that you can completely remove an unwanted transient completely without affecting the tonal content of the sound you want to keep, but it can be a huge help in cleaning up sound files.
Audition also works not only in stereo, but lets you work with 5.1 channel surround sound. The Multi-track Editor allows for full surround sound panning and automation. Easily pan sound effects around the room when editing your church's in-house movie production. And yes, it's amazing how many churches are producing movies these days.
What doesn't it do? It's not a MIDI sequencer. If one of your needs is to work with MIDI sequences along with your audio tracks, Audition is not for you.
NEW FEATURES
CS6 has had lots of new features and improvements added to it, and some from CS5.5 are worth mentioning as well.
First, Audition is now multi-platform—as of CS5.5, it's available on the Mac.
Audition now supports adding a video reference clip to your project. If you want to use Audition to create a superb sound track for your video, first edit the video with a basic sound track in your video editor. Render out the video, and bring it into an Audition multi-track project. You can now use both the video and audio from the video as a reference in the Audition project to build a perfectly synchronized stereo or 5.1 channel soundtrack to the video, and watch the video within Audition while it plays.
Audition has added clip grouping, which is very helpful. In my standard test case, I have a multi-track project that was recorded on an old Mackie hard-disk recorder. That recorder was very limited in file size for storing clips—about every 12 minutes, it would have to create a new file. So, a multi-track recording of a live event might break each track into seven or eight wave files. With clip grouping, once I've strung these clips together onto one track, I can group them and treat the group as one clip, altering the gain of those clips, for instance, as a group. I like this a lot.
Adobe has added monophonic pitch correction to Audition's bag of editing tricks. There are two versions of pitch correction available. An automated pitch corrector can be applied to a clip, which corrects simple pitch drift. For more severe pitch issues, you can open the clip in the file editor and take a look at it in the Spectral Pitch Display, tweaking pitch issues manually. I found that this works very well, and it's a welcome enhancement.
Clip stretching is a cool tool for the video editor. Let's say you're adding a stock sound effect that is a bit too short or too long for the video segment it applies to. You can stretch that clip to be the right length without altering the pitch content.
They've expanded keyframe editing of envelopes and effects, as well, enabling more things to be controlled through automation.
Ever have to remove a chunk of some stock production music to make the music end with the video? You can now preview edits to audio files with the Skip Selection option. Select the portion of the file you think you want to remove, and Audition previews the cut for you, letting you tweak the selection until you've located just the right segment to cut. This is a nice time-saver.
They've also added a tone generator, enabling you to synthesize some sounds and effects right within Audition.
There are lots of other new features—far too many to list in a short review. Visit Adobe's website for full details.
EVALUATION
I've used an older version of Audition for several years now, and found the new features to be very helpful and welcome. The application was rock-solid on my Windows 7 computer system. I do have two issues with it, however.
First, Adobe's claims full HD playback of video reference clips added to a multi-track project. I found that most of my 720p 30 fps clips did not play back smoothly—some played back at closer to one frame per second at times, dropping the other 29 frames. As I'm running a six-core system with 16 gigs of memory and all RAID disk volumes, built six months ago, I'm pretty sure my system wasn't the problem. I suggest rendering out your reference clip at a lower resolution for smooth playback. Certainly not a showstopper by any means, though.
In addition, Adobe CS6 no longer has local help files. That's right—the help system is on Adobe's servers, accessible through a browser. There are downloadable PDF files, but this is not an effective help system replacement. It's not uncommon for me to work where I don't have Internet access (on an airplane, for example). And even once on my office system, Adobe's server wasn't accessible, leaving me literally helpless. This is ludicrous, and something I hope all Adobe users will complain about until they reinstate a true local help file system in their products. Again, not an end-of-the-world problem, but I find it highly annoying and frustrating.
Overall, Audition CS6 has lots of great new features, especially for the video production person. I definitely recommend it. At $349 retail, or $149 as an upgrade from Audition 3, it's a great program to have in your toolkit.
