Splice Now

The Media Composer still doesn’t display audio waveforms fast enough, but speed has improved considerably over the years and I now leave them on quite often. One problem that comes up regularly is that quiet sources can be hard to see unless you make your tracks tall, which hogs screen real estate.

The trick is to enlarge the waveforms only. Just select the track and instead of hitting command-l, which enlarges the track, hit command-option-l. The waveforms get taller, but the track size remains the same.

Here’s a section of a timeline with waveforms displayed. The audio is so soft you can’t see anything.

Here’s the same section after hitting command-shift-l a few times:

Voila, you can see!

To shink the waveforms again hit command-option-k. To get your waveforms back to standard size hit command-option-k several times, until they won’t shrink any further.

This entry was posted on September 28, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Audio, Avid Technical Tips. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.