Splice Now

Avid’s new stereo tracks and Real Time Audio Suite effects are both liberating and frustrating. Introduced in Version 5, stereo tracks allow editors to handle stereo pairs as single objects in the timeline, and control them with a single set of audio keyframes. RTAS effects let you apply up to five real-time audio filters to each track, quickly and easily. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you can’t automate these effects in any way — you can’t turn them on and off, and can’t change their values, anywhere within a sequence. Nor can you edit them from one sequence to another — you have to copy to a bin first.

Stereo clips are problematic, too, because they can only reside in stereo tracks. You can’t put a clip wherever you want, you have to dedicate a track to these clips, again, throughout your show. Meaning that if you have only a few such clips, you’re wasting a whole track for them. And since Media Composer only plays 16 tracks, a couple of stereo tracks — each equivalent to two mono tracks — can waste resources big time.

But despite these limitations, I’ve been using both features to good effect, mostly for editing music. The technique I’ve come up with is to dedicate two stereo tracks to temp music, and one to reverb. That’s right — a whole track to reverb — the same reverb throughout the show. For picture editors used to conserving track space, this seems almost absurd, but once you’ve wrapped your mind around it, it can be effective. End your music wherever you want, then cut the last beat to the reverb track. Voila — you’ve created a ring out. (In some cases, you’ll need to add short dissolves or fades to smooth out the transition.) Avid’s new AIR reverb plug-in, included with MC 5.5, is particularly good for this purpose. Unlike the old D-Verb, AIR reverb is more easily controlled and sounds better. You can simply set a duration (Reverb Time), measured in seconds. You’ll also want to adjust the Mix parameter, which controls how much of the original, dry audio is combined with the reverb (50% is a good starting point).

Avid could make some improvements to this situation. Automation for RTAS is essential. Likewise, the ability to edit RTAS effects when cutting from one sequence to another. And the AIR plug-ins, good as they are, include presets in Pro Tools, which are missing in MC. Finally, if we’re going to segregate stereo and mono clips into specialized tracks, then we need more tracks — 24, at least.

For more tips like this, check out my book, “Avid Agility,” available from Amazon.

If you’re using an HD TV as a client monitor, you’re probably familiar with the dreaded “out-of-sync-on-the-big-screen” problem. This is the result of the fact that most consumer-level TVs introduce a video delay —  the time it takes the TV’s video scaling hardware to do it’s job. If you use the same TV at home, you’ll be listening to audio through the TV — and the TV contains hardware that delays the audio, as well, and keeps you in sync. But when such a TV is used in an editing room, audio is typically run through a mixer and big speakers and isn’t delayed. The result is a sync problem on the TV — the Avid’s composer window looks good, but the on the big screen audio is advanced relative to video, often by as much as two frames and sometimes more. What to do?

You typically have two choices: run your audio through the TV and then back out to your speakers, or purchase and use an audio delay box. Neither approach is ideal: running audio through the TV is awkward, limits you to two tracks, and may degrade quality, and delay boxes are fairly expensive.

But there’s a third alternative that I discovered recently: Avid’s Desktop Play Delay setting. It was designed for output to a DV device where video and audio are delayed by the latency in the device. But it can also work effectively to put your Avid audio in sync with a client monitor. Just select a frame offset in the setting panel: the number of frames you enter is the amount audio will be delayed. You’ll have to experiment a bit to get it right: on our LGs, a two-frame delay seems best.

Sadly, you can’t be in sync on both the Composer window and the big screen, so you’ll have to choose — no delay for perfect sync on the Composer, or your preferred offset for perfect sync on the client monitor. I tend to leave the setting at zero when I’m working alone, but make the adjustment when I have people in the room, or when we’re screening. Also note that because this feature was designed for DV, it  causes video to jump when you press play or stop, by the number of frames you’ve selected. That’s not a show stopper, but it’s another reason to set the delay back to zero for the bulk of your work. There’s another quirk, as well: You can’t create two settings panels, one with an offset and one without, and then switch between them. For some reason, whatever you do to one panel affects the other.

But despite these problems, the Desktop Play Delay setting has solved a big problem in my cutting room. And if video didn’t shift on play and stop, I might leave it on all the time.