Splice Now

If you work with temp music and effects and you haven’t started using iTunes as an adjunct to the Media Composer, you owe it to yourself to try it. Once you get used to the way it works, I think you’ll wonder how you got along without it. It’s great for two reasons.

First, iTunes makes it very easy to organize your sound effects and music. Most of the commercial sound effects libraries are now part of the Gracenote database, so when you load those CDs into iTunes the tracks get labeled and organized automatically. Once your effects are loaded, you can easily do a keyword search and find everything with the word “splash” or “gunshot” or “wind” in the description and listen to them with a simple double click. (Unlike the MC, iTunes keeps playing even as you move around in a clip, which makes it great for browsing.)

Second, iTunes can play things simultaneously with the Media Composer. This makes it a terrific tool for experimenting with temp music. You park the MC at the beginning of a sequence where you need music and press play. Then switch to iTunes and press play there. You are now playing music against picture, and you can move your cursor around in iTunes or the MC and try different synch positions easily. This is much quicker and easier than trying things out using CDs or, worse yet, within the MC itself.

Here are some tips that will make this process easier:

You don’t want to have to listen to iTunes through the tiny speakers on your computer. So make sure that the audio output of your Mac or PC is routed through your mixer. Then you’ll be able to adjust the level of iTunes just as you would a CD player.

Even though the Gracenote database now gets most CD tracks labeled correctly, it does make mistakes. Be sure to check the labeling, including the “genre.” You want scores labeled “Soundtrack” and sound effects labeled as “Sound Effects.” That’ll make it a lot easier to find things later.

Be sure you load your material into iTunes in an Avid-friendly way. The Media Composer won’t import “variable bit rate” MP3s, nor will it accept AAC-encoded files. So you must load iTunes using the MP3 encoder, preferably at a high bit rate, like 192 kbps. Better yet, load your audio as AIF files, which aren’t compressed at all. This takes up the most space but yields the highest quality. You’ll find these settings in the iTunes Preferences under Advanced > Importing.

Most important, the MC won’t import from iTunes directly. You can’t drag and drop from iTunes into an Avid bin. This is frustrating, and I hope Avid engineering will do something about it, but there’s a fairly simple workaround. Just drag from iTunes into folder on your desktop first. This creates a copy of the sound file and leaves the original in iTunes. Then drag that copy into a bin.

Once the file has been successfully imported into the MC you can delete the copy from the finder. You also probably want to adjust the level of the source file in the MC. For some reason, things that play properly in iTunes will come into the MC much too loud.

Finally, I suggest that you tell the MC to sample rate convert your audio during input. Though the system will now play any sample rate in the timeline, it will insist on rendering these files when you attempt to make a digital cut. That’s awkward and messy. It’s easier to let the MC do all of that during input. You’ll find these settings in Import Settings > Audio.

Once you start using iTunes for work, you may find yourself wanting to create more than one iTunes music library. Check out the program Libra. It does a good and simple job of helping you switch from one library to another. You’ll find it here: http://homepage.mac.com/sroy/libra/

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.

We’re all cutting more tracks these days and there just doesn’t seem to be enough screen real estate to manage them. Ever since the early 90s, the Media Composer has offered a way to maximize the size of the timeline window, but few people seem to know about it.

To shrink your source and record monitors and create a view something like you see below, simply click the button at the top right corner of the Composer Window. (On newer systems the green “maximize” button at the top left does the same thing.)

The images are gone from your source and record monitors, but nothing else has changed. All your editing controls continue to work as you’d expect. If your system includes a client monitor, I think you’ll find it easy to get used to this setup, especially if you’re working only on sound.

Once your source and record monitors have been been resized, you’ll want to adjust the size of other windows and then save this configuration as a Toolset.
First, have the system memorize your normal configuration, so you can get back to it. From the Toolset menu, be sure “Source/Record Editing” is selected and then choose “Save Current.”

Then select “Audio Editing” from the Toolset menu. The system will shift to a default audio editing view, and open the audio mixer. Your job is to customize this view until it suits you. The first step is to invoke the Mini-Composer. Click the green maximize button or the button at the window’s top right corner.

Then manually resize the timeline to fill the rest of the screen. And move your windows around until the interface is set up to your liking. If you prefer to see the audio tool then leave it where it is (you can even switch it to show 8 channels and have that memorized, as well). When you’re satisfied, select “Save Current” from the Toolset menu.

Now try out your toolsets. Select “Source/Record Editing” and you should see a normal display. Select “Audio Editing” and you’ll go to the magnified timeline.

The final step is to associate a timeline view with a Toolset. That way, when you select “Audio Editing” you’ll not only see the enlarged timeline, but you’ll also switch to a track view that’s appropriate, with taller track sizes.

Just set up the timeline view as you normally would and memorize it by selecting Save As from the popup under the timeline.

Then link that view to your Tooset. Get yourself into the Toolset using the Toolset menu. Then, from the same menu, choose “Link Current to…” In the dialog box that follows, type the name of the Timeline View you’d like to associate with that Toolset.

(You can always change your timeline view while working. All this does it bring up a specific timeline when you choose your toolset.)

That’s all there is to it. Now, with one menu pick you can shrink the composer, enlarge the timeline and enlarge your timeline tracks. And you can get back to where you were just as easily.