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In the previous videos, you have been focusing on the visual aspect of the sequence.
We will now turn our attention to audio.
Audio tools in Smoke comprise of a few components.
You already know that you can import audio sources in stereo and in mono.
The first component to the audio tools is in the sequence.
This is where you would deal with audio tracks and audio effects.
The second component of audio is the AUDIODESK
that deals with Audio mapping including mixer inputs and outputs.
We'll go through the second component in the next video.
But let’s start off in the sequence.
Audio waveforms are on by default.
To turn them off go to the OPTIONS pull-down menu and choose to HIDE WAVEFORMS.
To display the waveforms, choose the OPTIONS pull-down menu and select “Show Waveform with Effects”.
To scale the size of your waveforms, you can click the audio track
and drag it down to make the track bigger.
You could also go back to the OPTIONS pull-down menu
and choose to increase or perhaps decrease the size of the waveforms.
Now lets do some audio work…
Here I have a piece of audio in the timeline.
Let me play this for you.
As you can hear the audio comes in quite sharp and I would like to fade the sound in.
Move the focus point in line with the relevant audio track and navigate to the beginning of the segment.
Make sure that nothing is selected
by clicking on the grey area beneath the sequence or pressing SHIFT+COMMAND+A.
You can click on the transition box in the menu bar and choose FADE.
This will apply the fade to focused audio track.
Move the focus point to the next audio track and press COMMAND+T
to perform the fade on the audio track.
This will apply a transition to audio segment and you can adjust the length of the fade.
If you are working with stereo tracks than the audio effects
will be applied to the left and right channel simultaneously.
Note that the same will apply when fading out a clip.
If I want to cross-fade two audio segments together, the same principle applies.
Navigate to the cut-point between the two audio segments and press COMMAND+T
Let’s listen.
So that sounds good.
Now I would like audio level on the middle segment to be lower,
so the audio on the other tracks can be heard.
Smoke has a whole variety of audio tools that you can work with directly in the sequence.
Please note that the Audio Timeline FX are segment based and not track based.
So they will only work with your selection.
Just select the segments using COMMAND, right-click and add effect.
This brings up the FX ribbon for audio effects.
Here you can apply Audio timewarps, noise gate, compression, EQ, audio gain,
reverb, Delay and Modulation.
I’ll select the Gain Audio FX for the segment and the tool bar will display the gain slider,
the auto-keyframe button and an edit button.
Pressing play, you can hear the sequence as well as adjust the slider
to hear the sound changes in real-time.
You could also turn on auto-key and animate the gain during playback.
This functionality works for all of the Audio Timeline FX.
However, when it comes to the Gain AudioFX, you can also adjust the volume
with rubber banding in the sequence segments.
Press the EDIT button to enable the rubber banding.
Go to the frame where you want the fade to begin.
Hold K and click on the slider to create a keyframe.
Change the edit mode from MOVE to ADD in the Pull-down menu or press SHIFT+A.
Further down the sequence on the grey highlighted segment,
click and drag the rubber banding to add a new keyframe.
Don’t release the cursor just yet.
You will notice that the adjustments are down to three decimal places.
Hold OPTION and the value is rounded off for easier adjustment.
Once you have create a keyframe and you want to adjust it further,
press SHIFT+M or change the pull-down menu to MOVE mode.
So we need to keep the audio level under the voice over.
At the end of the voiceover, I want to add a keyframe at the same level
before the volume starts increasing again.
You can use the add mode to add another keyframe or move the positioner to the end of the voice over.
Hold K and click the gain slider to add a keyframe.
Press SHIFT+A again to go back to ADD mode.
Further down the audio track, hold OPTION and click and drag to add a new keyframe.
Drag it to 0 db to complete the audio animation.
So essentially I have created a fade down and fade up using rubber banding.
If you want to adjust the level under the voiceover, press SHIFT+M to switch to MOVE mode.
Hold COMMAND and drag a box selection over the middle audio keyframes.
Hold SHIFT and drag the keyframes vertically.
The SHIFT shortcut constrains the movement vertically.
Let’s listen to the adjustments.
A word about the rubber banding and adjustments…
is that you can always access the animation editor to refine the curve in greater detail.
Before we move on, one extra piece of knowledge worth knowing
is that you can generate animation based on audio through the animation editor
but I’ll save that video for another time.
In the next video, we look at audio track assignments, faders
and the Audio Desk.