[CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

Hi, All,

Looking for advice and suggestions on audio editing....

I'm completing a one-hour piece, and am about to add 'incidental music'
to the soundtrack.  It seems to me that keyframing the audio 'fade' will
be a tedious method of bringing the music levels up and down (as the
dialog comes and goes, etc.)

So, does anyone have an opinion on these, or other,alternatives?

(1) Add 'music' tracks to the Cinelerra project, then keyframe its
'fade' function, and render all the audio at once; or

(2) Render the project to an intermediate mpeg, without background
music, then create a 'music' track (on, say, Audacity) and manipulate
the levels in Audacity.  Then, finally, layer the music track onto the
mpeg with a separate pass through Cinelerra; or

(3) Learn how to use 'shared tracks' (which are a total mystery to me)
to do something more clever, which might involve 'compressing' the audio
automagically? 

How would you do it?  (FWIW: the rendering is to NTSC and most of the
audio originates as .wav)

Thanks!

Re: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

Hi John!

I'd certainly advice you to do as much of the music work as possible
outside Cinelerra. It'll be much more comfortable and stable approach.
Render the dialogue/sfx tracks to wav (unless they already are in that
format) and mix them with the music in Ardour for example. Then render
out the final soundtrack (incl. music) and put it in Cinelerra as the
only sound in your project. You don't really have to render your final
video before that.

-Heikki

2009/6/1 John Detwiler <jdetwile@...>:
> Hi, All,
>
> Looking for advice and suggestions on audio editing....
>
> I'm completing a one-hour piece, and am about to add 'incidental music'
> to the soundtrack.  It seems to me that keyframing the audio 'fade' will
> be a tedious method of bringing the music levels up and down (as the
> dialog comes and goes, etc.)
>
> So, does anyone have an opinion on these, or other,alternatives?
>
> (1) Add 'music' tracks to the Cinelerra project, then keyframe its
> 'fade' function, and render all the audio at once; or
>
> (2) Render the project to an intermediate mpeg, without background
> music, then create a 'music' track (on, say, Audacity) and manipulate
> the levels in Audacity.  Then, finally, layer the music track onto the

Re: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

Hi John,
See my tip 21.15 at the bottom of this page
http://cinelerra.org/docs/wiki/doku.php?id=english_manual:cinelerra_cv_en_21
"Using Compressor Effect as a Ducker"
HTH
Norv

----- Original Message ----
From: John Detwiler <jdetwile@...>
To: cinelerra <at> skolelinux.no
Sent: Monday, 1 June, 2009 9:59:29 PM
Subject: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

Hi, All,

Looking for advice and suggestions on audio editing....

I'm completing a one-hour piece, and am about to add 'incidental music'
to the soundtrack.  It seems to me that keyframing the audio 'fade' will
be a tedious method of bringing the music levels up and down (as the
dialog comes and goes, etc.)

So, does anyone have an opinion on these, or other,alternatives?

(1) Add 'music' tracks to the Cinelerra project, then keyframe its
'fade' function, and render all the audio at once; or

(2) Render the project to an intermediate mpeg, without background
music, then create a 'music' track (on, say, Audacity) and manipulate

Re: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

John Detwiler schrieb:
> Looking for advice and suggestions on audio editing....
...
> It seems to me that keyframing the audio 'fade' will be a tedious method of
> bringing the music levels up and down (as the dialog comes and goes, etc.)

looks like you want to bring the level up and down very frequently,
which bears the danger of brining in nervosity. A common approach is
to try to mix the music in a way that it can be combined with speach,
i.e. not so much using the middle freqency range 1kHz - 5kHz within
the music bed, so it doesn't disturb speech intelligibility so much.

Nevertheless, sound editing is a laborious task and I'd follow the
advice to try to do the fine tuning work in a dedicated application
(e.g. Ardour + xjadeo)

> (3) Learn how to use 'shared tracks' (which are a total mystery to me) to do
> something more clever, which might involve 'compressing' the audio 
> automagically?

I don't think they are overly useful as they are right now; but they might be
a very powerful feature, if the handling was better and the user had more
control about the behaviour. If you don't look into the code, they indeed
behave completely mysterious and un-obvious. If you do look into the code,
you'll realize that they are a rather cheap spin-off from the
inner workings of the Cinelerra engine: they are not so much a "routing"
feature, rahter what happens is that a part of the "render pipeline" of
one track is re-used in the context of another track (buffer).

Re: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

Thanks, Hermann!

I'm not sure that xjadeo is (i) easily added to my Fedora 10 system,
or (ii) necessary for the caliber of work I'm doing.

But I will invest in learning Ardour, based on your kind advice. (My experience
so far has been Audacity - and, on Windows, Cakewalk.  Audacity has been a
disappointment, but Ardour appears much more powerful.)

My goal is 'merely' to have some mash-up of musical themes to go with various
scenes and dialog; that is, I don't need to Foley any sfx to an individual frame-level of
precision.  So I think I can manage without xjadeo.

Thanks again!

On 2009-06-01 21:23, Ichthyostega wrote:
> John Detwiler schrieb:
> > Looking for advice and suggestions on audio editing....
> ...
> > It seems to me that keyframing the audio 'fade' will be a tedious method of
> > bringing the music levels up and down (as the dialog comes and goes, etc.)
> 
> looks like you want to bring the level up and down very frequently,
> which bears the danger of brining in nervosity. A common approach is
> to try to mix the music in a way that it can be combined with speach,
> i.e. not so much using the middle freqency range 1kHz - 5kHz within
> the music bed, so it doesn't disturb speech intelligibility so much.
> 
> Nevertheless, sound editing is a laborious task and I'd follow the
> advice to try to do the fine tuning work in a dedicated application

Re: [CinCV] Best practice? - audio editing

> On 2009-06-01 21:23, Ichthyostega wrote:
>> Nevertheless, sound editing is a laborious task and I'd follow the advice 
>> to try to do the fine tuning work in a dedicated application (e.g. Ardour +
>>  xjadeo)

John Detwiler schrieb:
> I'm not sure that xjadeo is (i) easily added to my Fedora 10 system, or (ii) 
> necessary for the caliber of work I'm doing.

> But I will invest in learning Ardour, based on your kind advice. (My 
> experience so far has been Audacity - and, on Windows, Cakewalk.  Audacity 
> has been a disappointment, but Ardour appears much more powerful.)

> My goal is 'merely' to have some mash-up of musical themes to go with various
>  scenes and dialog; that is, I don't need to Foley any sfx to an individual 
> frame-level of precision.  So I think I can manage without xjadeo.

Hi John,

well, maybe even Ardour is overkill, but I'm not aware of a really viable
solution in-between for slightly more involved audio work on Linux.
(maybe I'm wrong?)

Basically, Ardour is the same to audio editing, then Cinelerra is for video
when compared e.g. with Kino. Ardour is a "NLE" for sound, so to say, i.e.
you create a session, load some source sound material and from this point
on anything is done "virtual" and non-destructive.

In your case, there might be two problems: First of all, it's another quite

[CinCV] Help! Cannot apply preferences, bottom of settings window in Ubuntu Hardy is hidden by toolbar

[CinCV] Re: Help! Cannot apply preferences, bottom of settings window in Ubuntu Hardy is hidden by toolbar

Re: [CinCV] Help! Cannot apply preferences, bottom of settings window in Ubuntu Hardy is hidden by toolbar

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 23:24 +0300, phil hefferan wrote:
>  I cannot apply any Cinelerra settings->preferences changeson Ubuntu
> Hardy because the 'apply' button is hidden somewhere below the toolbar
> (if that is what it is called) along the bottom of the screen.  The
> prefernces window opens that way - with the bottom already obscured by
> that stupid Gnome toolbar thing, which does not seem to be able to be
> hidden or dragged away.
> 
> Neither can I hold down Alt and drag the preferences window up so I
> can to click 'apply', since the wndow will not move offscreen upwards
> past the top toolbar, unlike on simple desktops like Fluxbox.
> 
> This is somewhat urgent - how do I apply my preference changes and why
> is this window too large for the gnome desktop?  Did I inadvertently
> make it too large?
> 

I had the same problem when I started. As it turns out, you can not use
a 1024x768 screen. The minimum is 1280x1024. I guess this is the same
with you. You can overcome this problem also by pressing ALT-A [if I
remember correctly].

Frans.

Re: [CinCV] Help! Cannot apply preferences, bottom of settings window in Ubuntu Hardy is hidden by toolbar

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 23:24 +0300, phil hefferan wrote:
>  I cannot apply any Cinelerra settings->preferences changeson Ubuntu
> Hardy because the 'apply' button is hidden somewhere below the
> toolbar 
> Neither can I hold down Alt and drag the preferences window up 

Phil, 
Do you drag the central part of the window? (dragging the top bar
doesn't work).

> why is this window too large for the gnome desktop?

Cinelerra assumes video editors use screens at least 800 pixels in
height. But she is wrong, since some video editors don't.

Ciao
Raffaella