Audio standards and Adobe Loudness Radar

Audio standards and Adobe Loudness Radar at PVC follows up on a recent PVC article with additional background and tutorial links on a new tool in Adobe Creative Cloud.

Premiere Pro News Notes #6-7 (Audio Editions)

...collects news on noise removal, normalize, EQ, Editing and Animating to Sound, control audio in Clip Mixer and Timeline, voice overs, Adobe Audition and other of assorted audio-related tutorials and tips on Adobe Premiere Pro.

Premiere Pro News Notes #06 (Audio Edition)

Premiere Pro News Notes #07 (more Audio)

Thumbnail by Satya Meka.

Animating After Effects to Sound with Chris Meyer

Although video/film types sometimes say that "sound is half the experience," sound and music are often an afterthought in After Effects. Music industry people who crossed over are exceptions, like Chris and Trish Meyer of Crish Design, who have provided guidance on audio matters in After Effects since the days of InterActivity magazine.

Chris, who was involved in the development of the MIDI spec (see the Sonikmatter interview), posted related articles on PVC for years, and now has an updated comprehensive tutorial series...

Read the rest on Pro Video Coalition!

Headphones: a few resources was posted recently on PVC.

While audio monitors are important for video, you might find sound isolation and higher quality easier to afford with headphones. If you're tired of standard issue headphones like the Sony MDR-V6 or MDR-7506, but still want to avoid frequency manipulations of popular lifestyle headphones like Beats Audio. Accurate reproduction and flat frequency response isn't just a matter of more money, but an adventure in trial and error. While there are a ton of places to get advice and reviews of headphones, dedicated websites provide the best access to information and experience.

Silk: an experiment in generative art + Tone Matrix

Jeff Almasol noted Silk, an experiment in animated generative art by Yuri Vishnevsky, a college student. It's simple but elegant, and headed to iOS. There are shortcuts for more functionality, like hitting the S or X key, or E, which generates a thumbnail of the picture which can then be saved as a PNG for compositing on black.

It's not so different from Flame Painter. Too bad that the open source AE Flame plug-in is stuck in CS4 (see Neosapien and Flam3); a JDI day for an AE script or Pixel Bender version of Silk would be cool though.

Silk is sort of the visual analogue of Tone Matrix by Andre Michelle (and by extension iNudge and various other time-sucks).

Auto-fade audio in AE when voice track starts

In AE Help, Todd Kopriva lists instructions for the Convert Audio To Keyframes keyframe assistant and some Online resources for converting audio to keyframes.

Among them is a reference to Ducking Audio Expressions posted at Video Copilot forums, meant to automate music fades as voice tracks start:

"Nathan Gambles provides an expression on the Video Copilot website that ducks (reduces the volume of) audio on one layer when the volume of audio on another layer increases. This technique is useful, for example, for automatically decreasing the volume of a soundtrack when dialog occurs. This expression for the Stereo Mixer effect depends on the Convert Audio To Keyframes keyframe assistant having been applied to the other audio layer."

Update: Motion Graphics Exchange listed this last year and has newer related related auto-fading and more.

Tutorials taking you beyond the basics

Todd Kopriva has a hyper-view of 2 recent tutorials by Andrew Devis mentioned in Using audio to control AE: 2 approaches in his post tutorials on using linear expression method, null control layers, and expression controls:

"... the real strength of these tutorials isn’t in the audio part of that instruction; it’s in the linking part.

Andrew shows very clearly and methodically how to use expressions (specifically the linear expression method), the expression pick whip, null object layers, expression control effects… all of which are immensely powerful and crucial features. Unfortunately, these same features are usually very intimidating for new users.

In other words, I think that Andrew may be selling himself short by saying that these are tutorials about something as easy to do as converting audio to keyframes. In fact, they are great resources for teaching some of the most important and universally useful features to help someone to move from the basics into doing seriously complex and advanced work in After Effects."

Read the rest, with the proper links, at After Effects region of interest.

Recording sound effects + free audio in Soundbooth

AEtuts and Creative Cow released some complementary tutorials in the last day. AEtuts and Audiotuts teamed to deliver Recording Action Movie Sound Effects Like A Pro – Audio Premium (previewed below), which show you how to produce your own Hollywood-style action movie sound effects with some grocery shopping.

Meanwhile, Andrew Devis posted Free Music & Sound FX in Soundbooth, which shows how to find and use the free music and sound fx in both CS4 & CS5 -- as well as a sneak peek at Sonicfire Pro 5.

Update: AE Freemart also noted Sound design for motion graphics by Jeff Earley.

Using audio to control AE: 2 approaches

Andrew Devis is on a roll with yet another tutorial -- this time it's a 2-part tutorial on Using Audio To Control Effects. It's a unique approach in that they do the same thing but with slightly different methods.

Paraphrasing, the 1st part is the workmanlike approach, both slightly simpler and quicker, and ideal if you are only controlling a couple of items with your audio. Version 2 shows how to keep all the controllers on a single layer and is better suited for more complex projects with many layers, which need good organisation. The first tutorial is better if you are not experienced in using audio and expressions.

Audio waveform graphics in After Effects

Video Copilot posted a demo, project, and background on Audio Waveforms in AE.

There's more on the Audio Waveform and Audio Spectrum filters in Motionworks video quicktips by Maltaannon Effects A-Z: Audio Spectrum with Maltaannon and Effects A-Z: Audio Waveform, in a 2-part video tutorial by Aharon Rabinowitz, and by Chad Perkins on Lynda.com.

To extend the idea, see Sound Reacting 3D Waveform without 3rd Party Plugins and The Best Sound You’ll Ever See! by Satya Meka from AEtuts. Satya doesn't use a 3rd party filter (i.e., Trapcode Sound Keys), and his techniques present many options. Also, Sam Hampton-Smith wrote up his technique using the Wave World effect and the the CC Ball Action Twist Property in AFTER EFFECTS TUTORIAL: ANIMATE 3D WAVEFORMS USING AFTER EFFECTS.

Update: here's a fun animation, Reengineering the Esquire logo by Universal Everything (some reminiscent of Tim Clapham's Stylized 3D text with Trapcode Form),

Reengineering the Esquire logo from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

commonsExplorer: a browser for Flickr + more

commonsExplorer is an experimental interactive browser for the Flickr Commons, a collection of pictures with "no known copyright restrictions." It provides a "big picture" of these collections with a single screen interface that reveals structures and patterns and encourages exploration.

commonsExplorer is a Java executable, so Windows and Linux users will need to have Java installed. The application requires a network connection, and may not work from behind a firewall or proxy.

Creative Commons has had its own search function for awhile according to a post at Google Operating System, which has a nice cache of articles on new features in Google Image search, which can filter for usage rights under advanced search.

For video, see Free Online Stock Video Footage | 9 Of The Best Public Domain Video Resources from WebTV Wire (one dropped out); for audio see Videomaker's compilation of royalty free sound FX and Legal Music For Videos from Creative Commons.

Update: via @juanmiguelsalas comes 15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online by Six Revisions.

Update 2: see Royalty Free Music For YouTube Videos at Who Is Matt, and Openfootage.net.

Change After Effects CS5 render sounds

As noted last year, you can have Custom render sounds in After Effects, and now CS5 Help tells you how on the Mac. According to Change the render-complete sounds, just replace the rnd_fail.wav or rnd_okay.wav files found in these locations:

• On the Mac, Show Package Contents on the Adobe After Effects CS5.app, then navigate to Contents/Resources/sounds/
• In Windows, C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS5\Support Files\sounds\

If you have several machines, the source of the sound may not be obvious, so you could add an ID to the sound yourself -- or use a the built-in e-mail scripts (explained by Ko Maruyama) or one on AEScripts, Render, Email, Incremental Save and Shutdown. Prolost explains to how to expand options to view the render remotely in Use Dropbox to Remotely Monitor After Effects Renders.

You can also turn off render chimes by setting "Play sound when render finishes" to "0" in the Adobe After Effects 10.0 Prefs file (locations may have changed). The classic render chime (Happy-Happy-Joy-Joy) sound may have gone the way of Wireframe Previews.

Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over

Adobe's Jason Levine talks about Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over in part of an episode of Short and Suite, the Adobe.tv series that shows users how to use Production Premium with real post-production examples. Unfortunately this and other demos were done Adobe Audition 3, one of Adobe's elite apps, superior to the similar but hobbled app now included in the Adobe video suite.

Noise/Hum Removal in Adobe Audition 3 from Jason Levine on Vimeo.

Update: Ignore the whining and check out Jason's useful posts on issues like normalization and volume matching, etc.

55 websites to download free sound

via on PSDTOP, an RSS aggregator of Photoshop tutorials... 55 Great Websites To Download Free Sound Effects. Free isn't necessarily free to use, so check the license; in many cases buying music and sound is less trouble.

Scrub in audio units in editors

I'm Not Bruce notes (along with other things good to remember) that Syncing Multiclips 1/100th of a Frame at a Time is possible in Final Cut, not just Premiere Pro. In FCP, you can scrub in the audio Viewer with the Shift key down to help with precise tasks.

In Premiere you can choose Show Audio Time Units from the wing menu of the Audio Mixer, Program Monitor, Source Monitor, or Timeline panel.

Update: You can scrub audio in AE, but you don't have the fine control as in Premiere or other NLEs. Nick Campbell explained aspects of The Correct Way To Use Audio in After Effects:

ASND: the CS4 non-destructive audio format

Paul Ellis mentioned the ASND format in a recent post on Inside Sound, an Adobe audio blog:

'The Adobe Sound Document (ASND), which is pronounced “a-sound”, was introduced in Soundbooth CS4 to address the “Oops Factor” in the world of audio editing. When you save your edits to an audio file using the ASND format, effects and volume changes are saved in a non-destructive way so that you can open the file later and tweak these settings. Additionally, the ASND format supports the notion of Snapshots. Similar to Snapshots in Photoshop, this gives you the ability to save multiple versions of your edits and allows you to easily switch between them. By default, Soundbooth will ask if you want to save the original document in the ASND package so you can always retrieve the untouched file you started with.'

Also, I like the New Soundbooth Feature: Match Volume that I'd missed from using Audition. Match Volume matches your files to a specified dB volume or to matches them all to the level of one of the selected files. CS4 Soundbooth features are summarized in this video:

Pixxy: audio visualizer for AE

Update: Pixxy now works in CS6!

Fractallonomy Pixxy is a set of plug-ins for After Effects that can convert music into visual effects directly with no keyframing (via). It comes with 2D and 3D plug-ins that can use chaos, mathematics, and audio input, and over 100 tutorials and examples. According to the developer, "Some of these have already appeared in some form within DigiEffect's last product, 'Fantazm', just in case you have seen the name Pixxy before. However, the plugs have been heavily modified since then."

Someday iTunes visualizers like Trapcode Klangfarbe and AlphaOmega could also be ported to AE.

Psychoacoustic masking and audio compression

Jay Rose of DV and PVC has a four-part series on psychoacoustics and compression now posted as Hearing What’s Not There, Living with (Data) Loss, Vacuum Packed, and QuickTime Quickies.

Jay summarized the series like this:

• What’s going on inside your head when you hear things
• How psychoacoustic compression algorithms work
• How lossless compression shrinks an audio file without any changes… but only if you’ve got a powerful computer
• A few non-intuitive tricks that can streamline how you and your clients exhange audio over QuickTime.
  

Not covered in the referenced article from Nature Neuroscience but also fascinating is the cocktail party effect, which Wikipedia describes as "the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations" (like a complicated band-pass filter).

Note: SoundHack "is a soundfile processing program for the Macintosh. It performs many utility and esoteric sound processing functions available nowhere else. These functions make SoundHack invaluable to computer musicians, sound effects designers, multimedia artists, webmasters and anyone else who enjoys working with sound." At one point, SoundHack was the choice for resampling for many multimedia journeymen and audio geeks, and has branched into plug-ins for Windows and Mac.

Flash video metadata coming soon

To follow various posts on audio transcription in Premiere and Soundbooth, Beet.TV has video of a talk by Adobe's Jim Guerard last month at Stanford: Flash Video Will Have Metadata In Workflow Soon, Senior Adobe Executive Says.

Earlier Beet.TV mentioned "announced collaboration between Google, Yahoo! and Adobe to search and index Flash files" (swf), and Adobe strategist Mark Randall said, Video Indexing is the Key to the Future of the Web.

Musings about audio metadata

In an August '08 EventDV article, The Moving Picture: Musings About Premiere Pro CS4, Jan Ozer talks up audio transcription. It's in Premiere and Soundbooth and maybe other Production Premium apps. Others seem to concur -- in an NAB tidbit, Beet.TV and an Adobe rep talked about how Video metadata is key to web future. And as noted here in NAB 2008 on Adobe TV, Hart Schafer did a demo of Production Premium CS4 showing off this impressive feature (better viewed at Adobe), which works a bit differently than Avid ScriptSync (see the Avid overviews).

This technology was reported earlier here; I got great results in Soundbooth with good recordings in American English with clear diction, and no speakers talking over each other. Beet.TV has been tracking this technology more broadly and reports that YouTube is doing transcription now too, along with Blinkx and others.