Undoing effects in Audition

B

blando3

Well-known member
Im about to start editing sound clips for a project using Adobe Audition CC. I'm mostly using Auto Heal, applying it to WAV files. My question is this: How do I undo effects once I've saved, closed, and re-opened Audition? In Premiere you can just go and turn off or delete video or audio effects. Can you somehow do the same in Audition? So far I've been playing with Auto Heal, but see no way to turn off specific instances of it other than going back by undoing everything (unless I've closed it and reopened).

Does this all make sense? Any help would be great as I'm hoping to start work on this tonight.
Thanks!
Andrew
 
In general any effect you apply destructively can't be undone. I haven't used Audition so I'm not sure if the FX are destructive or not but my guess is yes. In video pretty much every NLE renders visual FX and then swaps out the rendered for the original so you can go back. THat is generally not the way DAW's work.

Also sound editing is a LOT closer to how After Effects works than to how a typical NLE works. Assuming Audition has multiple tracks, you want to spread things out. Dialog for instance is almost never cut on a single track. Usually you will at least checkerboard different actors and often different edits. When I am doing destructive things to sound clips I make a dupe and mute it on another track so I have an undo if I need it down the line. Everything in your time line is just an alias to the original so 10 copies don't take any more space than one. I also usually have muted or disabled tracks dedicated to things I cut out but might want later. You could just stash them in a bin or in the region list (DAW dependent terminology) but it's a lot faster to keep them muted in the time line since they stay in place that way.
 
That's what I figured. Kind of a drag because I'm adding Auto Heal all over the place, cleaning up little mouth noises. Very tedious work, and if the client says to remove an effect I added 2o minutes ago, there appears to be no way to do that easily other than go back to the original unaltered file (which of course I'm keeping copies of).
Thanks for the reply.
 
It's about time someone made the other tools in the workflow (like Audition) work non-destructively, like Premiere. After all, audio is WAY less data and WAY less processing than video, so it shouldn't be hard.

Meantime for a lot of projects where I just want fairly simple processing (fades and levelling and the like) I just use Premiere, even for a purely audio project. I find that works great. I end up with a timeline that has one or more audio tracks and an empty video track, then I can export it as MP3 or whatever.

Given that audio post mostly uses fades, and maybe some other stuff like parametric EQ, this works great; and since it's non-destructive, all the effects can be tweaked and previewed just like with video. You don't have to create intermediate renders and keep track of them on your hard drive like with Audition.

Of course if you want anything more fancy you'll have to go out to Audition, but I would still use Premiere to create the overall assembly.
 
This is why I never, ever have only one copy of a DAW session saved. When I create the session and get all the audio imported, I save the session. When I complete my first edit pass, I save the session separately (version A). After the second edit pass, version B. And so on and so on through all edits and mix passes until I save a _FINAL. That way I can always revert to a previous session, or import the unaffected audio from a previous session into the current session, if I need to. So, my sessions end up looking like this:

Series02Ep14.ptx
Series02Ep14_A.ptx
Series02Ep14_B.ptx
Series02Ep14_C.ptx
Series02Ep14_D.ptx
Series02Ep14_FINAL.ptx

Though, at least in ProTools, even destructive processing doesn't completely​ obliterate the unaffected audio. The original files are still in the file browser; it just means that you have to sight them in if you want to drag-and-drop back to the original.
 
Alex H. said:
This is why I never, ever have only one copy of a DAW session saved. When I create the session and get all the audio imported, I save the session. When I complete my first edit pass, I save the session separately (version A). After the second edit pass, version B. And so on and so on through all edits and mix passes until I save a _FINAL. That way I can always revert to a previous session, or import the unaffected audio from a previous session into the current session, if I need to. So, my sessions end up looking like this:
Click to expand...

Sounds like the Wife's approach to her Photoshop projects... but then... there's the _FINAL_FINAL2_..._REALLYDONENOMORE__ .. oh __ONEMORECHANGEDONE__

She also 'loses' files in the hierarchy... so I usually search on a tag like 'final'... case independent...
 
Well Sound Track Pro did work the way a NL:E does and it was a nightmare. Video editing is inherently different than sound editing and trying to make one work like the other is the road to hell.

With a program like Pro Tools destructive edits do (by default) write a new file and not over write the old file. What they don't do is keep track of everything that has happened to the clip so it can get tricky to find the "original" bit if you made a change long enough ago that you can't undo.
The answer is workflow as Alex mentioned. PT can be set to auto backup every X min and keep XX copies. If you couple this with , what you should be doing anyway, saving with a name that changes with each edit session/ day/ version/ whatever/ Then going back is rarely a big issue.

Blando3,

A trick that will save you time and allow the undo is to forget the "auto heal" and grab small slices of dead air close to the sound you want to cut out and just paste (non destructively) it over the sound. THen it will be a new really small clip and you can just delete it if they want the lip smack back.

What would be done on a feature is that all of those "unwanted" sounds would be pulled out to a muted track so they can be auditioned for the director if needed and some can be put back in if needed. You sometimes need to have some in, especially breaths, or the audience will be bothered by the unnaturalness of the track.

Atticus,

You may be right for a video editor doing their own sound, but not for a sound editor. In a film post situation you are talking about hundreds of tracks often and a LOT of plugins. Files have been processed (especially SFX) in other sessions and those changes would be a nightmare to track.

STP tried to do that by creating CAF files which are containers really. So every change yu make gets rendered and stuck in the container along with a list of how each variation goes together. THe files can get huge and they need to be decoded into a format other programs can read to send them anywhere (and that of course disables any undo). Plus sound files, SFX anyway) tend to be reused a lot. So unless you make a brand new copy EVERY-TIME you use a sound file any undo or change you make to does that same undo to every other use of the same sound. In fact if that CAF file is used in more than one project and you haven't made copies every time then you will change the sound in sessions that are not even open...

So again you are heading into big bloat zone. The "fix" would be to write a new file every time you make a change. But then each new copy needs to have all of the changes so now you start to get really serious bloat.

The bloat issue isn't usually huge since audio is fairly low data rate but if you use five seconds of a two hour clip then your five second clip is two gigs so it can be a problem. But the change one change them all was a real killer.

With picture you are hardly ever reusing material, and when you do you do need to make it a new independent clip or you will have the same problem.
 
Noiz2 said:
With picture you are hardly ever reusing material, and when you do you do need to make it a new independent clip or you will have the same problem.
Click to expand...

Well, one of the ways an NLE will deal with filters, is to perform the filter 'real time', and only burn in the results of the filter on rendering. In the case of AfterEffects, the real time render buffer was always limited and one would see the results completely only on the rendered output.

In the case of NLEs many have some set of RT capability, but other FX operations require rendering. But the main thing was that the one's I've used FCP/Premiere they never replaced the current track with the burned in version. One could do that in AE it was 'prerendering' or something like that so that during the RT playback the AE render engine had less to do.

But it has surprised me that most DAWs seem to replace the track with the 'rendered' version.
 
I can't really talk with a lot of expertise about other DAWs but PT has both track plugins that act like what you are talking about and destructive plugins that act on a section of a track. I believe that the latest version also has clip based FX and those probably act like the track plugins.

A good example of why this is problematic in sound editing is the OP's case. He is "fixing" a ton of very short bits. So to use clip based plugins he would have to isolate each bit and apply a plugin to fix the bit. This is the kind of thing that you just never do in picture editing.

Again After Effects is a lot closer in that like sound editing it is an additive process not a subtractive one like picture editing is (mostly). There are times in AE where you would do something like remove lip smacks, but not often. You do layer up though and that is very similar.

AE, unless you are doing very simple things or have a huge monster machine plays in slower than real time till it has made a pass through and buffered the temp rendering of what you are playing. If you try to play more than it can buffer it never gets up to real time with out rendering. Sound needs to play in real time all of the time, and it needs to do it when you hit play not after it renders. I have been on systems that couldn't keep up and it slows work down to a crawl.
 
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