Adobe Audition & Soundbooth

ADOBE AUDITION CS5.5

Adobe Audition is Adobe's comprehensive audio editing application. It started life as Cool Edit Pro, and then Adobe bought the program and added many things to it over the years.   With the advent of The CS3 Production Studio Adobe replaced Audition the the suite with Adobe Soundbooth - similar program but with a simpler interface, which they dubbed as "an audio program for web editors".   Soundbooth was a great little program but for anyone used to the control given by Audition (or similar programs like Avid's ProTools or Sony's Sound Forge) Soundbooth was not comprehensive enough.  So Adobe have decided to re-write Audition, produce both a MAC and PC version (Audition CS3 was PC-only which was not good considering the rest of the Production Studio works on both Mac and PC) and replace Soundbooth in the Production Studio with Audition and the launch of CS5.5.

Dynamic link with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

With CS5.5 and the launch of the revamped Audition Adobe also introduced a new link between Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition.  Now we have two ways to send audio from Premiere Pro to Audition of work:

1. Send one clip for sweetening
2. Send the entire timeline (or section thereof) for mixing.

Send one audio clip to Audition

With previous versions you could send one clip to Audition - just click on the clip and choose "edit in Audition".  Premiere makes a copy of the sound file, opens this in Audition, you carry out the work and then save the results.  Once back in Premiere you will find that the file which is edited in Audition has replaced the original audio.  In this way the original audio is kept (and you can revert to if if needed) but you can quickly access Audition without much effort.  We use this function in particular when using Auditions great audio clean up and noise removal tools.

Send the whole timeline to Audition

Typically you have made a picture edit and done some sound work inside of Premiere and now you want to do a final audio mix.  Premiere has some nice sound tools but Audition is better - it does better quality pitch conversion - if slowing down or speeding up sound for example - and has better tools for equalising levels and removing noise.  Simply put a program dedicated to sound editing is better than a video editing program which does sound as well.

Select the timeline (or select some clips on the timeline if you do not want the whole thing) and choose EDIT IN AUDITION - SEQUENCE.  A bit like editing a single clips Premiere Pro will now make copies of all the sound involved and, if you want to see the picture along side the sound in Audition a "mixdown" of the picture edit.  It will then open this in Audition with all the audio clips intact in the right place on the audition timeline.  It may take some time if you have a complex timeline with lots of clips, or you could choose to just take the sound and not the picture.

Inside Audition you add clips, tweak the sound and edit as much as you want.  Then you choose to send the mix back to Adobe Premiere Pro.  This will take all the audio clips in audition and mix them down into a new audio file which will be placed in Premiere Pro underneath the existing Premiere sound.  You can choose to send the mix back as one file or have one file for each track in Audition

Audition will edit mono, stereo or 5.1 sound files and export these formats back to Premiere Pro.

NOISE REDUCTION WITH AUDITION

Adobe Premiere as a filter called noise reduction whereby you can select a sound in a sound file (a hiss or a buzz for example) and then get Premiere to remove that noise from the rest of the sound clip.

The idea for this filter came from Audition which has the same noise reduction option with more controls and which works better than the Premiere Pro filter.

You select the noise you want to remove and "capture" the noise print.  Then you use the controls show to remove the noise from the whole file.  You normally do not remove everything as this has bad effects on the sound which is left behind.  This process is basically removing certain frequencies from the sound and if those frequencies also coincide with someone's speech (for example) removing them will affect the speech as well as the noise.  So you minimise the noise reduction whilst maintaining the sound you want to keep.  Audition, with a lot more control than Premiere Pro does a much better job.

Audition has quite a few noise reduction options including using the SPECTRAL display (see below).

SPECTRAL DISPLAY

Audition can display sound as a waveform or in as a SPECTRAL DISPLAY.  This shows the sound as a series of frequencies with the high frequencies at the top and the low frequencies at the bottom.  Dark sections are quiet, light sections are noisy.  This lets you see which frequencies are actually used in the sound and they you can lasso some and reduce or remove them.

A good example would be a shot with a seagull in the background.  The high pitch noise of the seagull appears as bright orange blobs in the display so you can select and delete them.

EFFECTS

Audition has a whole host of effects for tweaking and changing the sound.  It includes ways to level the volume of the sound (making the loud sections quieter and raising the quiet sections), pitch shifting, EQ, reverbs, distortion, pitch shifting, tools for extracting the centre channel from a stereo track, and much more

VST plug-ins

Audition will also load standard VST plug-ins - and there are a lot of these around either free ones of one which you can buy.  Adobe Premiere will take VST plug-ins BUT ONLY 64 bit plug-ins, and there are a lot less of these available.  Audition is still a 32 bit program so will take a lot more of the plug-ins that are currently available.

ADOBE AUDITION CS5.5 SPECIFICATIONS

• Edit precisely and mix projects professionally, now on both Mac OS and Windows
• Work efficiently with sound effects
• Fix audio problems fast with superior analysis and noise reduction
• Integrate audio with Adobe Premiere Pro, third-party NLEs, and popular DAWs

Product features

• Native Mac support
• Record, mix, edit, and master your audio with a powerful crossplatform audio toolset: Adobe Audition CS5.5 runs natively on Mac OS X v10.5 and v10.6, as well as on Windows.
• Project exchange with third-party NLEs and popular DAWs - Easily move sessions between Adobe Audition and Avid Pro Tools using built-in OMF import and export functions in Adobe Audition. Share files with other video NLEs via XML interchange.
• Batch processing- Speed up tedious tasks with batch processing.
• Waveform and spectral editing - Work in Waveform View and Spectral Display on Mac OS or Windows. Edit audio using the traditional Waveform View or the frequency-based Spectral Display that makes it easy to isolate and remove unwanted noise.
• Roundtrip editing with Adobe Premiere Pro - Sweeten audio for video easily. Pass individual clips and multitrack mixes from Adobe Premiere Pro to Adobe Audition for editing, or send Adobe Premiere Pro sequences with a reference video to Adobe Audition for complete soundtrack creation.

System requirements

Macintosh

• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.8 or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM; 2GB for HDV and HD playback
• 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case sensitive file system or on removable flash storage devices)
• 1280x800 display with OpenGL 2.0? compatible graphics card
• Core Audio compatible sound card
• DVD-ROM drive (SuperDrive recommended)
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for QuickTime features
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis*

Windows

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor (Intel Core?2 Duo or AMD Phenom II recommended)
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise; or Windows 7
• 1GB of RAM; 2GB for HDV and HD playback
• 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)
• 1280x800 display with OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card
• Sound card compatible with ASIO protocol or Microsoft WDM/MME
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for QuickTime features
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis