NLE audio feature?

[James McLellan]

I'm reasonably familiar with FCP and a bit with older versions of Premiere but not Avid or Vegas. My question is this:

Does anyone know of an NLE that lets you place tracks of audio into switchable folders?

For example, I would like to have 5-6 tracks for mixing dialogue and location sound, then 4-6 tracks for sfx and 4-6 for music. At the end there are often 20 tracks of audio. I would like to be able to switch between these different groupings instead of having them all piled one on top of the other. Also, protools is not in my workflow if that makes any difference.

 

[Charles Angus]

Can't do that in FCP.

Closest you could come is editing your sound in nested sequences. Which sucks.

 

[rod bradley]

Although there is no precise provision that I know of, it would be easy enough to do this in FCP if I understand you correctly. You could either simply duplicate your time-line and call them DIA, SFX, Music or whatever and have only the relevant tracks present -- or you could have them all grouped and color labeled and disable those that you didn't want to play. Very quickly and fluidly.

I do this all the time.

 

[Keith Stark]

Vegas has busses, so you can group your audio as you like, then also add effects ( full dx/vst support ) , and any kind of volume/ pan/ effects with automation to the busses just like the individual trackes. You can also do that with the main bus , and mix in surround. I've mixed 40+ tracks and hour plus projects with it for years.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Vegas is the best for that since it has buses.

In Avid, you can't do that but you can rename the tracks, which does make turning groups of tracks on and off a bit easier.

Eg I have DX1, DX2, DX3 and FX1, FX2 and MX1, MX2, MX3 in Avid instead of A1,A2,A3,A4,A5,A6,A7 disorganized FCP hell.

I also have my colors set up in Avid so that all of my dialogue tracks are shades of blue, music tracks are shades of white, etc. This helps a lot too.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com