Getting to grips with Audition

After Jan had visited to give us a talk on sound design, I got in touch with workshop support and asked if they would be willing to give me a basic tutorial in how to use Audition. They were more than happy to oblige and agreed to run through the basics with me.

I found the session to be really useful and I learnt how to set up a multi track and how to import the footage that I wanted. When setting up a multi track you have to set up a new session and you can either use a pre-existing preset track or start from scratch. Tom and Jamie advised me that a clean track might be easier, as it will allow me to add my own effects build upon them, rather than starting out with pre-made effects. With this in mind, they informed me that I should probably stick to 48000Hz and 24 bit if I wanted a 'pro-sound'.

Because it was only the basics, I didn't learn much about blending the sounds, however, I did learn that I should alter the volume of the sound directly, as this damages the original soundtrack, but rather I should adjust the sound using the effects under the equalizer tabs. In terms of blending Tom and Jamie told me that I should be focusing on looking at the effects under filtering and EQ, as these will help to layer the sounds cleanly.

When adjusting the volumes of the sound, it is easier to do so in the mixer first, as this means that  can come back to the multi track and move things around if I need to. They also pointed out that if I do chop a sound clip to put a fade on at the start to reduce the click that would happen if I didn't have that there.
They ended by telling me a few tricks to help clean up audio such as the De-Esser tool, which minimises the 'ss' sound that some people make. There's also a notch filter which can be used to remove a certain frequency within the sound clip if you can find the frequency that it is on.

Overall, I found this tutorial really useful if not a little bit overwhelming. Audition is a big program that has the ability to many different things and it will take me a while to become familiar with what can be achieved with it. Having said this, I feel that I have a basic understanding that will get me started and Tom and Jamie have encouraged me to go back to them when I want to learn something more advanced.