No editing to audio in After Effects
by Mark Onat
on
Jul 16, 2009 at 10:26:21 am
I just want to make sure I get this straight - so the deal is that there is NO monitoring of audio in After Effects real time...I know its a good compositor, but somehow in the demo, I never understood that I can't actually edit my composites to an audio track? How is this possible?
I'm using aiffs and wavs...I dont understand, I'm supposed to throw the audio on afterwards? I dont get this...and yeah RAM preview...great...I get to hear the sound when I hit the period button, but I dont get to see my animation move at the same time? HUH?
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by John Hammond on Jul 16, 2009 at 10:36:42 am
when you RAM preview you should hear the sound play with the video. Make sure the sound icon is 'on' on the layer, and the sound icon in the RAM preview options is on too.
If still problems you can access your AE sound hardware setup from Edit/Preferences/Audio hardware.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Michael Szalapski on Jul 16, 2009 at 1:32:41 pm
When you do what Joey said, and hit 0 on the numeric keypad you can also hit * on the numeric keypad to make markers. (You can do that in . audio preview or 0 RAM preview). That helps you do your animation to music or other audio. Plus you can view your audio's waveform too. Just twirl down the audio part of your audio layer.
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Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Jon Geddes on Jul 16, 2009 at 2:04:02 pm
You can edit audio in AE, but it's not really designed for it. You would be much better off using a multi-track audio application such as vegas, audition, soung forge, etc... Adobe Premiere would even be better to use for audio than AE.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Kevin Camp on Jul 16, 2009 at 2:44:59 pm
jon's right, you don't want to edit audio in ae, but i think th eop is looking to edit to audio, rather than edit audio.
all suggestions listed here are good (i do think that audio was not enabled for previews, which was covered in john's response and can also be checked in composition>previews, make sure that 'audio' has a check mark), i would add that you can also scrub and hear audio if you hold control(pc)/option(mac) while dragging the cti in the timeline. and holding the same modifier key while holding down the mouse button and not dragging the cti will play a brief audio clip (maybe half-second).
the way i'll typically work to time effects with audio is:
twirl down the waveform (or hit 'LL'), drag height the wavefrom area to make it taller/easier to see.
with audio layer selected hit the decimal key to audio preview and hit the '*' on the numbers pad to add markers as it plays in realtime.
use the scrub with audio feature to refine the marker positions.
if needed, label the markers to make it esier to know what i'm sync'ing to.
it seems like more work than it really is, you can typically get those steps done in several minutes. and seeing the waveform as the audio plays helps quite a bit for timing accuracy.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Jeremy Allen on Jul 16, 2009 at 5:48:56 pm
Mark, it's one of the hardest things to get use to with AE, but its true... No real-time audio/video sync while refining the animation. After making your markers, looking at waveforms, etc, you basically have to try something, ram preview...tweak that, ram preview.. rinse and repeat as necessary.
You may know some of this but I'll throw it out there just in case.
You can speed up the process a little by working at half resolution and 50% screen size. You can also try working in Draft 3D, which disables lights, depth of field, and other processor intensive features.
Oh, one other thing...if you have a lot of video that you need to move around, precomp it, put a still graphic on the second layer of the precomp and turn the video layer off. This way you can ram preview with only the stills, which is a lot quicker. Of course this may not work in every situation, but it usually saves a lot of time for me.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Mark Onat on Jul 16, 2009 at 7:25:44 pm
Thanks all for your pointers on how you work with this dumb aspect of AE.
I used the mid resolution settings to do a RAM preview, although I dont understand why it has to grind through this every time instead of just leaving the animation rendered, like in FCP, but ok...0 on the keypad instead of the spacebar to run the audio with the video? Why not the spacebar? That's what the mute button on the audio track is there for...this makes no sense..depending on how long my edit is, then I have to fiddle with preview settings...there are other programs without this hangup...
I edit my audio in Live, a surprisingly great DAW as well as sample/fiddler, and a program that makes my adobe ware look stodgy.
It's been just one thing after another with Production CS4...I thought I liked AE, but it figures I didnt notice this until I bought it...
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Dave Johnson on Jul 16, 2009 at 8:02:12 pm
In addition to the manual, perhaps it would be beneficial to take a look at some of the countless previous posts on this topic ... a few in particular by Dave LaRonde come to mind since they explain the answers to your specific questions and others implied within them.
AE isn't and wasn't intended to be an NLE like FCP, etc., which is why it doesn't function like one. The fact is that much of what the Film, TV and Video industries are today was built on the shoulders of Adobe's software and, more specifically, After Effects. Perhaps before slamming After Effects in an After Effects forum, you might consider that the real issue is your own lack of understanding, rather than that there is something wrong with the software.
If you like your DAW and other software better, perhaps you should just do what you need to do in that other software. No offense since it might actually be beneficial to you for someone to say this before you waste a ton of time ... you sound precisely the opposite type of editor that generally has any success at all with AE.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by Joey Foreman on Jul 16, 2009 at 8:16:44 pm
With some of them you just know right off the bat that there's no point in wasting time with anything more than the briefest response. I applaud all the others who made an effort to recapitulate the manual for him, Hopefully someone else can benefit from your thoughtful input.
Re: No editing to audio in After Effects by John Hammond on Jul 17, 2009 at 10:00:11 am
Thanks to everyone who responded, I learned some good tips that will speed my work up, like CTRL+ Drag the cti, CTRL+Click for a 1 sec preview,
And I'd never thought of using * for markers on an audio preview, maybe that will get rid of the half a second time delay I always get when placing markers to a video.
Thanks,
and Mark, as for why space bar isn't play.. well imagine if a photoshop user came to AE and the space wasn't the hand tool they would be just as uncomfortable as you are with having to use 0 on num. keypad. Anyway you obviously don't get the real difference between Space and 0, and I can't be bothered to explain to you.
