Can I open several multitrack sessions at once?

Question

Dear Audition Gurus
 
I am working on a podcast with seven interviews that we are intercutting.  Each interview has two tracks:  Our host, and the guest.  That makes about 20 tracks altogether.  I tried editing all this in a giant layout, with each on its own track, plus MX, VO, NATSND, and SFX.  Audition did not like this, at least with my computer (I have 16gb of RAM and multiple storage devices, but  I got very confused, and Audition did not like it.)
 
My next strategy was to edit each interview separately, with just the two tracks, producing a single session file for each guest with the two edited and synced tracks.  I am pretty much done with this.
 
NOW... deep breath ... I am ready to do the final assembly.  I'm including a screengrab here of the "Master Template" that I've created for this -- showing each Guest and corresponding Host track.  I am pausing here to plot out the best way of approaching this. 
 
I still need to keep the Host and Guest tracks separate -- hence the Intv and the Guest tracks -- because I need to process each separately.  We used a remote recording program (Squadcast) that worked very well, gave us quality WAV files on separate tracks, but there are different voice qualities, noise, etc. that I need to address separately in each case.  For this reason, I did not do a mixdown of each interview, merging the host and guest tracks.  Not yet.
 
This means that I now need to copy each pair of tracks and paste them into the Master Template.
 
What is the best practice for this?  I need to get all the tracks into my Master Template, keeping them all separate, and do my editing in that layout (splitting clips, moving and intercutting between guests), inserting VO bridges where necessary), and apply effects and processing to each track individually, THEN do my final mixdown.  
 
I think.
 
I await your guidance, which has been very much appreciated as I ride this Sisyphian learning curve.

Thanks.

Rob

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SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

Whilst there is an app (sesx2sesx) that can let you append sessions onto the end of sessions, I think that doing this here would be compounding your problems somewhat...

To do a job like this normally - without Losing The Will To Live (which is what your process puts me in mind of, I'm afraid), I'd just edit the interviews together first and not bother about effects, etc at this stage - it's a complete distraction. Just open all of the files you want to take bits from, highlight each bit you want to include and save that as a marker range, which you can give a name to so you know what they all are. Now, when you right-click on one of these ranges in the marker list itself, you get an option to insert that range into a multitrack session. If you already have one open, it comes up as an option.

So then you'll have all the parts you actually want to include as a series of clips, and it doesn't actually matter that they're all on one track, either. The reason for this is that if you know what treatment you want to apply to, say, an interviewer then you can apply this just to the clip - doesn't have to be for the whole track. And if you want to use that again, save it as a rack preset and you can use it selectively on as many clips as you like, without affecting the others. Get it all sounding right like this, mix it down and you're done.

This is actually the way Audition was designed to be used, and for good reason. Most of this stuff is essentially radio (dressed up as a 'podcast') and quite frankly, nobody's going to notice that everything isn't 100% perfect. What does matter is getting it out in a timely manner. If you don't use a streamlined production process and get used to it, you'll never make another podcast, ever (see LTWTL above for reason why).

This is what broadcasting in any form is really about. Nobody cares what it sounds like, as long as they can understand it - they only care about the content, and if they don't care about that, then they'll switch off. This may sound a bit harsh and in some ways it is - but it's reality, I'm afraid.

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