Shifting an entire session in time
I ran up against a problem using Audition CS6 in a film post production environment, where I had to re-conform a soundtrack already built in Audition to changes in the picture where black video was added at the front of the video. This shifted the video by a fixed amount of time, so I needed to also shift the entire soundtrack by the same amount of time. In CS6 (at least), there is no way to do this, except by hand. I had already done this once before I had the rather extensive track automation, and wasn't willing to do that again. The easy part, of course, is Selecting All clips and moving them en masse which works great, but that does not shift any Track Automation or Markers. That was a problem.
So, I wrote a PHP program to make the necessary changes to the session file for me automatically.You only need to provide a file name and an offset (in samples), and it changes all the necessary values in the session file and writes out a new file. This may be a unique need for post production, and although there may be work-arounds, in my particular case where I will be outputting the picture from Pr and the 5.1 soundtrack from Au, and marrying them in a DCP externally, the audio files needed to be exactly the same length as the video. So, although loading the audio in Pr and outputting the entire package from there would work for many cases, it would not for me.
At any rate, that work is done. If anyone has this need, I am happy to provide you the script to run yourself. Just PM me with your email.
Just as a caution, mind your sample rates and video FPS values. I had a video in 23.976, which I then built a soundtrack to from scratch with a 48kHz sample rate in Au, so I ended up having to shift by 96,096 samples for my 2 seconds, instead of 96,000. That 96 samples is the 1% difference between 23.976 and 24 FPS. In Pr, if you have a Sequence in 23.976, at 2 seconds your timecode will show 00:00:02:00. But if you turn on Show Audio Time Units, that same point at 2 seconds shows 00:00:02:00096 (or 96 samples beyond 96,000, or 2 seconds at 48,000Hz sample rate). So, in shifting my soundtrack in Au, in order to have exact sample accuracy, I had to shift by 96,096. My sync points at head and tail lined up on the sample. At 2 seconds in Au, with the time display set at 23.976, my sample count is 96,096, as it should be.
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