Can I nest one multitrack session inside another?

[Trevor_Asq]

eg

Session1: Interview recording - needs 2nd mic muting when not used (with appropriate fades), eq, compression, level adjustments etc.

Session2: editorial cut of session1, music added etc

Ideally it would also be possible to ‘relink’ the session 1 to an updated version.

Why?:

Mainly to enable 2 people to work concurrently in a fast turnaround situation but also there are times when the same interview may be used multiple times for different shows. Be very useful to have non-destructive & tweakable cleaned master interview.

Bonus question:

Are there other DAWs that have this? Certainly some NLEs do.

(Workaround currently is to do export session1 and relink master file to the fixed wav in session 2)

[ryclark · Accepted solution]

Audition doesn't I'm afraid and I don't know if other DAWs do either. However there may be a work around since there is a third party utility for merging Audition sessions which might help in your situation.

Sesx2Sesx 

[Trevor_Asq]

Thanks, that did pop up in a search but I think it’s windows and only really useful for merging sessions - which isn’t really what I’m after.

I’ve posted a FR - Allow nesting if sessions – Adobe video & audio apps  - complete with dodgy spelling!

[Trevor_Asq]

ryclark  wrote

Audition doesn't I'm afraid and I don't know if other DAWs do either.

Turns out that Reaper has ‘sub projects’ - which seems to be a pretty neat implementation of nesting in a DAW. It knows, when saving a sub project, to export a mixdown that replaces the previous version in the main project.

Also Resolve, being a CCR/NLE/VFX/DAW hybrid, has nesting too. That has advantages where multiple folks can collaborate on the same project. Not sure how well that works in practice.

So far I prefer Audition for just about everything else though...

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Trevor_Asq  wrote

Session1: Interview recording - needs 2nd mic muting when not used (with appropriate fades), eq, compression, level adjustments etc.

Session2: editorial cut of session1, music added etc

Ideally it would also be possible to ‘relink’ the session 1 to an updated version.

Mainly to enable 2 people to work concurrently in a fast turnaround situation but also there are times when the same interview may be used multiple times for different shows. Be very useful to have non-destructive & tweakable cleaned master interview.

You can pretty much do this just with cutting and pasting. If you have two channels of an interview in one session, and you apply muting and panning using the on-screen rubber bands then you can copy both tracks at once, and keep the rubber banding intact. Even if you have different clips at different points and tracks on the timeline, this still works - Ctrl-A then Ctrl-C, and then Ctrl-V on the second session, and the relative positions of the clips is retained.

On top of that, this will also copy clip-based effects applied to any clip at the same time - but not track-based ones. As for the relinking idea, I'm not quite sure what you mean here - could you expand on how you think that would work?

[Trevor_Asq]

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

You can pretty much do this just with cutting and pasting.

As for the relinking idea, I'm not quite sure what you mean here - could you expand on how you think that would work?

Cutting & pasting doesn’t quite cut it (sorry!) for me here. The pasted items do not refer back to the original session - they are new instances.

The relink workflow I was talking about we had working in an Audition/Premiere hybrid. The first pass of the editorial was done using raw interview in PP.  At the same time the sound mixer created an Au session with the raw interview file, matching the session start time to the interview start timecode.  Au guy did tidy up and exported a mixdown of the tracks. PP guy would then relink the raw audio in his sequence to that mixdown.

I tried the same thing in Au but the relinking loses any clip gain and effects applied. It also relinked incorrectly (both guest & host mics were relinked to the same mixdown clip)  

I guess the answer is to start the edit with the mixdown file (exported before cleanup begins, with link to multitrack session embedded). This may, in fact, end up with same functionality as Reaper sub project. I will investigate further...

[Biehln]

Reaper does

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

  wrote

Reaper does

We already did that - read the thread!