unmerging clips and grouping clips

[laurentK]

I am making radio documentaries and Audition CC has a lot of interesting features for very precise editing tasks but I can't find ways of working smoothly with groups or merged clips. 

I am editing at the moment a long piece needing a lot of speech editing, with sometimes 8 to 10 very short clips to make less than a single minute.  When this short speech is edited in 10 very short clips, I would like to merge all these clips together visually to get only one clip. Merging would be the best way but I need to be able to unmerge them if additional editing work is needed later (This is something you can do with Sadie for example, a DAW designed for radio use). Would there be a way of doing it with Audition CC ?

My workaround is to 'Group' theses clips together. Visually, it is not perfect as I still see a lot of small clips but, grouping them makes a single clip to move around which was my main goal and it is possible to ungroup easily. 

When I have edited, let's say 10 minutes on one subject (let's call it a chapter) I also need to group or link all the clips of this chapter to move this new group easily on my timeline. As I already used the 'Group' feature for all the small clips contained in these 10 minutes, I can't make a new group as it would overwrite my small groups that I want to keep.

I am probably doing a very specific type of editing but is there anyone would found better workarounds ? I searched in the Audition Help or in Audition CC Classroom book but without success...

Thanks!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Yes, I think I can see what your problem is - you can make a group of groups, but when you unmake it, it ungroups all the clips in all the groups, and you don't want it to.

The solution to just moving groups of clips, and having the relationship between them remaining, is simple. You just pick up the groups that you want to move using the same method as you do for grouping them in the first place - and drag them using the 'move' tool to where you want them to be - even across tracks if you want to. You don't need to do any more grouping, all inter-clip and group relationships remain as they are, and you can either ungroup or alter a single clip within your existing groups afterwards without any issues. You don't need to do any merging (which in Sadie is conceptually the same as grouping anyway, I believe, although visually it might look different) and you still retain total flexibility with your existing clips and groups.

[laurentK]

Dear Steve,

Thank you very much for your help. I understand I can move several groups together but as I am working on a long documentary, I also want to keep my small groups of clips linked together inside a larger groups for moving these big ones again later, while retaining the small groups inside of them, without fearing of leaving a single clip or a small group of clips behind.

If I was writing a book, I would write chapters including many scenes of several pages. I would need to move around the chapters in the book probably several times during my writing process while being able to edit the content of each scene if needed.

So, I would link the pages of each scene with a paper clip and put all the scenes of a chapter into a file folder. So I would have many file folders (chapters) of different colors to move them around easily without fearing to leave behind a couple pages. I would also be able to edit the content of the paperclipped scenes and even change their order inside the folder if needed.

So I found a way of using paperclips in Audition CC by making groups, but how could I make file folders ?  Do you see other options to organize clips and groups of clips in Audition CC in order to reach my needs ? 

Cheers, Laurent 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Since the larger group of clips can't contain the smaller groups, then the only solution I can see at present is that if you want to move both larger and smaller groups together, you have to zoom in and make sure you've picked all of them up.

My own solution to this - although it's for CD music production at present, not radio documentaries - is to keep each separate piece (chapter equivalent) in its own session, get those working as they should, and then importing the mixed-down results into an 'assembly' session, where I can get inter-track timing right, and introduce wild sound if needed. For me this works pretty well, and if I need to make any changes to original sessions, they are all still accessible.

Overall, I'm not claiming that Audition is perfect in this regard - a lot of people think that it would be rather better from this POV if it included bins, like Premiere does. Time alone will tell...

[laurentK]

Thanks again. I am following your tips for a CD production : I copied directly from my main multritrack session all the clips already edited for the first chapter of episode 1 and pasted them in a new multitrack session. It worked like a charm, they were pasted in the same order and place as they were. Therefore, I will create one session for each episode in the same way it is possible to create different timelines in Premiere Pro and switch from one to another...but in that case without using bins.

Thank you for your help !