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one.market
Known Participant
October 25, 2023
Question

Can you add space between audio takes in a timeline?

  • October 25, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1529 views

I have my audio and visenes in a timeline. Is there a way of adding space in a timeline that will give me a few more seconds between audio clips. 

 

(I know I can add space in the original audio clip and bring it back in, then I have to somehow lineup all of my visenes in the timeline. - I would just like to add space in the timeline.)

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1 reply

D
Community Manager
dtull-adobeCommunity Manager
Community Manager
October 25, 2023

I was initially thinking you could just select and move the clips over, but it sounds like they are part of a single audio track.

There's two commands that might help. One is the split command in the Edit menu. Select the tracks you want to insert gaps into, run the split command and then select the items on one side of the split and move them over together (that way they stay aligned).

 


You can also create a work area (via the Timeline menu's Set Work Area Start to Playhead and Set Work Area End to Playhead commands) and then use the Timeline menu item "Insert Time" command and it'll also add the gap for the items selected when the command is invoked.


Hopefully that helps.

    O
    one.marketAuthor
    Known Participant
    October 26, 2023

    Thanks for that response. I'm aware of the split command. 

    Here's my dilema... 
    I brought in a single 5 minute dialogue track. Then I created and edited all of the Visines. There are about 30 different audio sections in that track.  I will render each separately and edit them in Premiere.  I thought I could just 'simply' move the visines and audio tracks over.  The challenge is that the split duplicates layers so you end up with a ridiculously complicated timeline. Do this thirty times, add in a variety of actions, triggers etc and you've got a timeline with hundreds of lines in it - which is a mess. 

    I was hoping I cut just cut and drag the viscenses and audio pieces to the right. I don't know why split audio would need to go on a separate track - this doesn't happen in any other software.


    In hindsight I wish I had known to add in extra space between takes directly on the oringial audio track to give me run-in and run-out leeway in the delivery of lines for characters. I.e. you may want to have a character drink his beer, then put it down before he starts talking. This would require extra time. Spliting whatever is in your timeline will allow you to do this... but it also creates a huge mess of layers on that same timeline.

    I'm still hoping I am still missing a basic workflow process here because:
    1. You start a project with a characters audio track first. 
    2. You can't 'guess' at exactly how much time you'll need before and after each delivery (i.e. like accounting for reactions) until you actually record the performance in ACA.
    3. While recording the performance, the only way (as I see it) to add neede space is to duplicate everything into a whack of new lines. If you have 10 minutes of audio with 90 different deliveries - your timeline becomes... an infinite mess.

     

    I'm not sure how easy / complicated it's going to be to have to 'shy' and 'unshy' everything whenever I want to access a specific line. I.e. If I 'shy' all of the many visine layers - to make a visene correction I'd then have to 'unshy' the visine layer somewhere down the timeline every time.

     

    It would be far easier if all of the visines and all of the audio tracks (split or non-split) were together at the top on just two lines.

     

    I still hope I'm missing a workflow issue here.

     

    thanks.

      O
      one.marketAuthor
      Known Participant
      October 27, 2023

      Ah, good point, I have run into that before. There's a couple of options, though nothing that's as easy as it probably could/should be. The answers are slightly different for the visemes and the audio track.

      For the visemes, there's two options to reduce the "stairway to hell" effect of stacked tracks. The first one is to use the fold icon in the left part of the track to collapse the Lip Sync tracks into one row. The upside of that is that it leaves the chunks separate if you need to keep moving them. The downside is that when it is closed you can see the individual visemes at all, they're just one rectangle per split item.

      The other option for the visemes is to use the "Merge Takes" command in the timeline menu to recombine all those viseme takes into a single unified track again. The upside is you can see the visemes and it reduces the number of individual takes contributing to the height of the timeline back to one row. The downside is that further edits will create new stairs that you have to merge back out.

      There's no direct analog to the collapse or merge takes option for the audio, unfortunately. Once you get to the point where you have the spacing you want you could export the scene as PNG+WAV (can temporarily set the framerate to 1 to reduce the number of PNG files since you'll throw those away anyway) and then bring the WAV back in and things should still line up.

      I wish I had a better answer, but that's the best I've got. Those takes could totally be on one row in the timeline, but our timeline doesn't currently work that way. (and I 100% agree that this workflow could be way less of a pain than it is currently)


      Thanks for responding and for those suggestions - I appreciate it. One last question...

      Is there a suggestion for a better audio workflow in ACA. Lets say you are doing 5 minutes of single cartoon character animation. What is the best way to prepare / import / edit audio. It seems to me that I should be adding lots of space between each line / take on the original audio track to avoid having to cut the audio in multiple sections (as discussed.) I've never heard / seen that advice - and obviously didn't use it, but what else could you to to minimize the problem we're discussing?

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