From the course: Audition Essential Training

Using the Essential Sound panel - Audition Tutorial

From the course: Audition Essential Training

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Using the Essential Sound panel

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- [Instructor] The Essential Sound panel is dedicated to commonly used effects when it comes to mixing specific audio types. If you can't see this panel in your session at the moment, you can bring it up by going up to your Window menu and making sure you have Essential Sound checked. At the moment, I'm using the default workspace, and the Essential Sound panel is a part of that. So if you've ever used the Lumetri panel for color work in Premiere Pro, it's a very similar approach. The idea behind it is to simplify the audio mixing process and make it more intuitive for people who are not sound engineers. So let's take a look at how this works. The first thing to note is that the panel is only available in the Multitrack Editor. So if I go over to one of the clips in my session here and double-click it to open in the Wave Editor, you'll notice that this panel is now blank. So to get back to my session, I'll just go up to the top and I'll click the Multitrack button. The methodology for the Essential Sound panel is quite simple. I select a clip or a group of clips in my session, and then I assign an audio type. So these four items here are the most common elements of a mix. You have the dialogue, the music, the sound effects, and the ambience or background sound. Let's select dialogue as an example. And now based on that assignment, I'm presented with a range of settings that are specific to working with dialogue. Not only that, but the order of everything is designed to lead you through the mixing process. So if you're mixing for dialogue, it would make sense that the first thing you want to work on is unifying the loudness of all of those clips. After that, you'd go on to repair any sound issues in any recordings you had, followed up by focusing on the clarity of that audio. And I can uncheck these boxes to turn off whole groups of effects, or I can turn on individual effects as well. Once you've assigned a mix type to a group of clips, you can easily select them all again just by going to to Editor panel and deselecting any clips. And then by going over to the Essential Sound panel, you can click the mix type that you want and it will automatically select those clips in your session again. But the great thing is that the Essential Sound panel is not an effect in itself. It's actually building built-in effects and adjusting their settings in the background. So if I have my Effects Rack visible, and I'll do that just by going up to Window and checking Effects Rack. And I'm going to make sure I'm on Clip Effects here as well. Now if I go over to my Essential Sound panel, and I'm going to turn up this slider for Dynamics. You'll notice that when I do that, it actually adds the Dynamics Processing effect to my Effects Rack. And if I double-click this to view the effect, I can see these are the settings it's made based on that slider. And if I keep this effect window open and drag the slider around, I can see the adjustment in real time. What that means is if you're new to sound, the Essential Sound panel lets you focus on what sounds good. But if this session was then passed on to a sound engineer afterwards, they would have access to all the parameters of the original effect so they can make any necessary tweaks to the final mix. So that's just an overview of the Essential Sound panel, a dedicated place to quickly and intuitively mix your audio.

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