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Edit Expertise: Expand Your Skillset

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Gary Eskow

Steinberg WaveLab 6 offers user-friendly stereo waveform editing.

The goal of this column, and all others I post, is simple: to help both the audio post pro and the videographer with good ears find ways to increase billable hours. The model at the top end of the industry has shifted dramatically. Long gone are the days when a sound effects specialist, a music studio, and a foley recordist sent reels off to a dedicated layback facility. Today, everything is up for grabs, and the paradigm shift operates at all levels of postproduction. The more you know, the more work you'll get.

Just about a year ago, I reviewed Steinberg WaveLab 6 (see digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/
revfeat/steinberg_wavelab), a dedicated stereo waveform editing application that operates on the PC platform. As is generally the case, the goal was to get comfortable with this product and put it to use in a real-world situation, with the understanding that it's not possible to learn every function the first time around. This caveat is particularly appropriate to a feature-intensive program such as WaveLab 6 (WL6) that ships with a manual of almost 800 pages.

Rather than stick my head in the manual again, I asked Greg Ondo of Steinberg if he'd be willing to come to my studio and give me an in-depth tutorial on the product. His title, marketing manager, doesn't reflect the fact that Ondo is the go-to guy on all of Steinberg's software applications, including Nuendo 3 and Cubase 4. I've yet to stump him. Ondo readily agreed to stop by, and we spent about half a day going over WaveLab 6 in detail.

WL6 can import video files, which means that you can slide music, sound effects, and dialogue around to perfectly match picture. You can also open up multiple stereo lanes, balance their volumes, and apply effects to them on an individual basis. Of course, WL6 lacks the MIDI functionality that Nuendo 3 and Cubase 4 provide.

Once you've established sync between audio and picture, there's no real difference between working on files intended for multimedia or CD release, so we decided to task WL6 with editing an audio project that I'm working on. A wonderful chamber music group, the Palisades Virtuosi (www.palisadesvirtuosi.org) commissioned me to write a piece for their next album. We recorded Not a Sonata! at Bennett Studios in Englewood, N.J. This piece will be included on Palisades Virtuosi's next CD for Albany Records, a label that specializes in contemporary classical music. To maintain consistency, it will be edited and mastered along with the other material on the CD at Bennett Studios.

Prior to Ondo's arrival, I had imported multiple takes of each track and inserted markers at the main edit points so that he could get right to work. The first thing I noticed when Ondo started working was that I had been looking at WL6 through dated lenses. Scrubbing audio dates back to the tape-editing days when an editor slowly rocked reels back and forth to locate a precise splice point. Early software editing applications adopted this model, but WL6 pays only scant attention to it, and that confused me at first. Watching Ondo work, I quickly realized that the Audio Montage area of the program (where all detailed editing is performed) operates on an object-based model that incorporates cross-fades far more powerful than anything scrubbing has to offer.

In fact, the default cross-fade mode is remarkably forceful, and I put it through some serious tests before making that determination. For example, “Remembering Ray,” the second movement of my piece, is a tribute to Ray Charles. It ends with the pianist running up and down the instrument like Jerry Lee Lewis and the flute and clarinet executing a raucous run to the top of their registers. On the best take, the clarinetist, Don Mokrynski, made an inadvertent comment on mic before the ring-out had been completed. Using the default cross-fade, I was able to cut both tracks within this phrase and splice them together without introducing any zippering noise. If you've ever tried to accomplish a similar task, you'll understand how impressive an accomplishment this is. If, on the other hand, you've always believed that sound editing is beyond your capabilities, think again. With just a little practice, anyone with reasonably good ears can handle even the most detailed audio editing tasks using WL6 with the same results that I obtained. The power of the application's cross-fades will have clients drooling over your editing skills.

I could also have used the Spectrum Editor to cut out Mokrynski's remark. It's a visual-based tool that divides the frequency spectrum into colored bandwidth streams. Once you've identified a specific frequency — Mokrynski's voice, in this case — you can mute or process it without affecting anything else. The next time a company asks you to help them with their next Music Minus One project, you'll want to check out the Spectrum Editor.

Time stretching is another audio editing requirement that every audio post pro in the digital age encounters on a regular basis. A music bed doesn't fit or voiceover talent couldn't squeeze copy into the allotted 29:5 seconds. To test the DIRAC time-stretching algorithm that Steinberg touts, I applied it to “Coconut Cream,” the third movement of my piece. An unabashed homage to “Moon River,” “The Days Of Wine and Roses,” the theme from the movie A Summer Place, and other wistful music from the '60s, this piece was nailed by the Palisades Virtuosi. After assembling a final cut, however, I felt that it was performed just a tad too slowly. It's a fairly long track (almost six minutes), and therefore would present a reasonable test for DIRAC. I opened up the time-stretch dialog and asked WL6 to use its highest-quality algorithm (DIRAC) to speed the piece up by 3 percent. If you're in a hurry or simply want to experiment, you can also choose lower-quality algorithms that work more rapidly.

WL6 took about 10 minutes to process this movement. The result was a slightly faster rendition, exactly what I was looking for, with absolutely no artifacts. In the old days, I would have had to live with the tempo as performed in the studio. Again, a simple click will turn you into a sound editor who can perfectly match the length of an audio clip to a selected video — you're golden.

I mentioned earlier that WL6 lets you open up an unlimited number of stereo lanes and balance their levels against each other. But you can do more. Let's say you've been hired to produce a five-minute corporate film for a major company. You go out in the field and shoot, get approval on a rough cut, and then begin your audio post work. You strip dialogue and get approval on stock-music tracks. Finally, the inhouse producer tells you that she has access to the company logo and a series of bumpers and stings that are used in the nationally television ad campaign.

So, you've got three audio lanes: dialogue, stock music, and the material from the ad campaign. For starters, you get a balance between dialogue and stock music. The client is happy when you duck the stock-music track by 5dB (don't worry about the definition of a decibel — many engineers don't even understand it) whenever dialogue appears. At this point, you can automate the application and instruct WL6 to duck the second audio lane (stock music) whenever it detects audio on lane one (dialogue). Very useful. The producer loves the music from the national campaign, however, and wants it to play at full volume whenever it appears — even if talent is speaking — and so you set its level and leave it alone.

We've come far in the last 15 years. If you think about it, in the early 1990s, you had to spend almost $100,000 on a dedicated audio post workstation whose feature set didn't come close to those offered by the top software applications of today — such as WL6. And this new software costs about $600, and runs on an off-the-shelf computer (Windows XP Home or XP Professional, an Intel or AMD processor of at least 1.4GHz, 512MB of RAM, a DVD drive, Windows MME-compatible audio hardware, a USB port, and an Internet connection are all you need). When you add in the fact that audio post houses also had to purchase and maintain all of the tape and video decks that clients might have been working on back in the day, it's easy to understand why there were so few players in the game. The capital investment was enormous.

The playing field has been leveled, and the tools just keep getting better. If you're a musician or an audio post pro experienced with waveform editing, you'll be up and running on WaveLab 6 in just a few hours. Video specialists looking to branch out will need to make a deeper investment of time and study. The series of tutorials that Ondo put together, available at www.steinbergusers.com/wavelab/wavelab.php, are a good place to start. Bottom line: WaveLab 6 is an incredibly sophisticated tool that you may find indispensable once you begin to work with it.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.