Sorry, I wasn’t sure about what to name this topic!
I am recording voice over for an audiobook in Cubase. When I am editing, I am sometimes deleting a section and then filling it with room tone (buzz track) from an event in the pool.
Is there any way to do this so the pasted in section automatically fits the hole? Including looping if needed?
At the moment, I have to paste then adjust the front and end handles to fit using snap to event. This is not very difficult, but this is a huge recording and I am doing a lot of editing. Anything that speeds up the process a bit would be welcome!
Another thing that would be nice, though I don’t think this is possible, is to have the equivalent of Range - Insert Silence, but insert the room tone event instead.
You would have to have the 2nd Audio tracks, where is your noise. Then you could use ducking effect to make it audible, when there is no a signal in the 1st (voice-over) track.
I can’t seem to get that working. All that happens is that the gate opens when there IS signal and not the other way around. I suppose it needs to be a reverse gate. Or is there some button I am missing here?
Use Compressor instead of Gate. Compressor will compress the lower the noise signal, when there is a voice-over. After the Compressor, use Gate to “kill” the signal completely.
I will go and experiment. I think I might trip myself up here. Since my room tone is very quiet anyway, I think I might run into problems with the -60db limit of both the compressor and the gate. But I will see!
You could put the noise track on a lane of your voice track so that any gaps will just play it instead.
If you place it on the lane above the voice and choose the voice lane with the comp tool before you start cutting, you shouldn’t have to mess around with the comp tool as you edit the voice lane. That way you also leave the rest of the lanes neat and free for detailed edits.
Just had a quick go. I think this will work very well, but getting the workflow right is important.
Since this is an audio book, the recording is 50 minutes long, give or take, and has plenty of retakes. So there are 100 plus events before I even start editing.
I will try when I edit the next chapter and see where that gets me
I dont do multiple takes but wind back and drop in when there are mistakes. So it islots of events rather than stacks of alternate takes like you would with vocals.
If I understand you correctly, you could bounce your voice track to a single event first. If you don’t want to lose all those events by replacing them with the bounce, ie. if you want to retain them for reference, choose ‘no’ to ‘replace’, then find the bounce in the pool and ‘insert at origin’. Then you will probably have to drag the bounce down to a free lane so it’s not sitting on top of your events. Or you could do it on a new track entirely. If you do the former, once the bounce is sitting on it’s own lane, select the noise lane with the comp tool, then select the bounce before you start editing it. Cubase remembers the order of your comp choices, so the original events would only play if there is a gap in the noise as well. Or you could just drag the mute tool across them to make sure they never play.
Hope that helps with your workflow. This is what works well for me, so pardon if I’m stating the obvious, I didn’t want to leave out any steps.
(Cubase could save a couple of steps if Bounce had a third option to insert it on a track without replacing the original events. Also it would be great if it added a (b) like it does with rendering since it can be a bit of a chore finding the bounced file in a busy pool. I usually add that manually in the pool before inserting. A tip for quick finding is to click on the date header, once to sort, and another click to make the most recent audio appear at the top of the list (newest first).)
I have been playing around and at the moment, it seems just dragging in a “room tone” file in from the pool and adjusting the handles is the fastest - if for no other reason than it doesn’t take thinking about.
It would be nice if it automatically adjusted/looped to fill the gap, though.
I used to work on a system called the Foundation 2000 which was made, by all people, Fostex. This was 20 years ago, and it was very limited, but when it came to editing, it was far more intuitive than most modern DAWS. Adjusting levels of events and pasting bits in between was very fast.
It also had the most amazing Data wheel. It was large and very heavily weighted. You could spin it and it would keep on turning. Or use it slowly and it would scrub - no changing settings. Amazing machine, actually, but a complete failure for Fostex!
