So on a given song in a montage, I’ll have overall processing (EQ, compression, whatever) for that song. Then I might have a few small edits to the track done in an external editor (RX or SpectraLayers) in a half dozen spots. So now I have a bunch of clips within that song that I’d like to group together for convenience later (track IDs, etc) - the workflow is to create a superclip, which is great but if I do that it renders the clip effects (eq, comp, etc) into the superclip, which is great if I never want to revise those effects, but not so great if I want to revise them slightly later.
What I’d prefer is if I could render the audio edits into a superclip, but retain the clip effects and gain changes at the ‘song’ level so that I can further tweak overall gain, eq, comp for the entire song. In other words: I’ll have maybe an overall eq on a song, then upon listening I hear some clicks/pops that I need to clean up in an external editor - I take care of those and then render the whole bunch as a superclip. Now, upon giving the whole thing an overall listen I’ve decided that I added a bit too much low end to that song and I want to go back and revise the clip eq a bit - the only way I can do that is to either “edit source” and adjust the eqs on each of the clips within the superclip, or add a clip eq to the superclip so I’m eq’ing on top of existing eq - obviously neither is preferable.
This is already what happens when you create a Super Clip. You have the effects in the Super Clip, hence you can re-edit them when you want, by reopening the super clip. The super-clip is rendered when used in the parent montage, but the external montage remain editable.
This is different than the Bounce function, which renders the effects, without the option to re-edit the effects.
Thanks for the response PG - I guess I’m not describing it well: If I’ve done, say, 10 little edits within my main clip, I now have 11 subclips within my superclip - in order to edit the EQ (for example) that I had on my main clip (which is now split into a bunch of little ones) I have to edit 11 EQs, or add a second overall eq on the Superclip (not desirable).
The only way I can think to work around this is to save the plugin chain on one of the subclips, then disable them all, then render the Superclip, then add the plugin chain to the overall Superclip - now I can continue to revise the overall tonality of the Superclip (until the next time I need to edit something inside the Superclip) - this seems fairly awkward. What am I missing?
You should consider reversing your procedure: you should do your micro edits before using any plugin on the clip. I don’t know what your micro edits are, but typically, these are restoration actions, and there is no reason the plugin should be inserted before doing them.
Not only does this cause the problem you describe, but it also multiplies the plugin instances, which is never good for memory, speed, or usability.
And you say:
add a second overall eq on the Superclip (not desirable)
on the opposite, I would say this is good. In that way, you preserve the micro edits (no need to use the Bounce function).
Thanks for that response PG - I guess the bottom line is that I’m not missing anything, but let me just elaborate for a minute: In a typical mastering session you’re making multiple decisions/corrections at once; as you listen to a song you make initial decisions about overall spectral/dynamics issues, and as you work through the song you’re also catching flaws/clicks/snats/bad edits/etc - each of these requires small edits in the overall song, but you’re also fine-tuning / revising your overall corrections (EQ/Comp/etc) as you go, and by the time you get to the end of the song you have probably decided some of what initially sounded good is too much / too little / a bad idea / etc. It’s not really practical to divide this work into two separate phases - not to mention that in the third or fourth listening pass you will likely hear something that needs editing/fixing that you didn’t notice previously.
To my mind, these two different modes of work should be entirely malleable until the final render - I’ll often make tonal corrections to a song and then upon an overall listen to the entire album think “maybe I went a little too far on the low end on that one song - let’s back the low shelf off a 1/2 dB on that one” - to have to go in and open the superclip and modify each subclip’s eq is not practical, and to insert a second eq process on top of the first process to correct or modify it is not best practice (and not even really possible in the case of dynamic processes), adding unnecessary additional processing inviting more phase distortion, etc.
Seems to me that having the option not to render clip plugins / gain changes into the Superclip would be a sensible option, and makes the entire process much simpler.
I don’t see what you mean with “not to render clip plugins”.
The superclip is by definition an audio file that is the rendering of a sub-montage, that you can re-edit. If you don’t render plugins, you loose their effect. So?..
So thank you for sticking this out and trying to understand me - I promise I’ll drop this soon and not waste any more of your time!
Here’s one last try at an explanation - let’s take the simplest case of a song that needs a little eq and maybe has a few glitches/snats:
You’re mastering an album - you’re working on one song in that album. You apply an EQ to the clip (the song), and as you’re listening through the song you’re making adjustments to that EQ as you familiarize yourself with what it needs. Also as you’re working, you find a snat that needs repair - you select a small area and fix it in an external editor - you now have three clips for the song where you previously had one, another glitch later and you’ve got 5 clips. You want to continue listening to the song and fine tuning your EQ decisions as you go and perhaps check back at other spots in the song or album to make sure you haven’t gone too far, or created other tonal problems. But you now have this awkward problem where it’d be great to render the edits into the overall clip for the song while still having the ability to revise the single EQ for the song. The Superclip is the solution, but you don’t want to render all the individual clip EQs you’ve now got - you just want to render the edits while still maintaining the single EQ for the song that you’re continuing to revise (even as you move to other songs in the album). If the Superclip workflow gave you the option not to render the plugins (as it gives you the option not to render Track plugins) the whole process is simple, and you can freely move back and forth between edits and tonal adjustments. Without that option the Superclip function doesn’t work well for this workflow.
Let me rephrase it according to my understanding: you want to combine all small clips into one, without using the plugins, to create a new single clip. And you want this single clip to be attached with the original plugin(s) used on the small clips. Am I right?
Yes, +1 for this. It’s the missing link for making the external editor feature super powerful.
Thanks Justin - nice to know I’m not the only one.
Let me rephrase it according to my understanding: you want to combine all small clips into one, without using the plugins, to create a new single clip. And you want this single clip to be attached with the original plugin(s) used on the small clips. Am I right?
Yup - I think that’s the idea - just be able to “Superclip” all the edits on a song without also rendering the signal processing and envelopes. That way the song (superclip) is easily moveable, ID-able, but the overall processing for the Superclip remains easily revisable as you work through an album, and you can still take apart the Superclip if you need to tweeze an edit further without nuking your plugin and envelope settings. For example, in Pro Tools it’s just called a “Clip Group” and all the overarching automation travels with the clip group as if it were just another clip, but allows you to easily ungroup it to tweeze edits if needed. Makes the handling of lots of little edits within an over-arching structure much easier.