Mixing Sound for Video

[jurassic]

Hello all

I am hoping to help a friend mix / process audio for a friend's nearly finished short film. He is working in Adobe Premier. Ableton is quickly becoming my DAW of choice and would love to edit his sounds in Ableton but I've read a lot of funky stuff about trying to import different file formats for video.

Does anyone have any experience doing anything like this on ableton? I would like to get the video and audio tracks from Adobe, process them in ableton and export back out to Adobe Premier? Is that at all possible. I can't be shelling out for any other programs and would really like to do it in Ableton.

Anybody got experience/insight with this?

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[ChangoM]

Premiere Pro or Premiere Elements?

[dented42ford]

I wouldn't even attempt it in Ableton, as much as I love the program. It is far too settled around the "bar-beat" timeline, and lacks basic tools for working with freeform audio - you'd need an external editor, for one, to do destructive edits in detail...

Personally, if they used Premiere, I'd look at getting a 1m sub to Adobe CC and use Audition. Not my usual choice, but it is more than capable for video, has a round-trip workflow with Premiere, and is basically designed to do the task you need with none of the "cluttered" music stuff in most mainstream DAWs. I think if you use Ableton, you'll likely just end up frustrated.

[ChangoM]

I use Premiere Pro and Live together for every documentary video project, but only for creating the score. All other audio tasks take place in Premiere Pro or Audition. There is a pretty clean workflow for going back and forth between Live and Premiere to fine tune both the video and score for maximum impact. For the typical project, I may bounce between Live and Premiere Pro several dozen times to get both just the way I want.

If you don't want to acquire or learn Audition, the audio effects and clip/track mastering features in Premiere Pro are very usable.

[jurassic]

Thanks for the responses. It's Premier Pro. Seems like Audition is the obvious choice. Just hate this subscription idea thing. And like 20 bucks a month!!? Oy, ok will figure it out. Thanks!

[chris vine]

Am currently doing sound edit and design in Ableton for a film (80 mins). The editor works with premiere. He sends me short scenes and synced separate production audio tracks (that I also recorded) and I have been doing the editing and design in Ableton. I then render those out as wavs to send back to him to import into premiere.

It is early days yet, and I am sure I will be tweaking or thinking about stems to give him to put into Premiere later on. I looked at Pro Tools and Nuendo (which I have some previous experience with) but the learning curve and the awful GUIs (:-D) put me off. Yeah, I know that more experienced film audio peeps on here will tell me I will be suffering for using Ableton later on, but I know it very well and love the ease of the workflow etc. This is not a big production with a massive crew of people and industry editing departments, very indie, so I think I will be OK. If I had to deal with other teams, might not be so easy.

Would be helpful to import OMFs, EDLs etc into Ableton, but hey.
As far as beats/bar stuff goes, I just disable ALL warping on clips and in the video, also disable snap to grid. Extending room tone is so easy in Ableton, just select a bit of a clip and duplicate, fiddle with the crossover points and lengths of the new sub clips to dispel looping sounds. Checkerboarding different character dialog parts also is really fast.

Free Wave Agent software from Sound Devices, also very useful if you want to "stamp" a specific timecode onto the wav/aiff files.