New to the forum and New to Screenblast Movie Studio

BrianJ wrote on 9/20/2003, 9:48 AM
I've been trying unsuccessfully for several months to get Pinnacle Studio 8 working and I finally gave up. I just bought a copy of Screenblast Movie Studio version 3, and I'm trying to learn the ropes. I hope you all can help with some of the newbie questions I can't find answers to in the documentation or the archive. My first question is about setting the volume for audio tracks. One of the things I liked about Studio 8 was the ability to raise or lower the level at any point in the audio track. I see how I can change the level for an entire audio track in Movie Studio, but I haven't figured out a way to adjust it in the middle of the track. Is there a way to do this? I see there is a way to open an audio editor that isn't part of MS. Do I need some more software to be able to do this?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/20/2003, 11:20 AM
MovieStudio has a pretty good selection of audio editing tools built in. They may not be obvious on the surface though.

Select the audio track you want to adjust by clicking the track header or any event on that track. Click Insert / Audio Envelopes / Volume, or just type V. This will draw a blue line along the center of the track. You can drag this line up or down to adjust the volume. Double-clicking on the line will add a points if you want to set different volume levels at different places on the track. These points can be dragged up and down and also side to side for positioning.
IanG wrote on 9/20/2003, 5:17 PM
In the top corners of the audio clip you'll see small blue triangles. Drag those into the clip and you can adjust the fade in / out of that clip. Right clicking on the fade area allows you to change its behaviour.

To get rid of an obtrusive noise, rather than drop the volume, I prefer to cut it out completely*, replace it with background noise copied from somewhere else, and cross-fade it in and out. You can't hear the join!

* Oh yes, don't forget to select "Ignore event groupings" or you'll delete the video as well!

>I see there is a way to open an audio editor that isn't part of MS. Do I need some more software to be able to do this?

As Chienworks said, you can do quite a lot with the built in audio editing. If that's not enough though, you can use an external editor such as Audacity, Acoustica or Adobe Audition (better known as Cool Edit Pro).

Ian G.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 9/20/2003, 5:35 PM
Congratulations on breaking free from the Studio 8 crowd who believe that the next patch will fix all their problems. ;-)

In addition to double clicking as Kelly suggested, you might also want to right click on the volume envelope to get additional context sensitive features. If you right click on a point you can easily set it back to zero or delete it etc. Just the volume envelope alone has a lot more functionality that Studio 8 does. Eventually you will learn how to add audio filters to take out wind noise, hum, etc.

~jr