Musicvid, you might think this would be the case, but I just did exactly what I propose and there are no unpleasant clicks in the audio, in the video on YouTube

What you hear on this video is nothing but smart-splits (there are 150 of them) taking out single words or "ums" and "ahs" and sometimes the smart edit is right in the middle of continuous speech but there is still no unpleasant click. It works perfectly but all that I did was to mark (with a marker) the exact in and out point of the smart edit, but then first delete the audio inside the markers and then apply the smart edit to both the video and audio. If you listen, it works fine, because the video morphs and there is no audio during the short morph, which is exactly what I want.

As long as the same marker is used for both the audio deletion and the smart edit it works perfectly. Without deleting the audio leaves an unpleasant and unusable audio cross-fade. There can be no zero crossing of wave forms, because this process attaches a silent audio to the tiny morphed video section, and then comes back right after the morph. It is a very quick audio mute which connects to the next audio without a click because of the intervening silence.

The only downside with doing it the way I did here is that it takes a lot of time to delete the audio in each edit first, because you have to un-group the audio, then turn off ripple, then hit CTRL-Right Arrow and go to each marker and then double click the timeline to select the audio region between the markers and then hit delete. This puts little spaces in the audio but keeps the rest all in position in relation to video. Then re-render the audio so it is a single file, and group that to the video, and then using the same markers do the smart splits, which morphs the video and cross-fades the silence, which is perfect.

The result is great, but I wonder if it would be possible to achieve the same result simply by telling Vegas that a smart-split should mute, rather than cross-fade, the audio. This would save hours of time, and simply automate what the program is already able to do in a complicated set of steps.

I imagine that others, editing speech and wanting to eliminate jump-cuts, would find this useful.

Musicvid, you might think this would be the case, but I just did exactly what I propose and there are no unpleasant clicks in the audio, in the video on YouTube

I've had a different experience than yours over the past 2 decades (signature below), but then, I don't have your version.

Does your version not have the option to turn off "Quickfade Audio Events" in Options?

@Thomas-Price

"Smart Split should have an option to morph the video and simultaneously delete (not cross-fade) the audio in the morphed region. Maybe it can do this already, so let me know if I am missing something."

Are you aware that you can hold the Shift key and edit the audio separately from the video? You can go back and touch-up any Smart Splits that don't suit your ears.

Thank you Musicvid. I am new to Vegas and only have version 17, and specifically bought Vegas to get the Smart-Split option. But I am experienced with video editing on other platforms, and I am impressed with the functionality, ease of use and intuitive interface of Vegas so far.

To answer your question - the first thing I tried was turning off "Quickfade Audio Events" because that seemed like the obvious thing to do. But, while this works with other audio edits, it makes no difference with the Smart-Split function (Alt-S). On or off Quickfade Audio behaves the same with Smart-Split: both put a cross-fade of the audio in the area of the video morph. It is a very short event, not even a second, but annoying and useless , because it grabs the end sound of the cut-out and fades it with the beginning sound of the cut-in, if you know what I mean.

In reading online, I found that Smart-Split is a new function specific to version 17, and therefore it may not be developed to its full extent yet.

As far as video is concerned, Smart-Split is potentially a game changer, and I have shown some friends what it can do to smoothly to remove "jump-cuts" and they are all amazed. So if someone is recording speech and they say a sentence and want to say it again, or just want to think before saying the next thing, the smart-edit is great, because there is enough silence after the last part you want and before the next part you want to join it with.

But there is another usage for smart-split, which is to remove single words, coughs, sneezes, burps, farts, uhms, aahs, and so forth, which are in the middle of a sentence, and smart-split is amazingly great for doing that in the VIDEO - usually better than a larger smart-split cut because the face is not very different between cuts.

But it leaves this little useless cross-fade in the Audio (ie a cross-fade of the beginning and end of the fart or cough or uhm, etc) which is exactly the thing you are trying to remove. So it requires you to take extra steps - first do the smart split, then mute the audio in that tiny spot. From this we can see that there are two requirements for this kind of function. The video actually WANTS a bit of the beginning and end of the two clips that you are joining, so that it can make a smooth morph and hide the cut. But the audio DOESN'T want anything in that spot.

This is the first time I am on this forum, and don't know much about how to contact Vegas tech yet, so maybe you know a way to offer them a suggestion that in the future Smart-Split should have a toggle function for Smart Split to either cross-fade the audio or to mute it in the morphed region. Since they have a toggle function already in "Quickfade Audio Events" this would be very similiar, and I imagine very easy to implement.

If you know how to let the Magix/Vegas developers know of this suggestion, please let me know.

Thanks for your help

john_dennis:

"Are you aware that you can hold the Shift key and edit the audio separately from the video? You can go back and touch-up any Smart Splits that don't suit your ears."

Thank you john_dennis. Yes I know you can separately edit the audio after the Smart-Split, and that is exactly what I did to make my first video. Instead of using Shift for the edit I found it quicker to temporarily un-group the audio so I can make several edits without having to shift every time. But either way, it is the same - you need to first smart edit the video and then modify the audio to clean it up. I had 150 of these in the one-hour video i posted above, so doing this was easy and certainly possible, but a lot of unnecessary time to do each one when I imagine it could automatically be done with the original smart-edit function.

If you know how to let the Magix/Vegas developers know of this suggestion, please let me know.

Start a new thread with the words "Feature Request" in the title. It will get read.

To remove unwanted words and such, I usually copy/paste some 'room tone' right over the top of the existing audio event, Otherwise I open/copy the event (or entire file) in Sound Forge for surgery if it cannot be easily fixed in VP, being careful not to fork up the sync to picture.

To remove unwanted words and such, I usually copy/paste some 'room tone' right over the top of the existing audio event, Otherwise I open/copy the event (or entire file) in Sound Forge for surgery if it cannot be easily fixed in VP, being careful not to fork up the sync to picture.

Thanks - I'll check to see if this is faster than actually deleting the spot. It may work fine for this purpose, since the deletion length is exactly the length of the video morph, which is the same in every instance, so a copy of room tone in that length will work every time. But anyway, it still requires a manual fix of something that could have been automatically included in Smart-Split. As far as off-line audio editing, I just got Sound Forge with my 365, but I am used to using Cubase for this kind of editing, because I have more than one mic source and need to balance them and compress/effect them differently, so can Sound Forge do multi-track editing, or should I stick with cubase?

"... being careful not to fork up the sync to picture."

That's why I use the Shift key instead of un-grouping most of the time.

For the hair splitters among us...

For the hair splitters among us...

John, I see you found this option to alter the length of the smart-split, which is handy to know, although I am happy with the default length so far, but for huge movements maybe a slower one would be smoother, so this is good to know.

But as far as my issue, of course the smart-split length must be exactly the same for audio and video (unless it is very smart to compensate for the difference) so do you know if there is any option in settings to have a different length for audio and video in smart-split and still keep them in subsequent sync? Also, how do I find all the possible tweaks to smart-split like the one you showed us?

"I have more than one mic source and need to balance them and compress/effect them differently, so can Sound Forge do multi-track editing, or should I stick with cubase?

SF is a multi-channel editing app.. not to be confused w/ multi-track. It will work with up to 32 channel poly files if you need to edit all the channels together. You can apply processing to the individual ISO channels though. A multi-track app like VP or Cubse is easier/better for that though,