7
Quarrying material
7.1 Introduction
Returning to base with material of exactly the right duration and needing no editing is a rare occurrence. If your recording is of a continuous event, then simply cutting it to time is all that is required.
With unscripted speech-based items you can return with substantially more than you will ever use, especially if you have recorded a series of interviews that you plan to ‘quarry’ out as extracts rather than using them complete.
However, it cannot be stressed too much that the very best way to edit an interview is to have asked the right questions in the first place! A well-structured interview will also be easier to edit for duration. However, circumstances can force returning with far too much material, especially if vox pop (in the street) interviews have been recorded.
Once upon a time there was no alternative; quarter-inch tape had been used and the only way to edit was with a razor blade, wax pencil and sticky tape. Copy-editing added extra time and was avoided.
7.2 Blue bar blues
No matter how fast your computer and its hard drives, audio files consume a vast amount of data compared with a word processor, and take time to be saved. Most editors have a very useful UNDO facility. This works by saving a copy of the section of the file you are changing onto hard disk.
All this takes time and slows down the editing process. This means that you should structure your material so as to avoid long audio files of more than 3–5 minutes. Put plainly, a single edit within a 30-minute file takes much longer to do because of the time taken to save that long file. A 5-minute file takes one-sixth as long to save. A strategy of one or two files per item within a longer piece will speed things along nicely.
Extracting sections of a file to new separate files is most easily achieved by highlighting the section and using the ‘File/Save Selection’ menu option.
Where you just want to copy and paste then use the clipboard, where, as with all modern operating systems and programs, Control/C will save the selected area. Control/X will cut it out and Control/V will paste it to the current cursor position. Cool Edit, as well as using the Windows clipboard, also provides you with five clipboards of its own.
However, there will be things you will want to do to long files that will take time, such as noise reducing an archive recording. It is inevitable that you will spend some time staring at the screen as the blue progress bar slides slowly from 0 to 100 per cent. Ironically, the time is much less than used to be taken with the mechanics of razorblade editing. However, it feels much longer because you, personally, are not doing anything while the process is taking place. You can improve your efficiency by having a number of other tasks that you can do while the processing is going on; telephone calls to make, facts to check or even letters to write, as the processing can carry on in the background while you use your word processor on the same PC.
Some routine operations, such as normalization, can often be done using ‘batch’ files. These allow you to leave the computer to get on with the task while you do something else (see page 70).
You will very often want to load many files at the same time. Please remember that the Windows file selector allows you to select many files, which will all be loaded when you click OK. One way of doing this is to use the ‘rubber band’ method of multiple selection (Figure 7.1). The mouse point is placed by a track and the left mouse button pressed and held down. With the left button still held down, moving the pointer will produce a rectangular ‘rubber band’ that will select any files included within it. You can include all the available files by starting the rubber band at the first file and then dragging downwards and to the right. The file selector window will scroll the list so that you can include everything.
Figure 7.1 File selection using ‘rubber band’
If you want to select a number of individual files, then click on each file you want (Figure 7.2). Normally selecting a new file will deselect the previous selection, but if you hold the control key down while you do this then this will not happen. The control key also introduces a toggle action, so that clicking on a selected file will deselect it. This is particularly useful if you want to make a minor modification to a number of files as, once loaded, switching between them is rapid. Once you have made all the changes, you can SAVE ALL and all your changes will be preserved.
Obviously, loading and saving a large number of files takes an appreciable time, but by triggering this with one action you can be doing something else that is useful while this is happening. If you are saving 10 files each taking 15 seconds to transfer, you have given yourself 2
minutes to make a telephone call or whatever.
Many programmes will include material from compact disc. This can be commercial music, but also sound effects or even material from your own personal archive. Here considerable time can be saved, as a properly set-up computer will be able to ‘rip’ the audio data from the CD much faster than real time. This means that 10 minutes of material can be transferred in less than 1 minute. You don’t even have to listen to it! The quality will be better, as the audio is not converted back to analogue and then back to digital again by your sound card.
The easiest way is to use a background program that modifies the Windows desktop so that audio CDs appear in the desktop window with their tracks showing as .WAV files. These are usually named ‘track1.wav’, ‘track2.wav’, etc. This allows you to copy the audio files as if they are normal data files. Later versions of Windows come with this feature built in, while earlier versions can have this added by either using a special file or a utility provided by the manufacturer of the CD-ROM drive. Windows desktops without this feature will open a CD drive containing audio, but the tracks will be shown as ‘TRACK1.CDA’ etc. and are not normally directly accessible as audio. Version 2 of Cool Edit Pro has CD Ripping software built-in, and can access the CD audio directly using the .CDA files as if they were the actual audio files.
Figure 7.2 Individual file selection using mouse with control key held down
7.3 Copy, cut and paste
Cool Edit Pro gives you the option of six separate clipboards – five of its own, plus the standard Windows clipboard. These are selected either through the ‘Edit/Set current clipboard’ menu option or by using control/1 to control/5 for Cool Edit Pro’s own clipboards and control/6 for the Windows one.
This means you can work with multiple pieces of audio ‘in memory’ at the same time – so you can, for example, copy different jingles or link music sections to each clipboard, and place them in your file at chosen locations. The current clipboard can also be set to be the Windows clipboard. This is available to other programs, and is a convenient way to copy audio from Cool Edit Pro to another program or vice versa.
These internal clipboards save audio in your temporary directory as wave files, and they can be retained even after Cool Edit Pro closes. The ‘Delete clipboard files on exit’ setting in Options/Settings/System sets switches this on or off.
As well as using the normal paste function to insert material you can create a new file from the clipboard using Edit/Paste To New (Shift/Control/N). Save selection will usually be quicker, as you do not have to copy to the clipboard first.
Edit/Mix Paste (Shift/Control/V) will add material to the file on top of existing audio; the length is not changed except if the insert option is used. If the format of the waveform data on the clipboard differs from the format of the file it is being pasted into, Cool Edit Pro converts it before pasting.
There are four mix paste modes (Figure 7.3):
- Insert – inserts the clipboard at the current location or selection, replacing any selected data. If no selection has been made, Cool Edit Pro inserts clipboard material at the cursor location, moving any existing data to the end of the inserted material.
- Overlap – the clipboard wave does not replace the currently highlighted selection, but is mixed at the selected volume with the current waveform. If the clipboard waveform is longer than the current selection, the waveform will continue beyond the selection.
- Replace – pastes the contents of the clipboard starting at the cursor location, and replaces the existing material thereafter for the duration of the clipboard data. For example, pasting 1 second of material will replace the 1 second after the cursor with the contents of the clipboard.
- Modulate – modulates the clipboard data with the current waveform. I suspect that this option is here just because it can be done. It is yet another way of producing weird noises, and has the potential to do magical things. The classic use for this sort of facility is to make every day sounds talk by modulating them with speech. However, the Dynamics Effects Transform can generate a modulation envelope. This can be used to modulate the level of a file as if it were being compressed using the audio from another file. This could provide ‘voice-over’ ducking for a music file.
Figure 7.3 There are four mix paste modes
Loop paste allows you to multiply paste the same clip. This can be useful for music samples or for extending backgrounds and atmospheres for documentary work. You can choose to copy from the current Cool Edit clipboard, Windows or a file. The crossfade allows you to smooth the transition of the mix.
The invert tick boxes turn the waveform upside-down. Sometimes mixes work better if this is done. You can use this to compare nominally identical copies. If you make sure that the starts match, mixing the two, with one file inverted, should give total silence. Any noise or audio that is left corresponds to errors. It can be fascinating to do this when one of the files has been used with a lossy method; Minidisc for example. What you end up with is the audio that was ‘thrown away’.