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Adobe’s Audition - A Look beyond the Creative Suite

There are some strange winds blowing the post production world these days, and they always seem to swell when you see the infamous “.5” attached to anything.  Is this a big update?  Is this update worth my money?  This is a common thread I’m seeing on boards all over the WWW, and it’s directly pointed at Adobe’s new CS5.5.  Everyone is saying things like “Are the updates to AE (or insert other product in the Master/Production Premium here) enough for me to spend the upgrade money?”.  But unfortunately, I think that everyone is missing the point.  

We have not only all the great updates to most of our favorite applications in CS5.5, but we have a new addition (not a new application, just a new addition) to the CS family, and that’s Adobe’s Audition, and it’s now included in the Master Collection, the Production premium or as an upgrade from Soundbooth CS5.  This is big (as was Color inclusion in Final Cut Studio).  Up until this point, Adobe has been missing a key element to your production workflow, and that is post audio, and with the inclusion of Audition (now for Mac as well), you now have editing (Premiere, Story), graphics (Photoshop/Illustrator/After Effects), post sound (Audition), DVD/Blu-Ray authoring (Encore/Media Encoder) and web design (Flash).  This is the first, start to finish, complete production workflow in a box that has been released to date, and this is something to get really, really excited about.  I want to take a few minutes to talk about Audition, and why it’s inclusion is so important to the Master Collection and production premium.

I’ve been editing a long time (over 14 years), and was an assistant editor before that.  One of the first productions I worked on was a show called “Go For It!” for the Discovery Channel up in Toronto, Canada.  At the time, the Senior Editor and Senior Sound Engineer’s were attempting to do something that had never been done before, and that was to bridge the digital gap between Avid’s Media Composer and Protools.  They were attempting to send files digitally from an Avid to the Protools, to not only save a huge amount of time, tapestock and money, but headaches as well.  I even remember Avid sending updates to Media Composer just about every other night with updates so minor, you would never even have known what was “fixed”, but needless to say, the “Go For It!” production did it.  It broke down the digital barrier, and for the length of the show run (I can’t remember how many episodes were produced, but it had to be over 30, 1 hour episodes).  Now, at the same time, something else was going on.  This little application called After Effects was starting to make waves in the visual effects world.  I remember when I started editing full time, I was working for an Ad agency up here in Toronto, and any time anything had to be done, as far as graphics were concerned, in a commercial, it was always sent out to be finished in a HAL or a HENRY suite (man, am I dating myself).  At one point, I got really fed up with work being taken away from me, I stayed late and used this application called After Effects 3.5, that I had never heard of mind you, to to some graphics that made our little internal production house a ton of money, that would have gone to the big boys.  This was a big thing.  Fast forward now to 2011, and if I had to guess, I would say that After Effects is on, at least, 98% of all editing stations, and most people have a basic to intermediate knowledge of how the application works (don’t even get me started about rendering) and how to do things that they need to, to keep the money rolling in from clients.  The thing I haven’t figured out yet, is why haven’t these audio applications like Audition made inroads like After Effects has?  Well, I think that’s about to change.

Adobe is smart.  Very smart.  They understand the future of desktop post production.  Now, I’m saying that not because I eat/sleep/breathe Adobe, I believe that because when I talk to the product managers, I hear them mention Avid and Final Cut Pro when talking about their products, and they realize, understand and embrace the fact that Adobe’s products, as much as they are an island, have had bridges built to them for other products to take advantage of, and that’s where Audition is really going to make people happy.  One of the main new features in Audition is that is fully support OMF import and export.  Those of you who are not familiar with OMF (Open Media Framework) technology, it was designed and implemented by Avid back in 1994 as a way to share media and metadata.  Basically it was the core of the ProTools audio post workflow.  Fast forward back to 2011 and, as I mentioned, OMF import/export has been added to Audition as a new feature in CS5.5.  What does this mean for you CS5.5 users?  Now, not only can finish your Premiere Pro CS5.5 projects in a 5.1 surround sound mixing application, but you can also now take mixing jobs from Avid editors and Final Cut Pro editors (yes, Final Cut Pro can export OMF files as well).  Another fantastic option you have is that if you want to do 95% of your mix, and then take it to a ProTools suite to have an engineer tweak it, and make sure it’s to spec, you can do that as well, as Audition can export OMF for an engineer to import into a ProTools session to put the finishing touches on, and output to your format of choice.  That is the core of Audition (besides mixing).  Choice!

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Interesting article ... but I’d like to see a feature comparison between Sound Track Pro (which I already have as part of Final Cut Studio) and Audition. You’ve got to give me more ammunition to switch to Adobe Production Suite.

Oh, on the first page, please consider breaking those big blocks of text into smaller, more approachable paragraphs. I looked at page 2 and 3 first and almost skipped the whole article because of the apparent density of page one.

Peace,

Rob:-]

Posted by Rob  on  05/25  at  11:31 AM

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My experience has been that STP has more effects choices, with more control options and a much more polished interface for those effects. They also include a LARGE library of sound effects and loops. Audition requires you to download things from their site, which in my experience was slow and inefficient. I dont think Audition has what it takes to lure me away from STP.

Posted by Tom Daigon  on  05/25  at  05:52 PM

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