audio waveform in VS X7

[dewoldt]

Is there any way to zoom in on the audio waveform in VS X7? I recorded my wife's piano studio recital, and need to trim some major mistakes/restarts by some of the students. But, the audio waveform is basically just a straight black line with a couple of blips here and there up until the audience clapping. Then the waveform actually resembles a waveform. But there's no way I can figure out, except just guessing, how to trim the mistakes out and keep the timing correct on the piano piece.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forums!

The only way I can think of to do what you want would be to zoom the timeline to frame by frame view. In audio mode this should show more detail of the wave form. See attached image.

[dewoldt]

Hi Ken... thanks so much for the speedy reply. What I'd like to do is make the band the audio waveform displays in about 2-3 times wider. What I get with most of the clips in frame by frame view is in the attached image 1. With some of them it gets as good as image 2.

[lata]

Hi

Its not easy expanding the wave form you could try rearranging the workstation.
You can drag the panels to float or snap to a different location.

Switch to Sound mixer
You don’t really need the library panel (top right)
Drag the series of dots, just a little (below the Capture word) that will float the panel,
Press the minimise icon (top right of panel)
The workstation now shows the preview screen and timelines
Drag dots for timeline, top left of timeline, panel shows as blue, drop to left arrow anchor point.

Do you need to use the sound mixer?
Can you simply listen to the audio and make your adjustments, You can cut the clip into sections and set the volume % to individual clips.

[Mark Swanson]

It sounds like you have a very weak audio signal in the first place, hardly enough to show on the line. With audio that weak, it's hard to get good sound quality at all. I had to deal with a similar situation, but I have decent audio software and a lot of experience with audio....so I split the audio track and made a separate WAV file from the video, took it into Pro Tools and sweetened it and boosted the level considerably. Then I took it back into VS and synced it back up to the video. When I did that I could really see the waveform then, because I had a decent level. Plus editing in Pro tools allows you to really fix any audio bumps in the road.

[Sonic Fields]

I think the main problem with VS audio tracks is the lack of a vertical waveform expansion bar to magnify the amplitude.

Unfortunately this does make it difficult to sync A/V tracks together where audio levels are low. It's not always a question of just amplifying the audio prior to inserting the track, as low-level ambient sound recordings will suffer from excessive noise and high dynamic range recordings will simply become distorted before any quiet passages become visible on the waveform; so at times syncing becomes very much trial and error by listening until the 'echo' disappears.

'dewoldt' will have difficulty cutting/trimming in detail, without the waveform being visible, as the system audio latency makes this a virtually impossible task to undertake 'by ear'.

[erdna]

I suggested in the past to use the full hight of the audio timeline, and keep the level line overlayed. This would at least double the available height for the audio waveform. Maybe next time...