Hi everyone,

I'm a pro user, and have recently wanted to expand my skills into more detailed audio editing. I appreciate that my project must conform to a particular project frame rate, but now that we are all mostly working in digital, and are able to export audio straight to recording facilities, is there any way for us to edit audio without having to stick to frame based resolution?

In other words, while I accept I must edit video at 25fps, etc, there doesn't seem to be any need to do this for audio. Ideally, I want to edit video at the frame rate, and audio at the 'bit' level (like on Pro Tools, or any other audio waveform editing software).

For example, when editing music, the tempo doesn't always fit neatly into the frame rate of the project. So editing 'half frames' isn't possible. OR, I'd love to be able to compose music demos within Media Composer to run alongside my edits, but I don't want to stick to the 25 reslolution

Any thoughts? I assume this isn't possible within Media Composer?

Thanks for your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1eqRKWOy34

Yeah I see how that works, but that isn’t what I meant.

i want to be able to edit audio without having to stick to a video frame rate grid. I’m surprised this hasn’t been implemented yet, it would be an amazing feature.

Media Composer remains frame-based, not sample based.

Does any NLE allow for sample-based audio?

I don't know. But I think it's about time, as the idea of audio and video needing to be married by timecode seems obsolete. I can't see any reason for keeping audio frame-based. Unless it's a technical impossibility to separate the two.

In fact, do Pro Tools and Logic allow for importing video clips that run at a particular frame rate? And don't they include the ability to snap to that frame rate? There must be a way of programming this.

I don't think it's as easy as you describe...you're asking software to use two separate edit timebases simultaneously.

ProTools and Logic can play back video, but not edit it. Probably why systems aren't designed to do both.

Snapping to the frame that aligns with a particular sample is easy (after all, in a 24fps project at 48k, there are 2000 samples for each frame. If you slide back and forth within 2000 frame window, you're still only showing the same single frame.

Yep - appreciate that.

Seems to me, if Avid have already implemented a feature that allows you to shift audio by 2000 samples within a frame, why can't that be done on the timeline?

And I actually wasn't suggesting two separate edit timebases. I was suggesting video using timebase, and audio using samplebase. Or is that what you meant?

Adobe Premiere does this perfectly. You can flip the timebase over to bitrate, edit the audio and flip it back to frames.  Avid, See Abobe Premiere.

Thanks for the incredibly unhelpful reply.

jameslondon74:

Seems to me, if Avid have already implemented a feature that allows you to shift audio by 2000 samples within a frame, why can't that be done on the timeline?

That feature exists. You can add an Audio Slip effect to a clip, and slip to the sample.

Thank you. Yes I actually discovered this yesterday. It's been a few years since this thread started - probably out of date now.

https://community.avid.com/forums/p/184946/860152.aspx#860152

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