Let’s concentrate on a few audio features that I think can make a real difference in most projects.
If you can’t, you may need to review your hardware setup to ensure your speakers are properly connected and that the software is routed correctly in the preference settings (which we just discussed). First, play your project to ensure that you can hear the audio.
Once you have the audio in your project, you have countless options on how to proceed and how to work with that audio. If you drag a video file to the timeline, its corresponding audio lands on a separate audio track. If you’ve never done it before, simply drag the audio file to your timeline and it is there, ready to be edited.
If you’ve used Vegas Pro at all, then you’ve done this many times. Now that you’re set up to hear your audio, add an audio file to your timeline. (In most cases, you won’t need to change the other settings on this tab.) When you’re done with these settings, click OK. If you have a 5.1 surround sound setup, point your Default rear playback device and Default center and LFE playback device settings to point to the appropriate hardware outputs as well.įinally, set the Default audio recording device to point to the hardware input that you will typically use for recording. Set the Default stereo and front playback device setting to point to the outputs on the audio device into which you’ve plugged your speakers.
Most professional-level audio devices feature these ASIO drivers and if yours does, you should point to them here. For example, you can see in Figure 1 that I use an audio device that utilizes ASIO drivers for optimal performance.
If you’ve installed a more professional audio device, chances are that device utilizes its own software drivers which provide a more efficient audio signal flow. This means that Vegas Pro will send its audio to whatever hardware output you have your Windows sounds set to use (usually a built-in audio device).
By default, the Audio device type points to Microsoft Sound Mapper. To do this setup, choose Options | Preferences in Vegas Pro. However, if you have more sophisticated audio gear and use an audio interface device other than the device built into your computer, then you might want to do a bit of setup before you start working.
In simple computer setups (like your laptop), the audio just works and you don’t need to do anything extra. Of course, as the first step to working with audio in your projects, you have to make sure to set up your computer so you can hear - and if you want to - record audio. We’ve touched on much of this information in various other articles and trainings, but here I’d like to pull many audio-related features together so that you can get a good sense of what these tools are and when you might like to use them in your projects. I’ll use Vegas Pro for this discussion, but most of what I’ll talk about works the same way in all versions of the software in the Vegas line. In this article, I’d like to explore some of the topics involved with crafting the perfect audio for your video projects. That’s why Vegas Pro is second to none among non-linear video editing applications when it comes to audio. And we’ve continued to improve the audio features since then. We made sure we got the audio right before we introduced the video tools. That’s right your favorite video editor started life as a powerful audio multi-track recording, editing, and production tool. That’s why when we first introduced Vegas™ Pro almost 15 years ago it was an audio-only application. If that’s true, and so many people agree that it is true, then why do so many video professionals spend less time on the audio in their projects than the video? And why do so many non-linear editing applications provide such weak audio tools? Now, I don’t expect you to read through all 347 million results, but just reading the summary of the first few on the initial results page is enough to indicate that there are a lot of people out there saying that great audio is at least as important - if not more important than - great video to any video project. Go ahead type the phrase “how important is audio in video” into Google and see what you get.