One incoming frame at a time
By default the audio scrubbing in Media Composer is silent. Nevertheless there are at least two ways of audio scrub with Media Composer:
- Press the Caps lock key: this is the key to lock Media Composer in scrubbing the sound of our timeline or our footage in the source monitor. If we do not want it anymore – as it can be annoying sometimes – just press the Caps lock key again.
Caps Lock is the key to scrub the sound frame by frame. - OR hold down the shift key while moving around in the timeline or in the source monitor. It is useful when we just want to check something on the spot. As when leaving the shift key we come back to the original silent audio scrub.
Either ways, every time we move a frame forward or backward we hear the sound equivalent to that frame; it is called the incoming sound in Media Composer.
Remark: nothing in the interface shows that the audible audio scrubbing is on or off.
As many as twenty outgoing and incoming frames at a time
The Caps lock or the shift key thing are pretty effective but what if we want to listen not the actual frame we are on but the one before? Or what if we want to listen more than just one frame while scrubbing frame by frame?1
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Select the Settings tab of the project window (the one with all the bins) and then select Audio.
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An Audio Settings window pops up, giving us the choice to setup how many frames of sound we want to hear when scrubbing. It can be setup for both the Source Monitor Scrub (our footage) or the Record Monitor Scrub (our timeline). But more importantly, we can choose how many frames of before (Outgoing) and/or after (Incoming) the position indicator we want to hear.
The values of incoming and outgoing sound for the audio scrub can be changed from the default one frame. As an example: if we choose to put five frames for both the Outgoing and Incoming and that we are happily scrubbing around, every time we move the position indicator (the vertical blue line) of one frame we hear the equivalent of sound from the five frames before and the five frames after the position indicator position.
Remark: the number of frames is limited to twenty for both Outgoing and Incoming sound; it might be not so audible beyond that…
The End