I’m a video editor/director by profession, and have recently embarked on an audio documentary podcast project.
After some various exploration of potential options for editing, I’ve ended up doing the project in DaVinci Resolve - a video editing tool, essentially - because I couldn’t find an audio-focused product that suited the style of editing I wanted to do.
Surprisingly, it seems the source/record style of editing, that has been common in the video world since videotape-based editing began, hasn’t really been adopted much in audio, where the workflows are much more focused on linear takes and ‘subtractive’ editing.
Even spoken-word focused tools like Hindenburg don’t really adopt the source/record style.
I see it’s been brought up a couple of times in these forums in the past (2014 and 2016 that I found) but obviously wasn’t a priority at those times.
So I thought I’d raise it again. At it’s most simple I imagine the workflow would allow for opening a file/clip in a small docked or floating player where you had standard transport controls and waveform, and could mark a region which could then be added to a session track.
I’m having trouble understanding whether source/record is the same basic concept as source/destination editing. To my knowledge, there’s been no movement toward enabling 3- and 4-point editing in Ardour.
I touched on some of that in my thread on classical music. In that thread, I went into some detail about the challenges of selecting multiple tracks (8-10) for editing, but also the best way to organize the sources vs. the destinations.
The best I could come up with for a path forward in Ardour for both challenges would be through writing lua scripts. Although all my work was hypothetical at that stage, I settled on the fact that I would probably be better off using a tool more suited to that task, Like ReaClassical (built on top of Reaper)
I don’t really know about classical music (or any music really). But I think we’re talking about similar things?
The paradigm I’m thinking of is the “additive” editing style that’s the basis of most video editing.
So in a typical video NLE workflow there are two viewers, one that is connected to the edited timeline, and a second that previews the contents of a source clip. And you find and mark pieces in the source side and edit them into the record timeline with a 3- or 4-point editing method as you mention. This has been the standard in video since the very first desktop editing tools in the 90s, and the paradigm is modeled of the tape-to-tape editing process that has existed for as long as videotape editing existed.
The key thing really is that my tracks, markers and playhead position in the ‘record’ side are entirely independent of the source side. So in the case of the sort of documentary project I’m making now, I can jump around through my interviews and grab pieces of the interview to piece together cleanly in the edited timeline. At it’s simplest, I can move through my source file marking selections and adding them one after the other into my edit, or in more complex cases I can insert and overwrite with three or four marks to do truly non-linear edits.
From what I could tell with your video I think we’re possibly thinking in a similar way.
Fundamentally what I’m looking for is the ability to take from one clip and add a timeline in a piecemeal way, without needing to have my entire source content in the timeline for copy-pasting. It is something that, as far as I can tell, is almost entirely missing from the DAW world, but is obviously fundamental to video editing, and seems also pretty relevant to a lot of spoken-word editing (that isn’t just trimming a panel-discussion type recording).
In my use case I probably only imagine using 2-3 source tracks, but the principle theoretically extends to the many tracks you’d need. In a video context I can typically use a sequence/timeline as a source, in which case my source tracks can be arbitrarily complex.
Ultimately, I understand this isn’t the core use case for most DAWs. I am just surprised that it’s not something that exists, and I figure a mature open-source project is the most likely place to see it come to be.
I wanted to add 4-point editing 15+ years ago when I was still actively working on soundtrack editing (really EDLs) with Ardour, but didn’t get to do it, finishing the soundtracks was more important
…and it’s been on my ToDO list ever since. Sadly it’s not a quick trivial feature to implement.
