[Hmm. That somehow submitted before I was done. I tried to edit and it didn’t work for some reason. What I actually wanted to post is below]
I recently tried out scene crossfades for the first time, and they did not seem to be very smooth. I was fading between different microphones in a live concert setting, and there seemed to be a “hole” in the middle part of a fade where the room noise went totally away and then came back again.
I wondered if fade outs were really being completed before fade ins, or more generally, what fade law was being used. I decided do a test:
* Oscillator out from an aux patched to an input preamp
* That preamp patched to two input channels
* One channel panned full left, one panned full right.
* Scene 10: Left channel to 0 (5.1 sec fade)
* Scene 11: Left channel to -oo, Right to 0 (5.1 sec fade).
* Scene 12: Left to approx -5dB, Right to approx -5dB (5.1 sec fade).
* Scene 13: Left channel to 0 , right channel to -oo.
* Recorded output to Pro Tools and made a screen shot.
As you can see in the screen shot, when fading from one channel to another, the audio fading out does appear to be (nearly) gone before the audio fading in even begins to take its place. When simply fading from one level to another without fading to/from -oo the fades do appear to leave less of a hole.
So my questions are:
1) Is this a standard crossfade law that is used elsewhere?
2) Wouldn’t either an S-curve, equal gain, or equal power fade law be preferred? Or,
3) Is behavior actually what most mix engineers would prefer?
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