The Patchbay

On the left of the timeline is a region known as the patchbay. The patchbay enables features specific to each track as described next.

Textbox

for naming the track. The default names will usually be Video #, Audio #, or Mixer # if using the multi-camera/mixer operations. A # will be designated for subsequent tracks as in 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Expander

which is a down arrow on the right side, is for viewing more options on the patchbay and for viewing the effects represented on the track. You can just click on the expander to expand or collapse the patchbay and the track. If it is pointing sideways, the track is collapsed. If it is pointing down, the track is expanded. Existing effects appear below the media for the track.

Below the textbox name are several toggles referred to as attributes for different features (currently there are 7 as shown in figure 5.2). If the toggle button is shadowed by a color, the feature is enabled. If the toggle is the background color of most of the window, it is disabled. Click on the toggle to enable/disable the feature.

Figure 5.2: Patchbay

Several mouse operations speed up the configuration of several tracks at a time. Click on an attribute and drag the cursor across adjacent tracks to copy the same attribute to those tracks. Hold down Shift while clicking a track's attribute to enable the attribute in the current track and toggle the attribute in all the other tracks. Or you can:

1. hold down Shift while clicking an attribute,
2. click until all the tracks except the selected one are disabled,
3. then drag the cursor over the adjacent track to enable the attribute in the adjacent track.

The 7 attributes are described here next followed by the other available feature icons and their description.

Play Track

determines whether the track is rendered or not. If it is off, the track is not rendered. For example if you turn it off in all the video tracks, the rendered media file will have only audio tracks. If the track is chained to any other tracks by a shared track effect, the other tracks perform all the effects in this shared track, regardless of play status of the shared track that in this particular case affects the media output but not fade and effects.

Arm Track

determines whether the track is armed or not. Only the armed tracks are affected by editing operations. Make sure you have enough armed destination tracks when you paste or splice material or some tracks in the material will get left out. In addition to restricting editing operations, the armed tracks in combination with the active region determine where material is inserted when loading files. If the files are loaded with one of the insertion strategies which do not delete the existing project, the armed tracks will be used as destination tracks. Note that disarming a track does not prevent you from dragging or attaching an Effect/Plugin onto a disarmed track - this is not considered an edit in this case.

Draw Media

determines if picons or waveforms are drawn on the asset in the track. You may want to disable this if you know that the media/format takes a long time to draw on the timeline. By default it is set to on in order to see picons on the timeline.

Don’t send to output

– more commonly called mute – causes the output to be thrown away once the track is completely rendered. This happens whether or not Play track is on. For example if you mute all the video tracks, the rendered media file will have a blank video track. Mute track is represented on the timeline with a line that has the default color of a pinkish-orange. Use the pulldown View → Mute to have the line displayed. It is a keyframable attribute, but Mute track keyframing is a toggle and it has only the two values of on or off. If a track is part of a shared track effect, the output of the track with the shared track effect is overlaid on the final output even though it is routed back to another track (the shared track). Mute track is used to keep the track with the shared track effect from overlapping the output of the source track (the shared track) where the shared track effect is not present.

Gang Fader

cause the fader to track the movement of whatever other fader you are adjusting by dragging either the fader or the curve on the track. It doesn't affect the editing made with menu controls. A fader is only ganged if the arm track is also on. This is often used to adjust audio levels on all the tracks simultaneously. Gang also causes Nudge parameters to synchronize across all the ganged tracks.

Master Track

Mark a track as master serves when using Gang Channels or Gang Media mode. See Displaying tracks: Ganged mode

Track Data Height

this up/down toggle symbol to the immediate right of the 5 attributes, is used to individually resize each track. This makes it very easy to temporarily expand or contract the size of that track either by clickin with the left mouse button or using the middle wheel up/down.

Fader slider

fade values are represented on the timeline with a pink (default color) curve that is keyframable. All tracks have a fader, but the units of each fader depend on whether it is audio or video. Audio fade values are in dB. They represent relative levels, where 0 is the unaltered original sound level, -40 is silence, -80 the minimum value set by default. You can move fader and keyframes down to -80 but the parameter's curve won't go below -40. For your convenience you can set a different fade range with the curve zoom. Audio fader’s main purpose is to fade out sound or to lower the sound level smoothly to silence, or fade in to make sounds appear gradually instead of suddenly. Video fade values are the percentage of opacity of the image in normal overlay mode, the percentage of the layer that is mixed into the render pipeline in the other overlay modes. Click and drag the fader to fade the track in and out. If it is ganged to other tracks of the same media type, with the arm option enabled, the other faders should follow. Hold down the Shift key and drag a fader to center it on the original source value (0 for audio, 100 for video).

Mixer

in the expanded patchbay for that track designates the multi-camera mixer mode.

Overlay mode

in the expanded patchbay is used for porter-duff operations and is full explained in Overlays chapter.

Nudge

is in the expanded patchbay. The nudge value is the amount the track is shifted left or right during playback. The track is not displayed shifted on the timeline, but it is shifted when it is played back. This is useful for synchronizing audio with video, creating fake stereo, or compensating for an effect which shifts time, all without altering any edits (figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3: Video Overlay, audio Pan and Nudge.

Enter the amount of time to shift to instantly shift the track. Negative numbers make the track play later. Positive numbers make the track play sooner. The nudge units are either seconds or the native units for the track (frames or samples). Select the units by right clicking on the nudge textbox and using the context sensitive menu. Nudge settings are ganged with the Gang faders toggle and the Arm track toggle. Use the mouse wheel over the nudge textbox to increment and decrement the value.

Pan

is available in the expanded patchbay for audio tracks via a panning box. Position the pointer in the panning box and click/drag to reposition the audio output among the speaker arrangement. The loudness of each speaker is printed on the relative icon during the dragging operation. The panning box uses a special algorithm to try to allow audio to be focused through one speaker or branched between the nearest speakers when more than 2 speakers are used.

Press the Tab key while the cursor is anywhere over a track to toggle the track arming status. Press Shift-Tab while the cursor is over a track to toggle the arming status of every other track.

Automatic audio mappings

Several convenience functions are provided for automatically setting the panning to several common standards. They are listed in the Audio menu. These functions only affect armed audio tracks. They are:

Audio  → Map 1:1

This maps every track to its own channel and wraps around when all the channels are allocated. It is most useful for making 2 tracks with 2 channels map to stereo and for making 6 tracks with 6 channels map to a 6 channel sound card.

Audio  → Map 5.1:2

This maps 6 tracks to 2 channels. The project should have 2 channels when using this function. Go to Settings → Format to set the output channels to 2. This is most useful for down-mixing 5.1 audio to stereo (for more information refer to Configuration, Settings and Preferences section 16.2.1).

Standard audio mappings

Although CINELERRA-GG lets you map any audio track to any speaker, there are standard mappings you should use to ensure the media can be played back elsewhere. Also, most audio encoders require the audio tracks to be mapped to standard speaker numbers or they will not work.

In the channel position widget, the channels are numbered to correspond to the output tracks they are rendered to. For stereo, the source of channel 1 needs to be the left track and the source of channel 2 needs to be the right track. For 5.1 surround sound, the sources of the 6 channels need to be in the order of center, front left, front right, back left, back right, low frequency effects. If the right tracks are not mapped to the right speakers, most audio encoders will not encode the right information if they encode anything at all. The low frequency effects track specifically can not store high frequencies in most cases.