Audio Waveform Display - Timeline

Suggestion
1

I’ve always noticed that the audio representation on the timeline is rather blocky.
Been ok with it up to now as mostly cut news related clips.

However, just got a few music video type clips to do and finding it very difficult to cut on the beat due to this blockiness.

Any chance of making it more similar to Audacity for example?
Where the envelope is not filled in and symmetrical , like so:

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Whereas the same audio in Shotcut looks like this:
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And zoomed in, (the highlighted grey area represents one frame duration at 25fps)
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On Shotcut (red vertical lines represent next and previous frames)
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2

Will ‘View>oscilloscopes>audiowaveform’ help you?

3

Hi @DvS

Not really as there is no marker on it so very difficult to tell exactly where I am relative to the waveform.

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Screen Shot 2020-04-04 at 10.07.23 AM.png604×828 25 KB

If there was a marker on the audio waveform window, that would be of great help.
Simulated below to show what I mean:

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Screen Shot 2020-04-04 at 10.11.10 AM.png600×818 28 KB

4

Yes you’re right. I forgot that there’s no marker (I’m not at home yet).
In addition, SC is not really suitable for cutting pieces of music accurately to the beat.
For that I use Reaper, Wavelab or if necessary Audacity.

5

Reaper is really good at audio and not bad at all with video as well.
Was hoping to do all the cuts in SC as I’m much quicker with it.

6

The next release has a cursor for the Audio Waveform scope so that you can see finer detail. But that won’t help for what you are asking because the Audio Waveform scope shows exactly one video frame of audio - and you can only cut on video frames - not part way through a video frame.

However, using the Audio Waveform scope you can step frame-by-frame and then you can clearly see in the scope which video frame starts a beat and cut on that video frame. That is the best you will be able to do in Shotcut.

1 Like
7

Thank you @brian , that will help.

8

And there we have the next problem, because SC is not a waveform editing program either:
For example, if I have a piece of music with X bpm, I would have to set an individual fps in video mode beforehand!

9

I tried to get around this by selecting a clip > Properties > Audio tab > Sync and change the offset to line up a beat on a frame boundary. However, changes to the Sync parameter do not appear to be reflected in the Audio Waveform scope. If they were, it would be a super-useful way to time an independent music track to a precise cut on the video tracks.

10

After long time I just D/L and open the latest SC, I understand that WAV display is not going to change as other NLE’s , Kdenlive even can draw the 2 styles.