Tutorial: Mixing Audio in Sony Vegas Pro 11

Exploring the Mixing Console

Let's take just a moment and poke around the Mixing Console (Figure 14, below) for a little bit.

Figure 14. The Mixing Console

The Audio Properties (Figure 15, below) and layout are streamlined from previous versions.

Figure 15. Audio Properties in the Mixing Console

All of our main controls are still across the top, as they have been in previous versions, in serving busses, Assignable FX, things like that.

You have a variety of ways that you can look at the levels of audio. You've got our old friend, the Master Bus, which you can bring right up (Figure 16, below).

Figure 16. The Master Bus in the Mixing Console

You've also got VU meters. If you're used to working in any other digital audio workstation, you likely have a favorite way of viewing your workspace. And Vegas gives you all the flexibility to look at these levels any way you choose. Remember, Vegas started life as an audio workstation and it still has the best audio capabilities of any NLE on the market.

Play with the levels and experiment. Figure 17 (below) shows what's called "making everything louder than everything else." You'll notice that we're peaking in Figure 17. We're going above zero, which is always bad in digital audio. You never want to go above zero.

Figure 17. Louder!

So to keep that from happening, I'm going to add a mastering plug-in called MasterFX (Figure 18, below). There are a number of controls you can adjust in this plug-in, but I pretty much leave this the way it is. And you'll notice that no matter how we have these levels set, which are just entirely too high, it won't go above zero. And remember that if you double-click on a control in Vegas, it takes it back to its default setting, and the levels in the Mixing Console are no different.

Figure 18. The MasterFX plug-in

So again, you've got individual channel levels, you've got VU meters, you've got your master output. You can insert your effects on the individual tracks right from this view.

So the next time you have an audio-only project or a project that uses many different audio tracks-typically it would be multiple tracks of music, a few tracks of dialogue, some sound effects, maybe even room tone-you might find that you'd benefit greatly from using the full on Mixing Console view in Vegas Pro. Check it out. I do think you'll like it. That's all for this tutorial. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next time in Vegas.