Live Editor
Compose on the perfect stage
Summary
The Boombox Studio Live Editor, or 'Constellation', is available for After Effects and Premiere Pro connections.
Sounds are essential in motion design and setting these up can be hard and confusing. That's why we started a mission to set up sounds more visually and see how all your sounds fit together. The Live Editor is the tool we ended up with and it lets you edit the pan and volume of a single sound or multiple sounds together in a compact and complete space
Constellation
The main part of the Live Editor is the Constellation where you can see all of your timeline sounds and drag them around. In the Constellation you can simultaneously control the volume and pan of a sound or multiple sounds together.
By design, the constellation will show a visual representation of all of the sounds in your currently active AE/PR composition. You can also list the sounds next to, or below, the constellation by toggling the appropriate preferences:
The sounds are shown in chronological order as they are listed in your timeline.
Bi-Directional Live Polling
When on the Live Editor, this screen will continuously poll your active timeline, and update accordingly. Any changes to the selected sound, ordering of sounds, pan, volume, or title, will reflect in Boombox Studio. Additionally, any updates to the sounds' pan, volume, or selected status will reflect immediately in your AE/PR timeline.
If you notice any lagginess, it could be due to a large number of sounds in your timeline. We are currently working on a way to alleviate this!
Selected Sound
If you start selecting sounds in your timeline or in the Constellation they start appearing blue indicating that you are editing this sound or multiple sounds. By Shift or CMD/CTRL + Click, you can add or remove sounds from your selection. In the Constellation you can adjust the volume and pan of only one sound indicated by turning blue. If you have multiple sounds selected you can edit the pan and volume separately of these sounds in the Info panel.
Volume
In the Constellation you can edit both the pan and volume of a sound. The volume of a sound in the Constellation ranges initially from -16dB to 1dB and starts in the center of the Constellation and increasing as you drag the sound more to the blue outside border of the Constellation. You can customize the volume range to your liking in one of the Constellation preferences:
Panning
Panning a sound works in a circular way. A sound starts above the center at 0° and pans to left or right depending on which way you drag the sound, all the way to below the center of the Constellation where the sound is completely panned either left or right.
Audio skinning
To edit the sounds with a bit more context to their neighboring sounds, you can try out the Audio Skin function. It essentially filters sounds to only show a couple of previous sounds and the next sounds, so you will get a nice overview of where a sound group is placed in space.
Toggling Audio Skin and other options are hidden in the Drawer on the right side of the Live Editor. Turning on Audio Skin will give every sound a more unique color as well, compared to the regular view. The active sound will be blue, and the 'pre' and 'post' sounds will be shades of yellow and red, respectively. The next option to toggle is Audio Ghosts. If toggled on, all sounds that are currently not editable are displayed by a greyed-out cross. The Pre and Post options of the Audio Skin menu are sliders for you to determine how many sounds you want to display before the selected sound and after the selected sound.
Timeline
Above the constellation, we have added a mini timeline of all the sounds in your current project. Every sound is represented with a small star and by clicking on one you can select the sound. We made it also easy to cycle through sounds with the arrows on the left and right sides of the timeline.
Additional Preferences
Auto-Play
When the Auto-Play is toggled on, sounds will automatically play after updating them. This way you can hear the new volume and/or pan of the sound.
Last updated
