Zooming timeline

Zooming in and out on the timeline is one of the most fundamental skills needed to master ACID. Fortunately, zooming is very easy, especially if you have a mouse with a wheel button. 

Less important than project or timeline zooming is track level zooming. This simply controls the height of the tracks in AOD (see Figure 1.5), allowing you to see more tracks at one time (zoomed out) or to see more detail in a track (zoomed in). There are three ways to change the height of all of the tracks ... 

Events are the most fundamental objects in ACID. Events can be thought of as containers for media files or windows into a media file. A single event can contain multiple repetitions of a media file or only a small portion of a much larger file. Events are drawn or painted onto the timeline and visually represent the project s output Depending on the zoom level, events also display the sound in a media file with a waveform drawing (see Figure 1.8). The waveform shows the amplitude (loudness) of the sound waves over time, making visual edits possible. 

Waveforms can also be used to identify where the beat falls in rhythmic music. The two events in Figure 2.15 display the waveforms of two different media files. The top track has a spoken-word media file. The hottom track contains a drum part and displays clear periodic peaks in the waveform that line up with the beat marks along the top of the timeline. By zooming in and out on the timeline or in another window, you can see more detail in the waveform and make more accurate edits. 

The Chopper window is a special tool that is used to perform precise trims of media files and insert the trimmed portion into the timeline. The advantage to using the Chopper to trim events is that you can trim an event in more detail in the Chopper window without zooming in on the project timeline. There are also a number of other tools in the Chopper window that make trimming easier. 

Zoom in until only one measure (or less) is visible. Use the mouse scroll wheel or the zoom arrows at the bottom of the timeline. 

Zoom in and ont on the Chopper timeline with the mouse scroll wheel, the + or — huttons on the right of the horizontal scroll har, or hy dragging the edge of the horizontal scroll har itself. 

X Draw contents of events— This controls whether the waveforms are drawn inside events on the timeline. Deselecting this can speed up the performance of ACID when scrolling or zooming on the timeline, but it will not improve playback or rendering. 

The Quick fade edit edges of audio events option prevents clicks and pops that may occur when audio events are cut or split. By default, this option is set to 10 ms. Quick fade edges can be seen as blue curved fade envelopes on event edges if you zoom in on the timeline far enough, as shown in Figure 13.3. 

Figure 3 depicts three sketches of the same revision tree and figure 4 shows a zoom through a piece of this design in order to better review the details. The first sketch (the one on the top) exposes the normal vista of the design it uses variable width columns to accommodate the revisions in each baseline, the distribution of the rows is uniform, the first row is used for the baseline numbering, the second row represents the timeline and includes information about the date and hour of creation of a revision, the horizontal blue lines with arrows on both ends emphasize an individual day and the vertical blue lines indicate the end of one day the dark blue small lines in between the parallel vertical blue lines point out the absence of work, the rounded rectangular... 

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