I'm using elements 3.0 and I was putting some footage together; namely a close up on a fire in a fire place, and then inter-cutting with a man reading in a chair nearby.

My problem is this; as I add the dubbed soundtrack of the fire crackling away on the audio track, it immediately shunts down the video track.

It's like the program wants them to run concurrent rather than simultaneously. So you end up with a a few seconds of video THEN followed by a few seconds of audio, back to a few seconds of video, etc etc.

Please help, it’s driving me up the wall.


Also, anyone know of where I can get a XL3X lens without being held to ranson for it? Anywhere under £900?

Are any of the video tracks locked or do you already have video or audio on a track and maybe that is why it is being shunted to another position?

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So this is always going to happen when I want to add sound effects to a video clip that has its own audio track?

There shouldn't be any problems. Just ensure you pop your sound effect on a different audio track. You need to ensure you are in the timeline view, not the scene view.

In the timeline view you can see separate video and audio tracks stacked on top of each other, and can move these tracks relative to each other to sync them up.

That's exactly how I am doing it, hence the frustration. It makes perfect sense like multi-track recording. Flicking through my elements for dummies book offers not other real insight, I wondered if anyone had had a similar problem.

At the moment, I'm only into sorting out the first few minutes of my movie, would be a real pain when I'm much further down the line finding adding a sound effect, or a an over dub will cause gaps to appear in the timeline. Then have to work back to check eveything lines up as it should.

For the record, I'm using dialogue on track one, effects on 2, then music on 3.

I can't understand how it's not working, I did a thing with 3 sound tracks plus a couple of spot FX earlier in the year and it was fine

Can you describe your problem in more detail please?

One thought - try "locking" the other two audio tracks when you're adding the fire sound to the third. Previous posters have said, correctly, that they're shouldn't be any problem whatsoever making them simultaneous.

Do you have some limited form of the software that only allows two audio tracks? Are all three audio tracks appearing in your timeline? Can you move an audio clip from on track to another with no problems?

More info

But the problem seems not to be one of one audio track pushing another out of the way, when I add the sound effect of a crackling fire, it actually 'pushes' the video clip of the roaring fire to the left.

Imagine the various sound and video clips as horizontal bars on the time line.
I have the video sequenc all edited and line up in sequence.

I then add the sound effect. If I now play the sequence I have the first vid clip complete with crackling fire, but the next clip of the fire does not start until the sound effect finishes.

It has 'pushed' the next video clip to begin at the end of the sound effect.
Does this make sense?

Be so easy to illustrate. Instead of the cips running concurrently, adding a sound effect makes them run consecutively.