{MLK Editing Assignment}

Today we're going to get into some advanced editing techniques. To practice these techniques, we're going to take an audio file from a famous speech (Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech) that has been chopped up and put out of order. Your assignment is to reassemble all the segments in the correct order.

First, let's listen to the speech...

Now please do the the following:

Part 1 - Editing

1. Find the folder called "MLK_Mountaintop" in dolly>Shared Media>Class Materials folder and copy it into your folder on your computer.
2. Open that folder and open the file document called "Mountaintop_text". You will be using this as reference for this assignment.
3. Open the Pro Tools session file called "MLK_Mountaintop.ptf". Play it back. What's going on with it?

Obviously the speech is all out of order and messed up. Your assignment is to chop it back up and put the segments in the correct order. To make this process quick, I want you to do two things:

• To make edits, use the Separate Region command. Simply drop the cursor wherever you want to make the cut and hit Command-E.
• Put Pro Tools into Shuffle Mode to keep all the different regions stuck together. This will save you the effort of having to manually move them and will eliminate any dead space between the regions.
• Use crossfades between your final edits to make your edits sound smooth.
• When you are finished with all your editing, Consolidate them together into one audio file. 

Basically, just follow along with the text and put all the speech segments in the correct order. Don't forget to pay attention to the crowd noise; try to avoid making cuts that make the crowd noise sound weird/cut off/etc.

When you are finished, please show the instructor and then move on to the final step of this exercise: consolidating regions.

Consolidating allows you to recombine a bunch of separate regions into one single audio file. Why would you want to do this? Mainly because it allows you to work with all this audio as a single thing, rather than a bunch of different little clips. You can move it all at once, or do additional processing to the whole thing, rather than having to do it for each individual clip. This makes it easier to work with. Plus, it just looks cleaner!

To Consolidate:

• Use the Grabber Tool and click on the first region you want to include
• Hold down Shift and click on each of the other regions you want to include
• Now hit Shift-Option-3 on your keyboard

Once you finish all this, you can move onto the second part of the assignment.

Part 2 - Add music

1. Make a note of roughly how long the MLK speech is by looking at the timeline at the top of the Edit Window.
2. Save your session and Quit out of Pro Tools.
3. Open Reason.
4. Make a beat that is a little longer than the speech (~30 sec.) and matches the tone of Dr. King's words. Please include an Intro section that is at least 4 bars long.
5. When you finish making your beat, save it to your folder as:   your name_MLK beat
6. Export this beat as an audio file (File>Export Song as Audio File). Again, call it:         your name_MLK beat
7. Quit Reason.
8. Launch Pro Tools and open your MLK_Mountaintop session.
9. When it is open, Import your beat into the session (File>Import>Audio)
10. Move the speech around so that it comes in at the right time in the beat and flows together well.
11. Adjust the volume levels of the tracks to make sure that the speech isn't being overwhelmed by the beat.
12. Give it a nice ending, such as a Fade Out. (Ask one of the instructors if you aren't sure how to do this.)
13. Save your session.
    
14. Bounce the final product out as an audio file. Call it:  your name_MLK speech.
15. Put a copy in the folder called MLK Speech in Student Work. (dolly>Student Work>MLK Speech)