{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...

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm

Now do the following:

1. Find the folder called "MLK_Mountaintop" on the Media Share folder and copy it into your Pro Tools Sessions folder on your computer.
2. Look in that folder and open the text 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?

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

• Instead of using the copy/paste technique that we used in the last exercise (assembling our interview edits), use the Separate Region command. Simply drop the cursor wherever you want to make the cut and hit Control-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.

So 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.

Also...

Please, please, PLEASE use crossfades between all your regions.

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

Heal Separation allows you to recombine a bunch of separate regions into one single region. 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. This just makes it all easy to work with. Plus it just looks better.

To heal separation:

• Use the Selector Tool to highlight all the regions you want to include
• Go to Edit>Heal Separation (or hit Control-H)

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