Dive Into Your Imagination

FCP allows for some limited controls for your audio, whatever their source plus some included filters to adjust their sound in various ways. For this tutorial I will be using some recorded dialogue from one of our commercials and some stock music to demonstrate a few of FCP's audio controls. I suggest you listen to the video with headphones on so you can really notice what I do with audio. note: Audio is not really Final Cut's responsibilty when it comes to production, most professionals will use programs like ProTools for the final product.

If you are following along, make sure you have the standard Final Cut layout by running, WINDOW>ARRANGE>>STANDARD. This will put your VIEWER in the center. In my bin I have imported an AIF audio file and an MOV clip. Double clicking on any file in the bin opens it in the viewer. From here, I click on the audio tab at the top of the window revealing the waveform, in my case, my video clip has a two MONO tabs meaning this was recorded with only one channel. Looking under these tabs, I find only one channel has audio while the other is empty. Doing the same steps for my music clip results in a stereo tab. Only this time, both left and right channels are in the same window. These characteristics are all determined by the way my sounds were originally produced. The music for example is professionally created to be heard in stereo. If for some reason you want to split these up, just put them on the timeline and run MODIFY>STEREO PAIR, the same command also ties them back together.

Notice the controls above the waveform: LEVEL and PAN. Level is the volume, and this will often be something you will be facing as you mix. This is also available on the timeline, enter "ALT/OPTION+W" to reveal the pink line which you can drag up or down to adjust the volume. Take a look at your audio meter on the lower right of your screen, if that is bouncing in the red, then you must lower your levels a bit. Otherwise you might get distortion. If it's not loud enough for you, then the original recording was exported at too low of a volume for any use...just rasing the levels is not going to help and will probably result in a lot of hiss and hum.

Pan determines which ear you hear the sound in. This can help make your environments much wider than what is seen on screen. There's just the left and right channels though, FCP does not work in any fancy 5.1 surround or anything, you will have to talk with a sound engineer about that. As with many of the parameters, you also have the ability to keyframe the values, so you can pan from one side to the next over time or raise or lower the volume too.

Check out the audio filters too. Sound isn't really my thing, so I honestly don't know anything about these filters but the Final Cut User's Manual has some descriptions. Ideally you don't want to be "fixing" any audio so find a sound person who knows what they're doing.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed