Any way to automatically detect audio peaks in FCPX?

[Griffinity]

That's not a feature I can locate.

[stoneinapond]

Not sure if this helps, but the audio display peaks will turn yellow if they are overs. I say this because way back when I did some work in iMovie I had audio with the yellow peaks and the sound was fine when playing back in the application. When exported to iDVD, the audio distorted very heavily in those sections. Just lowering the general audio level to when those peaks disappear fixed the issue.

Again, not sure if this is an issue in FCP X, but that would be my starting point.

[blackcat]

The issue of being able to hear audio that would clip isn't specific to Final Cut Pro X. You want that while you work on the audio so that you can hear what is there.

When you work with the NLE it should let you monitor a range of sound that would be clipped in a deliverable export. If you don't want to saturate the sound, you need to watch the peaks in the monitor. You can manipulate audio with a limiter to bring the peaks down and keep the loudness up.

A lot of this stuff is why we want a dedicated audio tool. I am not sure how well the audio tools work in FCPX, but it really helps to have the right tools.

[Griffinity]

To be more specific, I'm editing a three-hour event video, and I can set audio levels for broad sections, but I'm not looking forward to watching the audio level meter for three hours to verify that no peaks have occurred. FCP7 had a great "Detect Audio Peaks" feature, which I don't see in FCPX.

Maybe Apple deemed it unnecessary in FCPX, because now I'm noticing that the waveforms in the timeline show yellow and red when the levels get hot. Even if I zoom out to fit the entire project, those color areas are still visible. That's a cool feature - great way to visualize it, but it seems that all the red waveform regions don't actually peak on playback (they're hitting around -6 db), so I don't know what to rely on.