Basic audio tricks and settings in FCPX

G

guerriglia

Active member
Hello everybody.

I am putting together a very short documentary with FCPX. The audio (interviews recorded on location and also music) is divided in several clips along the timeline.
I know ALMOST NOTHING about audio, so please forgive my ignorance and possible silly questions/terms.

What is the best dB setting (I know there are differences based on countries, broadcast or not, etc.)?
Can I normalize/equalize all the different tracks in just one track with a smooth volume and not stark contrasts/peaks?
Any easy suggestions to avoid major mistakes? Or can I just use the friendly tools generously provided by FCPX? :)

Thank you!
 
I average audio at around -12dB. Music to taste.

You should edit at the zero line (where the sound/sine wave touches the zero dB line) which is not possible with FCP X, so you should probably use the little faders at the beginning and end of the sub clips or else you can hear a crackle on cuts. I sometimes add a bunch of volume keyframes for complicated volume adjustments (ie someone says the first words of a sentence loudly). At the end you can create a compound clip, where every plugin you add to effectively applies to all the subclips.

For normalizing a good plugin indicating the dynamic range for voices will help with the compressor settings.

iZotope RX would likely be quite helpful..
 
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OK I will say it.

The best advice I can give is to rough it in with your picture edit and send the sound off to be done by someone who knows what they are doing.

There are no "tricks" that will create a decent sound track, it's time and experience. It also helps to have something close to the right tool and FCP is not close to being the right tool for doing sound work.
 
The question is where you plan to send this documentary to. If it's youtube/vimeo, fcp x can be enough I'd say.
 
raphb said:
You should edit at the zero line (where the sound/sine wave touches the zero dB line) which is not possible with FCP X, so you should probably use the little faders at the beginning and end of the sub clips or else you can hear a crackle on cuts.
Click to expand...

If you don't have access to software that will find the zero crossings, putting an audio crossfade on your cuts can make a big difference. Add the transition to the audio edit, and then drag it so it's just one frame on each side of the cut. That can really clean up some cuts.

BTW, Audacity (free) has a "find zero crossings" menu item - dunno how well it works as I use protools for intense stuff. But in 9 years or so of using FCP, I've never needed that for dialogue edits... and yes, I've had to rebuild words and sentences, paste in consonants and vowels, etc. and never had a click or pop from editing and very rarely taken dialogue into protools unless there's a big big problem. A one-frame crossfade has always worked for me in a pinch.

Audacity is great if you need to stretch a bit of audio, and when cutting music you can add a little stretch+reverb to the end of a hard cut so it sounds like a natural ending to a piece, or extend the last note of canned music that ramps off too fast. It's nowhere near protools, but when I just want to take 30 seconds for a fix and not create a new PT project, it's a big life saver.

Longer crossfades can really help in fixing words or sentences in dialogues, to sort of "smear" the fix in with the original. Dialogue editing takes a lot of practice and a good ear for the way people talk.
 
Thanks everybody.

I can guess what "zero crossings" are, but can you please explain me? Are they the points where two tracks connect?
Again, please forgive my dumb questions and improper terms, but I am just starting with this audio nightmare!

I'd rather avoid sending "the sound off to be done by someone who knows what they are doing", otherwise I will never learn. I prefer to make mistakes and produce something close to horrible than spending hundreds (thousands) of euros to have somebody else do the job for me.
Needless to say, this is not a commercial work. When I said "tricks" I meant ideas, tools, suggestions to avoid major mistakes. I did not mean shortcuts to get the same results that someone with a 20-year experience can achieve.


If FCPX is not good, what could the right tool be?

Unfortunately, when I submit a thread like this, most of the times I get great technical replies that are ok for someone at the same level of experience of the user who sent the suggestion. While I do appreciate everybody's help, please don't forget that I know almost nothing bout audio, I want to learn, and you can't start pouring 469,834 technical words and suggestions on my poor brain :) PLEASE KEEP IT AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE!

Thanks.

PS: my work could be for Vimeo, YouTube and broadcast. I have no specific plans.
 
Guerriglia

You can get a lot of help in this forum, but it can be a little rough and tumble. If you ask specific questions about what you want to do, you'll get better responses.

You might want to get one or more of the Jay Rose books about audio for video. One of them I believe is about post audio. If you need more audio processing than what FCPX can provide, you might consider Apple Logic which fully featured and will integrate well with FCPX.

You will want to make a decent workspace to do your editing, so imagine what you will use for monitors and how you will drive them, and the acoustic treatments in your editing station.

From what you have said so far, you will need more than a few audio tricks and tips for FCPX. Settle in, do your study.
 
This isn't something that a few tricks and tips or a little advice about FCPX will help with if you want good audio. People go to college for this.

Are you wanting to be a sound editor? Director? Picture editor? There is a reason these are jobs. It's great you want to learn how to do this, but very few people do an entire project all by themselves on the post side of things. Your best bet is to hand it of to a sound editor that knows what they are doing. If you don't have the budget for that then hand it off to a college student studying sound design. To do proper sound post you'll need either Pro Tools or Nuendo running on a powerful machine with some good plug-ins. At that point you are spending as much as you would on someone to do a down and dirty sound edit for you.

In all of my years of doing this, I've seen people buy a DAW thinking they can just "learn it on their own". It doesn't work that way, and they end up giving up on it and let people who know what they are doing handle it. Save yourself the headache and let someone skilled deal with it. FCPX is garbage for audio work (I know, I've tried, and I'm a skilled sound designer).
 
I would highly recommend getting a book or two or much better talk your way into a bit of time with an editor, buy them a beer and ask one on one. It will be infinitely more helpful than trying to get the basics through a forum. The forum is pretty good for specific questions but the kind of "how do I do sound" type questions are just too broad.

So zero crossings.

If you look at the sound wave zoomed in a lot so you can see it as a wiggly line you should see a guide line that cuts roughly through the center left to right. Not the divider between tracks, each wiggly line is one track, so you will probably have two since almost everything these days records two tracks.

That guide line is where the waveform crosses from positive (top side) to negative (bottom side). That is the Zero crossing point. At that point there is no potential difference in the signal which is a technical way of saying that at that point nothing is happening sound wise so you can cut and not hear it. If you make a cut when the wveform is far away from the zero then you will hear a pop at the cut.

This used to be a big deal. Assistants would go through an editors session putting 1/4 frame fades at the head and tail of each region (clip) and that might have involved thousands of fades in a 10 minute FX reel.

I haven't actually done this in years. ProTools did something? not sure what a number of versions ago and you almost never get pops. Not sure of other software but I suspect this would be a very high priority on less "professional" sound editors because they would be getting bad press from users having pops all over the place, so I suspect that most software either adds a depoping fade automatically now or auto shifts to the closest zero crossing point.

The other gotcha to doing in manually is that on stereo files the zero crossing is almost never at the same point on both channels so one or the other will pop unless you just fade it.

So now that you know what it is you can probably forget it until you hear a pop (if ever).

Sound Track Pro probably came bundled with FCP, used to anyway, that is probably a good tool for you. It's not the best DAW (sound editing programs are usually referred to as Digital Audio Workstations "DAW") in the world but it works much like FCP so it's pretty easy for FCP editors to get their head around. It also integrates well, or used to. I'm not exactly sure what they threw out when they went to FCPX, so maybe STP doesn't come with it anymore and maybe it doesn't integrate anymore.

The reason not a lot of professional editors use FCPX is because they tossed out a lot of the functions that let you work with others, so most stayed with FCP7.

At least up to FCP7 there is basically no GUI for the audio "filters" so using them is really difficult VS a DAW. Also track size is very limiting in FCP, true also with STP but since you don't have the video tracks it's manageable.

If STP is out the Audacity I hear is nice Reaper is quite good and pretty cheap. After that it starts getting expensive so...

Most of my total newbie "tricks" are more "dont's".

Don't "normalize". Don't use a lot of EQ.
Don't use noise reduction unless you really need to.
Don't compress the hell out of your mix.
Don't slater it with music to cover the lack of sound work.
Don't try to record everything while shooting, do the SFX later and add them in.
DO add in backgrounds and ambiences. Or to make it a don't, Don't rely on whatever you recorded in production for your ambience.

And I would jump up to the stickies at the top of this section of the forum and there is a whole group that is all about post sound, so that should help.
 
Sound Track Pro has been discontinued, and there is no equivalent that comes for free in FCP X. Of course you can buy Logic, but that's another $200. Reaper is $60 and comes with a long trial period.

As far as I know there is no automatic fades in FCP X.
 
I don't know if Reaper is available for Mac. Reaper was styled after SCS's Vegas Pro (w/o the video) by some folks from Winamp. (Jason C. in particular) A nice program IMO, but not quite as intuitive as Vegas Pro.
 
Yes it runs fine on a Mac. It actually is very Mac friendly and you can get it to run on quite old hardware as in PPC.

It's biggest problem for post is that it doesn't import OMF or AAF. On the Windows side there is a third party application that can translate all kinds of formats and it will let you convert an OMF to a Reaper session. It will also convert reaper to ProTools and visa versa.

As far as I know that is only available for windows so you would have to jump through some hoops on a Mac.

Too bad about STP, but not surprised. Sometimes I wonder if Apple has strategy meetings where they try to figure out how to piss off professional users.
Love the hardware, like the OS, but when it comes to software they make life hard for a professional user.
 
Thanks everybody.

I just asked for some help to put together a small personal project, and then I get people telling me that I have to go college for this. People go to college to become surgeons, but this doesn't mean one can't cure a scratch or a headache at home without studying for five years.

I never intented to take a shortcut and skip what pros learn in decades or become the sound editor for the next Spielberg's movie in a couple of weeks; I just wanted to know how to avoid major mistakes. That's it.

I do understand that my question was very broad, but some of the replies are irritating: it seems to me that some of you are just waiting for somebody who doesn't know anything about sound to devour him and laugh at his questions, dismissing him as somebody at a much lower and insignificant level. Being a "skilled sound designer" doesn't mean you are in the position to treat others as morons, without putting yourself in other people's shoes. We make this a better world with kindness, not bragging about our skills!

My thanks to users like ggrantly, noiz2 and raphb for their thorough and sympathetic replies :)

I will do my homework, that's for sure.
 
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Hey don't get disheartened. It is better to first learn to extract all the juice from FCPX. Then think of becoming an audio "surgeon", if that is what you want after mastering FCPX.

There are some free basic tutorials by people like Larry Jordan, ripple training etc. Those will give you basic workarounds. Just try to put whatever sounds you can record and place them in the timeline. Start playing with those and you will automatically feel like getting more sounds and layering it to create a better experience. Then you will learn that certain sounds "pop" and you will then look into audio transitions etc etc.

Audacity is a free software and you can also play in that for some of your recorded sounds and then use those in FCPX.

When you realise that you have to regularly deliver projects to clients and the quality ought to improve, then start looking into proper monitors etc... Trying to attain mastery is a journey. Pick up books. Sit in an editing studio if possible. Enjoy the journey.
 
"On the Windows side there is a third party application that can translate all kinds of formats and it will let you convert an OMF to a Reaper session. It will also convert reaper to ProTools and visa versa."
I assume Scott is referring to 'AA Translator'. The $199USD 'Enhanced' version does OMF, AAF and conversions most popular NLE/DAWs including FCP-X.
There is not a Mac version, but will allegedly run with Mac/Windows emulators.
http://www.aatranslator.com.au
 
raphb said:
Sound Track Pro has been discontinued, and there is no equivalent that comes for free in FCP X.
Click to expand...

Actually, much of the functionality of STP was absorbed into FCP X. The audio plug-ins now function and interface like a proper DAW. It's still not an ideal solution, but I just wanted to clarify what happened with STP.

guerriglia said:
I just asked for some help to put together a small personal project, and then I get people telling me that I have to go college for this. People go to college to become surgeons, but this doesn't mean one can't cure a scratch or a headache at home without studying for five years.

I never intented to take a shortcut and skip what pros learn in decades or become the sound editor for the next Spielberg's movie in a couple of weeks; I just wanted to know how to avoid major mistakes. That's it.
Click to expand...

For YouTube/Vimeo, there aren't many "rules" because there are no standards enforced. As long as you don't peak your audio (hitting, or trying to cross, 0dB), everything else is kind of subjective. Just spend some time looking at as many different Internet videos as you can and you'll see (hear) everything from awful to polished and professional. Generally, keep your audio peaking between -6dB and -3dB for Internet distribution. Start with your dialog and then build the rest of your mix (music, effects, etc.) around that.

Remember, too, that sound level is additive. In other words, every time you add another source to the mix, the overall dB level will increase. Getting all your dialog to peak right at -3dB before adding in everything else is the wrong way to go, because once music and effects are added your mix may actually push 0dB or, worse, try to cross it (resulting in clipping). I bring this up because I have watched people go through and make sure every source is set, one-by-one, at the same nominal peak/average level, and then they un-mute everything and suddenly find their mix is hotter than they thought. Dialog will never ride constantly at or close to your peak level, but will be a bit lower. Sudden peaks caused by yelling, clapping, slamming props, and loud FX (like explosions and crashes) will hit the peak. Music levels should be built around dialog, to stay below and non-interfering. Music can come up in the mix when it is to be featured and there is no dialog to compete.

As for plug-ins, normalizing is to be used carefully, as with any other processing. It's not a fix-all, and honestly I never use it. Layers of compression, EQ, and limiting are typically used to shape the final mix. Use anything like that carefully and gently. Extreme settings can cause problems, not fix them.

Spend time playing around. Make a mix and listen to it. Post it on the Web and play it back on different systems in different places. Take notes with things you hear consistently and things that aren't consistent from playback to playback, then ask questions about how to fix those specific issues. Be sure to post examples, because we need to be able to hear what you hear.

HOWEVER:

The moment you bring in the intent to submit for broadcast, all that goes away and you'll find strict standards that are, honestly, very difficult to hit without knowledge and experience. It's more complex than can be summed up in a few "tips and tricks" in a single post on an Internet forum. As has been suggested, specific questions about this plug-in or that kind of dialog edit can be addressed quickly, but "how to mix audio from start to finish" is a wide and complex topic.

guerriglia said:
...it seems to me that some of you are just waiting for somebody who doesn't know anything about sound to devour him and laugh at his questions, dismissing him as somebody at a much lower and insignificant level. Being a "skilled sound designer" doesn't mean you are in the position to treat others as morons, without putting yourself in other people's shoes. We make this a better world with kindness, not bragging about our skills!
Click to expand...

I agree that the sound forum can play a little rough at times, but this is not out of arrogance or bragging about skills. Sound is a very complicated, specialized skill that people spend years honing.

Broad questions about mixing audio that are accompanied by "I know nothing about sound" effectively try and reduce audio to paint by numbers, and that just won't work.

A similar question would be, "I know nothing about carpentry, but can you tell me how to frame a house?"
 
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Audacity is a great free program. I've messed around in it a lot. Not nearly as capable as pro tools, but hey, it's free and it's basic enough to get started doing basic sound editing and design. If you really know what you are doing you can pull off some cool stuff. I've done sound design in Audacity when I didn't have access to pro tools and then exported those sounds and put them in FCPX. It runs on both Mac and PC. You can find free sound effects on www.freesound.org. It doesn't have everything, but again...it's free.
 
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