FCP audio... Looking for pointers

Jay Rodriguez

Jay Rodriguez

Coffee Member
So I'm editing my short film and being fairly new to FCP I'm at a total loss as to how to work with mixing the audio and filtering out the unwanted noise.

Anyone care to throw some tips at me?

Thanks
 
What sort of noise? There's not much FCP can do to fix badly recorded production audio if that is the issue.

Noah
 
Do you have Soundtrack with your comp? It'll help, but like Noah said Coffee, if you had poorly recorded audio during production, you are pretty much screwed.

When I DPed a feature this past summer, we got to the editing room and found that the audio was horrible. We had to lay the final cut out on DVD, then bring it to a studio to re-record the audio. The actors were pissed.

The crappy co-director blamed it on me because I had the sound levels on my lcd screen, which is crap, because I may have had levels, but I wasn't listening to the sound via headphones. Plus we didn't have a dedicated sound guy, so we were pretty much screwed. Good luck with that man, but if you have Soundtrack try bringing it in there and you could possibly put some sort of noise gate on there.
 
Well an example of what I'm facing is during some dolly shots I can hear a rummble as the dolly moves which is coming from the wheels I guess. Trying to figure out how to manage that kind of stuff.

Also I need to do some basic things like adding sound effects like doors closing and foot steps kind of stuff. Simple cut and paste with mix down capabilities.

Do I have soundtrack? I don't know, I'm new to mac's as I bought mine a month or two ago......
 
I think your best bet to control the rumble is to apply a high pass filter on the track that has the rumble. Start at maybe 200hz and see if that knocks out some of the noise. You can usually roll off all the way to 350 or so without starting to make dialogue sound crappy. I probably wouldn't attempt to use a noise gate, as you probably wont be able to set the trigger well enough to help.


If you are going to do foley work, I think that would definately exceed FCP's ability to do well, and you would need to use Soundtrack, or a different application. If you bought Final Cut Studio, it came with Soundtrack. I have FCS, but I have never used Soundtrack, so I can't really help there. I think you will find that doing foley and having it sound convincing is a little harder than cut and paste :)
 
If you bought Final Cut Studio you got Soundtrack Pro. Soundtrack pro came with a second cd full off loops. Those loops included something like 500 soundeffects - check them out to find possible foley.

I actually just finished doing a sound edit for my feature film in Final Cut pro because I couldn't get soundtrack pro to work properly. (I do recommend sending clips that need noise reduction to Soundtrackpro as it can work well.)

Use CrossFade 0 to fade in and fade out audio, click and drag to set length
Use CrossFade +3 when connecting 2 audio clips together.

As for the clip you mentioned with the dolly sound... if they aren't talking during the movement, just replace the sound entirely adding new ambience, sfx etc.. You can do ADR, which is good practise for both you and the actors(if they are serious actors).

Whichever eq it is that has 31 bands, it is pretty good at lowering wind or other outside consistent noise while leaving your dialogue useful, you just gotta play with the settings to find the right mix.
 
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