sweetening audio in fcp
- Thread starter pulpwoody
- Start date
I have one. It's called the "Alex" filter. Send your audio through Alex, for a reasonable day rate, and it'll sound more awesome. :beer:
NoahK
Hottie Mod
Personally I don't use STP that much and I'm not 100 percent convinced the audience is really there to support a course on it. The best way to get great audio is record it well during production- then you don't really need to do much with it in post other than set levels to your liking. Barry's DVD on Sound for Film and TV is really the best thing there is for getting good audio.
Noah
Way too many variables for a "Magic Bullet" style of program. With video, not to oversimplify, but it boils down to red, green, and blue. With audio, the spectrum is much more complicated, and not everything the microphone hears can be adjusted with the same tweaking points. And once everything is layered together, it's even more complicated. Layer your video, and it's still RGB.
Then, once you get into compression and limiting, which are necessary for controlling levels and giving audio that "bigger than life," "in your face" kind of feel, every mix has its own needs that cannot be boiled down to a handful of presets (since some compression/limiting takes place at the track level, and some on the master level).
And recording it right the first time is the best solution. Poorly-recorded audio, well... you can polish a turd all you want.
Unless you know what you're doing... be careful with filters and plug-ins. Again, lots of variables here. And "smoothing out" can mean many different things. Are you sure it's an EQ kind of "smoothing out," or is it more of a mix level "smoothing out?"
And EQ isn't going to help you too much if you don't have reliable audio monitors. On what types of speakers are you listening?
Mixing on headphones is worse than mixing on crappy computer speakers. Those Sony headphones may be nice (MDR7506?), but only for field production and dialog editing. Once you get to the mix and the EQ stage, headphones are the last things you want. They are misleading, and represent nothing of what the actual mix will sound like on speakers.
That said, for plosives, about the best you can do is a low-frequency roll-off (aka hi-pass) at 80 - 100Hz. But recording with a pop filter the first time is the best way to avoid plosives.