Final Cut Pro Audio Question

I prefer Sound Track Pro for the sort of thing you're talking about.

Once I'm finished editing, I take the video into Sound Track Pro and adjust levels where it's easier to manipulate levels, in my opinion. I also use Sound Track for my final mix of sound effects, music and ambient audio.

Audacity is the best for removing noise levels. That has saved my bacon a couple of times.

Sound Track Pro, OK thanks for the recommendation.

In this program, can you basically filter out different sounds> meaning filter my voice by the camera (which will be very loud) from the voice of the person being interviewed (who will be much quieter)? Do you know if that's possible?

I don't quite get what you mean by audacity being the best for removing noise levels. Is that a program or some insider film joke I don't quite get ? ;P

Audacity is an audio program. I believe it is free; open source, and available for Mac OS X. It's another sound editor, and it's actually quite capable, but not as pretty as Sound Track.

I assumed you would be adjusting audio levels over time. If you and your interviewee are speaking at the same time, you may have a problem separating them. My thought was that you were going to be doing some painstaking, moment-by-moment level adjustments. I find Sound Track much easier for that sort of thing than FCP.

What you want to do can be done in FCP. But filtering out the signal to noise ratio is really difficult in any program. The farther away the mic is from the speaker the more "noise" you're going to get. Raising the level in post will only boost that noise along with the signal.

If you haven't already shot the interviews I suggest using a boom pole to get the mic in nice and close.

But filtering out the signal to noise ratio is really difficult in any program.

Click to expand...

Agreed, and noise filtering is always a last resort. However, if you haven't tried Audacity, I suggest you give it a try, and keep it in your back pocket for when you need it. Audacity has you select a region of audio that is just noise, and it uses the signature of that noise to remove the noise from the area you want to clean up.

I've used Audacity when nothing else would work and I was ready to scrap an audio clip that was just too noisy. I've always been amazed at how well it works. I know, in a perfect world, we'd never need noise removal, but my world isn't so perfect.

I have to do this kind of thing all the time and providing both the sound sources are clean it's fairly easy in FCP.

Here's a basic how to.

First you need to go to the buttons in the left hand corner of the timeline and click on the button that shows the levels of any particular clip. It looks like a little graph with dots on the line. This makes a pink line visible on the audio clips in the timeline.

If you drag that line down, you'll see that it lowers the level of the whole clip -- it will show a number as you do this and this is the difference between where you are and the original recording level ie. -2 or -9.

(You can tell the clip volume by watching the audio meter on the right of the timeline.)

If you've got two distinct levels, then the first thing to do is set the overall level for the clip so the loudest peaks at round about -12db (for voices).

Once you've done that you go to the tool selector and pick the pen tool.

Then go back to your clip. You need to scrub though the clip and identify the point where the you need to raise the level of the clip. At this point you click the pen tool onto the level line and this will mark a key frame point on the audio line. Then make another key frame point right next to it. --- having marked the start of the audio you need to raise, then find the end of the section and mark two key frame points right next to each other.

Now, go back to the tool selector and click the selector tool (the arrow) -- you can now drag the centre of the marked area and raise that until it also peaks around the -12db mark on the audio meter

With that done the two sections should now play at the same audio levels.

This is by no means a guarantee that your sound will be acceptable, because Rik's right, if you don't get it the audio right in the first place it's very difficult to get an acceptable fix in post.