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2 FCP Audio Questions

Dutchboy

Dutchboy

I have two questions regarding audio in FCP. If anyone could help that would be great. Shouldn't be too hard to answer. I'm just a newb...

1. I've been re-arranged files around hard drives. Now that I finally have the files where I want and I've reconnected all of the media, the audio (background music) does not play when I preview the movie. My audio files, listed under my "music" bin aren't red-flagged. I don't understand why I can't hear the audio?

2. Down in the timeline, where my audio clips are placed, is it possible to see the audio wavelengths without double clicking on the audio file? This way I could know where a song starts/stops/picks up just by looking at it?

Thanks again for anyone who can help.
 
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2. In the preferences somewhere, there's an option to show the waveforms in the timeline (it's a resource hog and may slow down your editing)... I think you may also be able to activate it from the lower left corner of the timeline window with one of the little button doohickies down there.

1. I'm not quite sure, is the green light turned on to the left of the track in the timeline? Clicking this can turn tracks on and off... you may also want to pull up the mixer console window and see if any of the tracks are muted or soloed.
 
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They are not muted. It's very bizarre. When I double click on the audio file in the timeline it doesn't even play in the viewer. Something went wrong when I moved files around. It's like the audio file is there in the timeline and it's edited, however there is no audio file to play...

I guess I'll just have to re-add the audio files into the timeline.
 
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I redid all of the audio files which did not take very long. While I have your attention, I have one more thing to fix before I export it.

I have a clip, which I increased the speed of to get a fast-motion effect. Now the clip is not widescreen, like all of the others, when I view it. Very strange. I'm guessing it did this automatically when I increased the speed of frames? Can I put it back to widescreen?
 
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how did you change the frame rate? The anamorphic flag may have been unchecked in the settings when slowing down if you changed the frame rate in something like cinema tools rather than just a simple speed change in FCP.
 
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All that I did was drag the clip into the timeline then right click and select speed. Then I chose 300%, constant speed, and frame blending is checked (maybe this is why?).

(BTW, this is all before I exported.)
 
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weird, that should have kept it all at the same video settings. I'm not sure why that would change. In the clips browser, if you right click (or control-click) on that clip, you shold be able to look at properties to see if the anamorphic box is selected.
 
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I eventually right clicked on 'remove attributes' and checked 'distort'. I have no idea why I needed to do that or why it was there but it worked...

I'm finally ready to export the video. Hopefully I'll have it up on the web later today and you guys can check it out. BTW, when I export with quicktime, I select PNG and BEST quality, MILLIONS OF COLORS +. I was told at one point that PNG is good quality to export it with. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
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DIrectly out of FCP, I generally just use the LAN preset. It's provided good results for me and is relatively small. PNG will probably be larger as it's a higher quality compression format. If the goal is the web, you'll need to balance more toward filesize than quallity (these are the two adversaries in the online movie equation).
 
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Okay. I've been watching tutorials on using compressor. I'm compressing in LAN setting as we speak. I'm going to try to compress for DVD now. How do I export from FCP before I bring to compressor?
 
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The LAN file for the internet turned out very well. But I'm still working on exporting to DVD. I exported from FCP as full quality PNG, but when I burnt to DVD using DVDSP, the final video's exposure was shit.
 
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Under final cut, File > Export > Quicktime (not the convert using QT one). The full quality export will be what you need. You don't even need to make it a self contained file, that will save time (make sure you keep all your files well managed though or it'll break the dependancies... or you can juse make it self contained and move on with your life)... If you have other options than this, you're exporting it incorrectly.

Transcoding always has the potential to screw stuff up. Keep it the same format as long as possible. In this case, it's up until it's encoded by DVDSP to stuff it onto your DVD, DVDSP will do that for you, don't try to do it elsewhere or you'll be disappointed unless you know some magic secret sauce that you have to sign away your first born to get ;) It won't be PNG, it won't be JPG, it'll just give the option of self contained or not.
 
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I should only be using Compressor to compress it for internet then? I'm doing a very good job managing all of my files. Especially after all of the "re-do's" I've had to do. Hah.

I don't see the option for full quality export you speak of. I chose File > Export > Quicktime Movie. Then am I supposed to see it under settings?
 
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Nope, that is the full quality export. Keep the settings at "Current Settings" which will read the settings from the sequence you're exporting, preventing any potential cross encoding changes.
 
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