Working with Audio in Final Cut Pro 5

Series Summary

A working knowledge of Final Cut Pro is essential to any aspiring filmmaker. As the most widely used software program in video and film editing, Apple computer's Final Cut Pro can give a professional appearance to any film project from basic digital video to HD material. Because it is relatively affordable and easy to use, Final Cut Pro has become extremely popular with broadcast stations and independent filmmakers. So much so that some would say it has become the industry standard for video editing.

In this video clip series our expert will show you more than the ways to use Final Cut Pro for video. You will learn tips and techniques for editing the audio to go with the video. Since Final Cut is such a good video editing program it also needs to be a good audio editing program to go along with it and that it is. All of the audio either already part of the video or imported separately is able to be separated out and edited on its own without changing any of the video. Have a look and really get flying on you next film!

Video Transcript

"This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to give you an introduction into working with audio in final cut pro. Welcome to Volume 8. In this volume we are going to talk about basic audio editing. So first we need to go over some theory and rules for editing audio. Rules which by the way can always be broken. Most viewers are quite good at distinguishing audio changes from one clip to the next. Also, the notice incorrect audio video synchronization so as you work on refining the audio in your project, your editor will focus on eliminating these major distractions to the audience. In particular keep in mind three important goals. The first one is make sure audio edit points are not noticeable. Editing audio clips in a sequence mainly involves finding good edit points that sound natural. Audio edit points are often more effective when they are offset from the corresponding video edits. Although you may set your initial audio and video edit points in the same place to create a quick rough cut, editing your audio more fine tuned may involved changing many many of your edit points to split edits. Some of those split edits may only have a few frames offset between the audio and video edit points. But those frames will turn and otherwise obvious cut into a much smoother transition. Besides making clean sounding cuts, there are other reasons to edit the audio in your sequence separately from the video. You can edit mistakes in dialog, adjust the sync of off camera or re-recorded dialogs or even replace the entire audio of a clip with another tape of the same audio. The second goal is to make sure that your video and audio clips are in sync. That is important. You have to make sure that your video and audio clips are in sync because as you edit your audio, you may sometimes find it necessary to adjust the sync relationship between video and audio clips. Audiences, people who are watching this are quick to notice when audio is out of sync. I notice even if it is slightly out of sync it is distracting. It is very distracting. So you need to be extra cautious when you are editing. A good rule of thumb is if it is annoying to you, it's annoying to them. If you can notice it, they will definitely notice it. Now Final Cut Pro does a pretty good job of keeping track of the sync between audio and video clip items when they come from the same source media file or when they have intentionally linked together. So as long as Final Cut Pro is doing its job and you are doing your job, you should be okay with that. "