How To Set Keyframes in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"This is C. J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I'll show you how to set key frames for your audio and its uses inside of Final Cut Pro. Now I will show you how to use key frames with audio. You would set audio key frames to change the volume of a clip or clips over time to create for example a fade in or a fade out or to change the volume temporarily. So to add key frames to audio you are going to want to grab the pen tool which is this bottom tool in the tool pallet, hand tool, just click that and now wherever you put your pen tool here, that is where you will click and make a key frame. So let's make a key frame here. So now I have a key frame and let's make another key frame over here. Let's say our goal for this is to make the audio fade in from nothing. All right, well to make that happen all you have to do is just pull one of these down and you can see now that everything to the left here is down which is at zero, which means it is silent. You can do the exact opposite. You could do it to the right and then that goes down and you see how it kind of comes up and fades in. So it's pulling these down. Let's listen to that. See it just kind of fades right in very nicely. Now let's say you have some dialog that you need to stand out. With dialog, you want to pull down. If you have music behind it so you can hear the person speaking, you want to fade your dialog down temporarily. Not all the way down. You might want to fade it all the way down. It's a really low level so you can hear talking on top of that. Now when you want to fade down just a section of a clip, you notice here that if I am trying to fade that middle part down I can't do it without dragging the other side. What you have to do is you have to actually set 4 key frames. You have to set two on each side. Now what that is doing is now these middle ones they can move down. Now a nice way to navigate with these is to just grab the pointer tool, the selection tool and go right in the middle and then you can drag it down. So you see what is happening now. As it comes to here, it hits this point and it fades out, so it fades down to a very low volume and then it fades back up. So you always need those two points on the outside to tell it where to go back up to. Otherwise it would just be affecting the whole thing. So let's go ahead, what did I bring this down to, 44. Let's go ahead and listen to that now. That was a little bit too low. Let's bring it back up here a bit and then they stopped talking. That is a very important tool when you are cutting audio that has music behind it. "