Leveling & Fading with the Audio Mixer in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I will continue to talk about the audio mixer. Below you have the level meters here. Okay the fader and the level meter. Here's your level meter right here and this is your fader button. You can drag this fader up and down to change the volume. Put it right down there, it's cool. Now to the right of that you have the master area which you can toggle with this little arrow here, hiding or showing and this allows you to adjust all the tracks at once. So you have your master mute right here and under that you have what's called the down mix control. Now when this is selected all output channels are mixed down to a single stereo pair of outputs so these are useful if you need to monitor, print a tape or export files of your mix in stereo. So let's say you have like 15 tracks of audio. Hitting mix down will smoosh it all together into just 2 tracks which are a stereo pair. Now you have this clipping indicator which are these little 2 red dots up here at the top of the meter. What happens is these light up when you go over 0db which is where the slider is right now. When your levels go over 0db, you see how they are down here right now. They are just kind of hanging out down there. Well if they go over 0db, you get a very noticeable audio distortion. Like you will start getting crackling and coming out of the speakers and it is really bad and annoying. So always try to keep your audio levels below 0db. Now everything to the left here in these meters, you notice there are not clipping buttons on top here. That is because as long as your levels are inside of here, you are fine. Because this top one right here, this is 0 db over in the master. So if I play this you can see, all right, cool, cool, yeah. It's all good. So you just need to watch out for that. Now the view buttons. You have your view buttons up here at the top. You have a 1, 2, 3 and 4 and if you notice now that I am selecting between the 4, no view has changed. That's because you haven't set it but let's say on A1 and A 2, you have an audio track, someone speaking and A3 and A 4, you have music. You want to edit those separately. What you can do is click a view so you select a view and then you go ahead and deselect A 3 and A 4. So now if all you see is A1 and A2 which will be your audio and you go over to 2 and they all come back. If you go over to 1, it remembers it. You can now go over to 2 and deselct A1 and A2 to have just your music. So you can switch between your voice and your music, your voice and your music. So we remember which ones you toggle and which ones you hide. "