- Audio is half of video.
Now, I'm no audio engineer
and I don't pretend to play on on TV,
but I have taught Final Cut Pro to high school students
for the past eight years, and in that time,
I've learned quite a few basics
about how to make your project sound a lot better
when using Final Cut Pro.
The importance of audio cannot be overstated,
and it really kinda seems counterintuitive at first,
but people will stick with a video,
they'll watch it longer if it looks bad but sounds good
than they will if it looks good and sounds bad.
The audio really is just that important.
So here are five quick tips to help you
get better audio with no prior
audio engineering experience required.
As you're jumping into, ooh, look at my arms.
They're like, they're so long on this wide angle lens.
The first thing to do as you dive into your project
inside Final Cut Pro is to press shift, command, eight,
and that's going to bring up audio meters
over on the right hand side.
You can actually adjust how wide or narrow
you want those audio meters to be,
but I would pretty much never, ever edit a project
without having those meters available.
Even in my classroom, when students are editing,
they know that they should have those on there,
and if they don't have it, sometimes as I'm walking by,
I will just push shift, command, eight,
and just put the audio meters up
so that they're there and students can see their audio.
And as you scrub through your project on the timeline,
you will see the audio meters bounce up and down,
and it's really important to pay attention to those meters,
even over your headphones or your speaker monitors,
because there are so many variables
between how you're listening to your audio
versus how your audience is going to listen to your audio
that these are accurate no matter what.
If the levels are good here,
they're going to be good everywhere.
Simple step number two has to deal with
how you adjust your audio levels
within Final Cut Pro.
If you've used Final Cut Pro for any amount of time,
you know the frustration that comes
with trying to adjust your volume,
especially accurately, using just this little slider line
that appears on the timeline.
Whether it's a video track with audio
or a separate audio track, it's really hard sometimes
to get exactly what you want.
But, if you go up into your inspector
and you click on the speaker,
there are all of your audio options,
and you can either type in the level
that you want your audio to be,
or you can just slide this slider,
which is much, much easier to get exactly
the level that you want.
And now that you've got your audio meters
and you know how to adjust your levels,
what should those levels be at?
What is a good level?
This is a very general, very broad rule of thumb,
but as a very broad, very general rule of thumb,
you wanna keep your audio levels
right in between negative 12 and negative six
for like an average dialogue speaking part of your video.
And that doesn't mean it's not going to bounce up and down,
but it just means, as the meters
are bouncing up and down, they're gonna be
right in between negative 12 and negative six.
That's not too soft, but it's not too loud.
As soon as you get up towards zero,
that's when you're gonna encounter peaking,
which sounds like distortion, and clipping,
and you're not going to be able to fix that in your edit.
And if your levels are too low,
if they're down in the negative 20s,
it's gonna be so quiet that people can't hear it
even if they turn their volume all the way up.
Now, there's a whole different question
when it comes to background music,
and that's one of those things
that is really tough.
Sometimes you don't have background music,
but if you're editing a short film,
you might have sound effects,
you might have a soundtrack.
YouTube videos a lot of the time
do have background music, just to help
make it more interesting.
In general, I have found that it is good
to keep your background songs somewhere between
negative 35 and negative 40.
That's gonna make them almost difficult
to hear without headphones,
but that way they're never gonna compete
with your main audio.
If you do want to have an audio spike,
you have a loud explosion,
or a very surprising moment in a video
and you need that loud audio,
you can have it spike close to zero,
but I would keep it at negative one max,
because as soon as your audio goes to zero or beyond,
that's where you get that clipping and that peaking
that just becomes impossible to fix.
Tip number three is all about effects and presets.
Just like video, Final Cut Pro has so many options
that you can add to your audio to make it better.
As soon as you select any clip with audio
and go into the audio menu,
you'll see an audio enhancements option
over to the right hand side with some equalizers.
There are some presets that are actually pretty good.
I've noticed that I have kind of a nasaly voice,
and after I've been editing videos for a long time,
I want to reduce that, so I usually actually will add
a base boost to my audio, and you can see,
as soon as I added it, it kinda change the waveform
down at the bottom.
But I've also found that, with the base boost,
my voice sounds then too basey,
so rather than just leave the preset as it is,
you can click this little equalizer icon,
and then you can adjust it to your specific liking.
So, I usually end up bringing down
some of the low end so it's not super basey,
and then I also bring down some of the high end too,
which hides that nasaly-ness of my natural beautiful voice.
And once you have it set the way that you want,
you can actually save it as a preset
and an audio category that you choose,
and then you can go into your side menu any time,
go down to audio, find your preset,
and then just drag it over.
I completely misspelled the word super, but that's fine.
I spelled it Tom's Suoper Beautiful Voice.
And the same really goes with any effects
that you add to your audio in Final Cut Pro.
Just like with video, it's best to use a very light touch.
Use them sparingly.
The presets are one thing, but if you go down
to where the video effects are
and you go towards the audio selection,
you have tons of different things that you can add,
which can be really great,
but once you add them, you probably wanna use
a very light touch to keep them subtle.
Anything that you add shows up in your audio inspector,
and you can adjust it, you can equalize it.
It can actually almost be overwhelming
how powerful Final Cut Pro can be with audio.
But we don't need to worry about that right now.
My main thing is just to let you know
that there are presets which can sometimes be very helpful,
and sometimes they sound even better
if you go in and you modify them just a little bit.
Nothing scientific, just to what sounds good to your ear.
And last but certainly not least are audio key frames.
So, just like with video, in Final Cut Pro,
you can have audio key frames.
This can be something as simple as
when you want audio to fade or show up.
Say you have this background song
and I want it to fade in.
I can just drag this little circle from either end
and it will fade in or out.
You can also cross fade tracks
into each other and around each other
and get really into mixing.
But if you wanna go beyond that,
you can add in audio key frames.
If you hold down option and then you click
on your audio track on that little line,
you'll see that key frames now start to be added in,
and then you can adjust those key frames
and position them however you want.
One way that I use this a lot
is actually at the beginning of my videos.
Even though I want my background music
to be at like negative 35, so rather than fade,
I actually like to start a little bit louder.
Not too loud where it interferes with my voice,
but maybe somewhere around, like, you know,
negative 15, negative 17, and then slowly kind of
dip down into the background.
And it just sorta helps pull the viewer in,
hook someone, grab their attention,
but it's not super disruptive
and it's not really distracting
since it's not staying there throughout the whole video.
You can also easily add audio key frames
by using the range tool.
If you click on the tool selector
or you just press R, it will give you the range option.
You can just click and drag to select
a portion of your audio,
and then you can adjust just the audio
within that portion.
As soon as you go back to the select tool
by clicking the arrow or pressing A,
you'll notice Final Cut has then thrown in key frames
all on its own, and then you can fine tune
and adjust these key frames and these levels
as much as you want.
This is great when you need to mix in
different audio sources.
So, if I have a nice sequence of B roll footage and music,
and suddenly I wanna mix in a voice,
you would want your music to come down,
and the voice to come up, and then you might want that
to change as time goes on.
And when it comes to key frames,
you can add key frames for pretty much
any audio effect the same way you would for video.
Any time you're mousing over an effect
and you see the little diamond with the plus sign,
that means add a key frame.
If you've reached a point where you've played with
a whole bunch of different effects
and now you've got audio key frames everywhere
and it's hard to keep track of them,
you can right click on your audio
and then do show audio animation,
and any key frames you have for any settings
will show up there.
And my goal with this video isn't to be
the definitive source on Final Cut Pro Audio,
it's just to help you boost your audio quality,
which in turn will help improve
the overall quality of your entire video.
And if you are a Final Cut Pro editor like I am,
I did make a video that has five quick tips
for Final Cut Pro in general
to help make your editing life a lot easier.
Put that video right here so you can click on it
and go check out that video.