So by now, you should understand the central role that roles play in Final Cut Pro 10.3.
In this lesson, Steve will show you how you can use roles to do a final mix.
In this lesson, I’m going to show you how you can use Final Cut Pro 10.3’s new Role-based
workflow to deliver a final master that includes a mix-down of your Dialogue, Music and Effects.
I’ll start by revealing the Audio Lanes for all the Roles.
The color coding really makes it easy to identify each group, and by selecting the bar for each
Role in the Timeline Index, all the clips that belong to that role group become highlighted.
This feature makes it easier to see if a particular audio clip is not assigned to the correct
subrole, so you can quickly reassign it if necessary.
As you’ve learned so far, Final Cut Pro’s approach to audio organization is completely
metadata driven and therefore its approach to mixing is also metadata driven.
I’ll reveal all the subrole lanes by clicking the button for each Role.
Here you can see that I’ve taken the time to create individually named subroles for
each role group.
There are separate Dialogue subroles for each speaking character, and I’ve assigned unique
subrole names for all my Effects and Music.
This level of organization, especially on large projects like features or documentaries,
can really make your audio post fast and efficient.
But let’s say that you are delivering for broadcast and you need to refine your mix
a bit further to comply with network standards.
In a traditional mixing environment, you might route all your dialogue tracks to its own
bus on a mixer - often called a sub-mix in order to apply volume changes and audio effects
to a single track.
Let’s look at how to create sub-mixes for your dialogue,
music and effects in Final Cut Pro 10.3.
And here’s a hint: it doesn’t involve a mixer.
To set this up, press Command-A to select all the clips in your project.
Press Option-G to create a Compound Clip.
I’ll call this “Date Night Final Mix” and press Return.
I’ve now greatly simplified my timeline into 3 lanes of Dialogue, Effects and Music,
called Role Components.
They are called Role components because they represent the consolidated signals from all
the roles and subroles nested inside the compound clip.
As with any compound clip, you can reveal its contents by double-clicking it,
and in this case it reveals all my original Dialogue, Effects and Music Roles.
The reason I’m showing you this is to point out that you still have access
to all your individual clips and lanes if you need to make edits to them.
Any changes you make here are routed to the Role Components in the parent project.
I’ll press Command Left Bracket to go back to the Parent project.
Basically, these Role components are now sub-mixes.
If you look in the upper left corner of each component you’ll see a badge indicating
a mixdown.
Whenever you see this badge on a clip, it means that the clip is combining its components
into a consolidated audio output.
One other helpful visual is the clip color - or lack of color to be more precise.
Whenever a clip contains more that one role it will appear gray.
With your timeline set up this way, it’s now easy to change the volume of all your
dialogue, effects, and music as a single entity by dragging on the volume bar.
You can treat the role component like any other audio clip, adding keyframes,
or even dropping an effect onto them.
When an effect has been applied to a role component,
an FX badge appears in the upper left of the component in the Inspector,
and the controls for altering the effect appear in the Effects section directly above it.
I'm going to remove that effect because I want to show you an alternate workflow
that's very powerful.
Let's say I wanted to apply an effect or make adjustments to individual subroles
that are being routed through these Role Components.
For example, perhaps I want to give Jill’s dialogue some more punch.
Do I need to open the compound clip to do this?
Absolutely not.
In the Inspector, you’ll find a menu that allows you to switch from Role based mixing
to subrole based mixing.
I’ll choose Subroles.
Bam.
Now I can view all the subroles that are nested inside the compound clip
as consolidated role components.
I’ll add a Compressor to Jill’s dialogue component,
and apply one of the built-in voice presets.
I also think these dish sound effects are too quiet throughout the scene,
so we’ll give those a boost as well.
and I also want to bring up the overall restaurant ambience.
I’ll play it back to hear my mix, and while the project is playing
I’ll clean up the UI by collapsing the lanes,
and closing the timeline index, and the inspector…
With this version of Final Cut Pro, you now have complete control over your audio,
from organizing to editing to creating a final mix.
And we’ve just scratched the surface.
If you are interested in going deeper, with more context,
you'll want to check out our Final Cut Pro 10.3 New Features: In Depth tutorial.
You can click the Info button above.
In the next several lessons, Mark will explore several other new features and enhancements.