What I'm going to teach you today transformed my films in
my opinion and I hope it can do the same for you.
Before I teach you this powerful audio tip, you’ll need to switch your project’s audio to
surround sound. And yes, you can create films that have a surround sound mix in Final cut pro. Doing
this will allow you to have full control of your sound environment, and I’ll explain what I mean
by this in a second. To change to surround audio on an existing project, Press control command 1,
head into your library, click on your project, and open your inspector window by pressing
this icon, or by pressing the shortcut Command 4. With your project selected, hit ‘modify’.
Head down to audio and switch this from stereo to surround. If you’re starting a brand new project,
just do the same thing when setting up. So hit audio, and surround.
Switching to surround allows you to take full control of your sound design by giving you 6
audio channels to work with. Press this audio meter icon to bring up your meters and you’ll see
what I’m talking about. We have left surround, left speaker, center speaker, right speaker,
right surround, and LFE which plays deep low frequency sounds.
So let me show you how you can to take advantage of this. So what would we hear if we were at
this location? Let’s start with ambient sounds. Obviously we’d hear the stream. So I’m going to
use two stream/river sound effects. Let’s trim off the end of the sound effects by selecting them,
going to the end of the clip and pressing option and right bracket. You’ll see as I play this out
that these sounds are only coming out of the left and right speaker. We’ll change that in a second.
I’m going to press option G to create a compound clip with these two audio clips and I’m doing
this to make it easier to adjust and animate the sound of the river since these two sound effects
go together. That way I don’t have to adjust two clips. Head into your inspector window and
make your way down to Pan. This right here is the holy grail for dynamic sound design.
Using this will allow you to shape your audio environment so you can make things sound like
they’re exactly where they are in the shot. The two pan modes you’ll use the majority of the time
are ‘create space’ and ‘ambience’. We’ll focus on these for this example. If you want to learn
about the others I’ll link another tutorial of mine in the description that talks about them.
Changing this to the ambience pan mode will put more of the sound towards the surround channels
and less signal to the front and center speakers. And we can see that in this weird thing here. This
center position is your viewer or listener, the camera however you want to put it. This
dot is your audio. By pushing it closer to these speakers, you’re pushing the sound towards left
speaker, center speaker, right speaker, left surround, and right surround respectively.
The more you push away from the center towards a speaker, the more sound is played from that
speaker or speakers you’re going towards. The more center you are with the dot, the more evenly the
sound is distributed. So when we switch this to ambience, the sound is playing more in these two
back speakers which are the surround speakers and less on the speakers that would sound a
little more front and center. So this ambience pan mode is useful for designing audio of different
environments and to make things sound more ‘all encompassing’ if you will. Little side note,
you’ll notice that just by switching this to ambience, our stereo sound effect which was just
playing out of only the left and right speakers is now integrated into the surround sound mix.
This river sound effect should be getting quieter as the camera moves away so let’s
adjust that. I could put a fade out slider on the end, but that would drop the volume to 0
decibels and we just want it to get quieter, not become silent. So right click and hit
show audio animation or press the shortcut control A. I’ll make some keyframes by pressing option K
and start lowering the volume of sections to match the camera being moving away
from where the sound would be coming from. Now we have a river sound that sounds like
it’s coming from all around us and it starts to get quieter as the viewer moves away from it.
Then you can just press the X here to close this out.
So let me show you a more advanced tip. Go to the beginning of the clip and hit the
keyframe button in your surround panner. This is going to save any changes that we
make to the pan location of this sound. In our shot, the river would sound both
up close and personal and all encompassing, so we’ll move our sound so it’s a little closer to
our listener. That way it’s hitting the surround channels as well as the left,
center, and right speakers. As we play out the clip, I’m going to animate the sound so
it matches what’s going on in the visuals. I’ll move it a little to the right here. And
I’ll skip to the end and push the sound so it’s coming mainly out of the right surround speaker.
If I play this out, you can hear that difference and you can see what’s going on with the sound by
looking at the surround panner. It sounds like we’re actually there by the river.
These river sound effects and all the sound effects we’re going to use to
fill our audio environment even more are from the music licensing site, Audiio.
And this is a good segway into mentioning that this tutorial was made possible by the lovely
people over at Audiio. So thank you guys so much. If you don’t know about Audiio it has
a big list of not only fresh, quality songs but also cinematic sound effects as well. So based on
the vibe of my video, I can head into one of these cool categories and quickly download one of their
sound effects that are exclusive to Audiio. You can use their sound effects and songs for whatever
you’d like, even commercial projects, and even if you stop your subscription with them. I’ll make
sure to put a link in the description with 70% off of their Audiio pro plan if you’re interested.
So back to it, it’s important to realize that we’d probably start hearing other
sounds as we move away from the river. Most likely some wind, some birds, maybe insects.
And I found these two sound effects that will work perfectly. If you press option S,
you can solo select those clips. And this is a really helpful shortcut to use when it comes
to sound design. Let’s make these into a compound clip and let’s definitely switch these to ambience
since they’re sound effects that need to sound full and surrounding when our viewer watches
and listens to the video. I’ll have them fade in and I’ll change the fade option by right clicking
and we’ll go with the most gradual option which is linear. Now the birds and the wind sound effects
start to fill our audio environment a little more as the river sound effect decreases in volume.
Now that we’ve used the ambience pan mode to help our ambient sound effects
fill the sound environment, let’s use ‘create space’ to add in her footsteps.
Create space is a great general purpose pan mode that I use to place specific sounds in
my sound environment. So when you have a bird in your shot, when there’s a car driving by,
when you want to make it sound like something broke just outside the frame.
Basically, specific sounds that wouldn’t fall in the ambience category.
I’ll isolate this sound effect by pressing option S, and let’s make our audio waveform a little
easier to see by clicking here and selecting one of these. Also the river is so loud that
we don’t really need to start the footsteps until about half way through the clip which
also saves us some time because with footsteps, usually you have to cut up the steps, find where
the person is stepping in the video, and place that step at the right time so it matches up.
Since she’s starting to the left of the frame and comes more center, let’s make our job easier with
animating by creating a compound clip with all these. We’ll head back into the inspector window,
flip the pan mode to create space again since now it's a compound clip, we’ll position our sound to
the left side of our surround panner since that’s where she is in the shot, and hit the
keyframe button. Head down the clip, and adjust the sound position based on her location again.
Last thing I’ll do is add in a soft riser reverb from Audiio to help add a cinematic undertone
and trim off the end and we went from no sound design at all, to this.
If this video helped you out, do me a solid and hit the thumbs up button and if you’re curious
to see an in depth tutorial all about sound design, click right here. Have a great day guys.