Beginners Guide to Audio and Levels in Final Cut Pro 2021

hello hello hello hello hello can you hear me hi guys i'm nick griffiths a professional tv editor you've probably seen some of my work on tv x factor love island the voice that kind of thing today we are going to be talking about beginners audio levels in final cut pro it's so important to get those levels right because if i'm too loud i'll distort if i'm too quiet you won't be able to hear me [Music] it's so important to get all those audio levels at the right point on your timeline so that your videos sound great everyone will say you know if you look in google and on other youtube videos how people will watch a video with really bad pictures but they won't watch your video if it's got really bad audio and i kind of agree the sound on your video has to be spot on and sometimes it's really difficult to get those levels right if you just go by what's on your speakers or what's on your headphones when you're making your edits you know you might go totally down the wrong path because you might have the volume of your computer or your headphones turned really low or really high and then you're making your audio really low because what you're hearing is lower because your volume of your headphones or your speakers is lower if that makes sense so how do we combat that well we combat that by using our meters by default weirdly final cut does not have its audio meters turned on duh so the first thing i always do is turn on my audio meters i mean once you've turned them on once they stay on so we're going to go up to your window menu show in workspace audio meters shortcut shift command 8. this is a really important one and you'll see here they are your audio meters this is where you can get very technical and i'm not going to get technical all i'm gonna say is that you roughly there's there's no hard and fast rules but you roughly want your audio to be between this minus six and zero if it goes above zero it will distort and sound bad when you play it back now as you can see on the timeline you have got these built-in waveforms and it shows yellow and red if i play it this is without making any [Music] [Applause] [Music] adjustments the waveform on the timeline is showing red the audio meters are not going above zero so it's not peaking so the audio levels of that track played on its own are okay so even though it's saying red ignore that and follow what's on these meters when you make an edit what you're generally going to do is lay in your talking head your video the stuff that you've filmed it's got your voice on it and then you're going to lay music underneath it so we're going to lay in now a clip that i have made and as we saw when i played the audio the music back the music was at a good level it was at the top of where we want so it's going to be really punched through so i've now added my dialogue on the top so when we hit play now how's this going to sound we found it [Music] that doesn't sound so great does it we can hear the music but we cannot hear anything i'm saying at all so what we're gonna do we can lower the level of the music maybe to minus 25 so let's now higher the level of me and let's have another listen we found a really great music track so we're going to lay the music track under my voice where then we're going to lower the levels of the music and maybe higher the levels of my voice that sounds much much better already if you notice what i've been doing i have been using the line the audio line here to higher and lower the levels of both or the other way of doing it is we can go up here to volume so if we click on the clip we want to change if we see here i've got plus 12. now on your dialog from whatever you've recorded you may or may not have to hire or lower the volume much depends on the quality of the recording for music under dialogue i would probably suggest dropping the levels to between minus 20 and minus 30 depending on how punchy you want the music to come through i'm gonna drop a shot now of a person singing afterwards and we want to raise the level of the music when i stop talking so that it's better for the cutaway and the shot of the girl singing first of all let's cut that little section of audio off at the end and then what we want to do we want to select our range selector tool so we hit r on the keyboard and we want to just come back a little bit to where i've finished talking which is here because we can see from the waveform here where it ends i'm going to range select that area there and then i'm going to up the levels we know that zero it was playing sort of in the right place i'm just going to back it off maybe -2 and then go back to my pointer tool and then i can just move that keyframe across a bit just to make it a slightly more gradual fade in and then if we have a listen in perfect harmony [Music] and then there's an abrupt end now the quickest and best way just to do a little audio dissolve at the end of a clip is when you come down to this point here if you hover your mouse at the end of your clip and then make go over the audio fade out button you see you get a left and a right slider and if you click and hold your mouse you can put an audio fade at the end of your clip so that will sound like this [Music] audio can get really really confusing and it can be overwhelming to get your audio right but my number one beginner tip is rely on those audio meters because that is what the level is that people will hear at home or wherever they're going to hear your your piece forget what's coming through your ears forget what you can hear to a degree in your speakers and look at what those levels are and make sure that it's not going into the red and that it's up above -6 because then you know that the levels are good [Music] well there we have it audio levels in final cut pro i've tried to keep this really simple and basic i'm going to do loads more tutorials taking things further but in this tutorial we've learned to lay two audio sources and adjust their levels accordingly using the volume and the level sliders on the timeline we've also created a keyframed range-selected keyframed increase in the levels of the music when the dialogue disappears and we've added a dissolve well not a dissolve a keyframed audio transition at the end of the music to reduce the level if you found this tutorial useful please remember to like the video and subscribe to the channel because it really helps me out drop a comment below to tell me what things you'd like me to cover in my next audio tutorials and remember to come back soon because there's loads of new stuff being added to the channel every week see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Nick Griffiths Pro Editing

Views: 458

Keywords: final cut pro, video editing, final cut pro x, fcpx, fcp, final cut pro beginner tutorial, final cut beginner tutorial, fcpx beginner tutorial, fcpx beginners guide, video editing basics, fcpx beginner, fcpx 101, learn fcpx, learn final cut pro, starting out in fcpx, Final Cut Pro shortcut keys, edit, audio levels, audio meters in final cut pro, audio meters, final cut pro ppms, audio levels in final cut pro

Id: l4nA6Tm36xw

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021