- Today, I'm gonna show you guys how to make your audio
sound as good as possible inside a Final Cut Pro X. So if you're a beginner and
you don't even know much about audio editing, this is
the perfect video for you. I'm gonna walk you step-by-step
everything that I do to my videos when editing them to make the audio sound
as good as possible. You got to just press record. Now, before we get into this tutorial, it's definitely recommended
to wear headphones, when you are audio editing, typically your headphones are
going to be so much better to listen to audio than something like a
built-in computer speaker or a monitor speaker. Most people don't have expensive speakers but they do have some
headphones laying around. So, plug those in and
that's gonna be better off for you to start editing your audio. So here in Final Cut Pro X, you can see that I do
have some clips down here and we are gonna be editing
the audio of these video clips to make a sound as good as possible. I'm gonna walk you through
everything that I do, step-by-step so you guys
can see exactly my process. Not saying that my process
is the best process, but if you are a beginner, I promise you, you are gonna learn a few things here that are gonna make your
audio sound a lot better. So stay to the end of this video. So you do not miss out. But the first thing that I
like to do is actually the EQ. Now this is something that
I didn't do for a long time, because I was just kind
of overwhelmed with it. And to be honest I'm not a professional when it comes to doing this. So I'm gonna show you what I do. And I'm gonna try and teach it in a basic way that a beginner
could follow and understand and practice some of this
stuff in your own video. So let's get right into it. First thing we want to
do is to select a clip that we want to edit. So I'm gonna go ahead and
select this first clip. And if we hit play, we
can hear that the audio, If you listening to this right
now then you are hearing me, sounds fine, but it's a little bit low. We are going to fix that next, but I am going to adjust the EQ first, and then you'll see why
I do that first later. But what we do is we go up here and we are going to see
this little sound mixer box. This sound mixer box, if we click this, it's going
to open up, see equalization. It's gonna open up this window right here. This is called the graphic equalizer. Right now it's set to flat and you can see that each point is set to zero decibels. Now, if I raise this
point, which is 32 Hertz this is going to be at 12
decibels and that's going to raise that lower basey frequency
up higher so that it's louder or I could reduce that to negative 20 DB. And that is gonna make
it very, very quiet. So each of these decibels are
related to a different Hertz, a different frequency dragging them up are gonna emphasize
that, make them louder, dragging them down, are
gonna get rid of that. Now, the reason I use this is to actually make my audio sound better. So I adjust these up and down and it can actually make your microphone sound a lot cleaner, a lot smoother. and sometimes when recording
on DSLRs or mirrorless cameras it just doesn't sound full, it doesn't sound super good. And actually just messing
with this a little bit can make your voice sound a lot cleaner. And honestly can really
make a cheap microphone sound expensive if you get this right, like they can sound really, really good if you mess with these settings correctly. Now, what I like to do is actually set this first clip on a loop, and it's really simple to do this. You need to make sure that
your loop playback is on. All you gotta do is hit Command L and that is going to turn it on, or if it's already on,
that would turn it off but Command L to turn it back on. And then instead of hitting
the Space Bar for play, like we always do, we are gonna hit this
Forward Slash button, hitting this button is going to play it and then put it on a loop so that it goes over and over again. And as it's playing you're gonna see me do a few things here, you're gonna see me
moving this up and down seeing what sounds better. Now, typically voices
don't fall in this range or in this range. It's usually in that middle range. And so these, I might be able
to move around a little bit but I won't really notice much until I get into this range of the EQ. Another thing I'm looking for here, is the background AC unit. There is a noise removal plug in that, I'm gonna show you guys how to use but actually messing with this, I might be able to find that, maybe the AC is on a
specific channel frequency. And if I pull it down,
it's gonna get rid of that. So I'm looking to get rid of
some of those unwanted noises by lowering the frequency. And then I'm looking to kind
of mess with the rest of them to get my voice sounding as
clear and full as possible. So we're gonna go ahead and loop this. And then I am going to mess with the EQ. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. So right here sou can see
it as I pulled this up, it's actually increasing that
AC unit in the background. So I definitely don't want to do that. And by the way you never
want to boost any of these up to 20 decibels. I usually boost them if I'm going to boost them
around the six decibel mark but you do not want to go that high. But the reason I'm doing that now is so I can hear it better. And I go, okay, this is where
the AC unit is falling in. And so these are the kinds of things that I'm listening for a while editing. Listening to this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. All right now, in this channel, I'm also really getting
that AC unit as well. I'm gonna hit play so
you guys can hear that. Now, then you are hearing
me edit this audio to make it sound better. Now, instead of just
reducing this all the way to get rid of that noise, this AC unit sound is actually tied to some of the same
frequencies as my voice. So it's gonna sound a bit funny if I just pull this all the way down. If you're listening to
this audio right now. It sounds pretty dead, my voice kind of sounds like
it's coming through a telephone or a walkie-talkie. So this is where you really
have to kind of play back and forth, go through it a few times and see what's gonna sound best because you wanna take
away some of those noises you don't want, but you also want your
voice sounding really nice. (fast-forward voice) Audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now then you are hearing me edit this. So, in this channel, I
feel like as I pull it up, I'm starting to get that walkie talkie telephone effect again. And it's making my voice
just sound a lot less full. And so bringing that up, I
definitely don't want to do I'm gonna leave it at zero. I could even bring it down a little bit if I don't want that, but for now, I'm gonna leave it at zero
and move on to the next one. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this
audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now then you are hearing me
edit this audio to make it. Now, once I've gone through, I
made some simple adjustments. I'll put it on loop and I'll
kind of click it on and off to see how it sounds. If it's starting to turn worse then I'm doing something wrong. If it's starting to sound
better, I'm on the right track. What I'll do is I'll go
back through these again and I'll start to just
tweak them little by little until I get something that I'm happy with. You are hearing me edit this
audio to make it sound better. If you're listening to
this audio right now then you are hearing. So I definitely feel with it on, I am getting less of that AC
unit sound in the background. And I feel like my voice
is a little bit fuller. There's a few things I can tweak here. So I'm gonna play it
through a couple more times and just make some small tweaks to the EQ. (fast-forward voice) If you're listening to
this audio right now then you are hearing me edit this audio. Now it's just a subtle difference but I do definitely think this
sounds a whole lot better. And so I'm pretty happy
with how this is sounding. Once I'm done, all you
got to do is hit that X and this is gonna save everything. So I'm gonna hit X, and now what I can do is I can see over here, I can turn off and on just
from this tab right here. If I do wanna go back in
and make some changes, I can click on that soundboard again. And this is gonna pull up the same window. Now, one thing that I
like to add here and there I don't use it all the time,
but I do really like using it, and it's helped me a lot. And that's the compressor, now to find it, if you go to the effects
tab, by clicking on this, you are going to see
that it's set to Video. But if you scroll down,
you are gonna see Audio and it says All, we can click on that. And from here, we can
search for compressor and you can drag that onto your clip. Now watch what happens to the wave form, when I let go, it's
going to boost stuff up. Now the compressor is really good for boosting up low ends,
where stuff is quiet. And it's also good for not
clipping those high ends. It tries to keep everything
together, more level, so here's a great example. When I was shooting my How
To Vlog video with my wife we had one shotgun microphone
right in between us, but I just talked a little
bit louder than her. So her audio was a lot quieter. And so when I threw the compressor on, it brought her voice up, so that we were at about
the same audio level and that I wasn't much louder than her but we both had that same loudness. Now there's a whole lot that
you can do with compressor. If you open up the parameters,
you can mess with all these and see what's gonna sound best for you. Typically, what I do sometimes is just leave it how it is. Now this is the beginner's tutorial, so I am not gonna touch anything, but you can see even the audio form looks like a lot more level. It doesn't look like the
low parts are, as low, so if I listened to this back, things are gonna sound a lot
louder that were quieter, and so you can hear what that sounds like. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. Now, again, I don't always
love using the compressor because what I found is
sometimes when you are quiet and it boosts stuff up, it can boost up that background noise, like the AC or other things like that. So, definitely something
to experiment with, but it can be a lifesaver. Like it was for me on
that video with my wife and ended up sounding really, really good. For this clip, I'm actually
going to remove that. And my next step that I would do, if I was editing this is
to set my audio levels. I like to do the compressor first because that kind of messes with that. But setting the audio
levels is really simple. All you need to do is
drag this up and down so you can see if I drag it up to 12 DB, that's gonna make it as loud as possible. Or if I drag it down, that
is going to make it quieter. Now, when setting your audio
levels, you want to make sure that nothing is clipping
above this zero DB audio levels right here. So if I play it through, I'm gonna see where this is falling. I want it to fall right
around negative six, even if it goes up
above that, that's fine. As long as it doesn't pass over zero. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. So sounds pretty good I honestly could increase
that to, seven or eight, but if you notice something right here, right when I try to pull that
up, it just jumped up to 12. Well, what you can do to
do precise adjustments is hold down the Command button. And then when you do this, I can go from six to seven
to eight pretty easily because it slows everything down. So I'm gonna go ahead
and move that to seven. And that is a nice little
hack that you can do. One other thing you can do is go up here and you can actually just change
your DB by typing this in. If I wanna go to 7.5 or
something, you can do that. And you can also drag this as well. I'm gonna leave mine at seven DB. I'll do one last check,
make sure it's not clipping in this beginning part
where it's nice and loud and it looks perfect. The next thing that I might
add is a noise removal. This can help get rid of
that background noise. And so if I go up here and I
go to my Audio Analysis tab and I click Show, this is
gonna give us some more options and you can see right here,
it says noise removal. If I click that, it's
automatically set to 50%, and typically this is a bit too much. I find that it kind of
distorts the voice too much. It just doesn't sound the best. So we're gonna hit play and
see how the sounds at 50% If you're listening to
this audio right now. Then you are. It's actually taking away
from the quality of the voice. And so I am going to bring this down, even though it did get rid
of that background noise, and it's just my voice, you
don't hear the AC at all. It's not worth it because it
just doesn't sound as good. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. Now then you are hearing
me edit this audio to make it sound. So what I found is right at
30% for this clip specifically it gets rid of that background noise without messing with my voice a bunch. And again, I don't even
use this all the time because it can mess
with your voice so much. And I actually have a video on how to record your audio
with no background noise. So definitely check that out by clicking the link in the description, that's gonna save your life because you do not wanna be
using this noise removal. But if you get into an instance
where you might need to, this is always there to help
save you if you need it. So let's say that we like this audio and we wanna copy and paste it to all the clips in the timeline. What you can do is you
can click your clip, you can hit Command C and then if you select
both your other clips, if you hit Shift Command V this is going to be paste attributes. Now, the other clips
already have color reels and a hue saturation on them. I just want to copy over
these audio attributes. So I'm going to de-select
everything on this side, and from this, I can
copy and paste all this, which looks great, I'll hit paste. And now all my clips are
going to have the same audio. Everything that I just
changed on that first clip is now on all my clips. All right, so I've got a few more things to show you guys about
first like this video, and then comment down below. What other Final Cut Pro X tutorials do you wanna see from me? Let me know in the comments down below. So I just dragged some
music into my timeline and I have a few more tips for you guys. That's going to help a
lot with your videos. And so first off, one major mistake that I see a lot of people do is they add in the back
music way too loud. And so I like to start
by bringing mine down all the way to about negative 32 decibels. Now, really this is just by ear and hearing how it sounds with your video, and obviously if like the chorus or the drop happens in this, in the song that might need
to come a little bit lower but you just wanna listen to this. And honestly, I tell people
you'd rather underdo it, than overdo it because I've
clicked off videos before, where the back ground
music was just too loud, and it's annoying. So, again, you'd rather just
bring that a little bit too low than a little bit too high. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. Now I can't even hear that music, so I'm gonna actually bring that up. What I've noticed is
that usually the chorus or the loudest part of the song that is going to be around negative 32 sometimes these beginning
parts in the video can be anywhere at
negative 16, negative 12. It really just depends on the song but that's just something to listen for, as you're editing the music. If you're listening to
this audio right now, then you are hearing me edit this audio to make it sound better. That sounds pretty good, right? At negative 20 DB, it's
just in the background, it's not overpowering,
but we can see here, as it starts to get louder, I'll show you guys how to
actually make that quieter. So let's say actually right
at this part right here, we want to boost this part of the song, maybe there's gonna be some B roll, or something cool is happening
and there's no one talking, so we just wanna increase
the audio of the music so that it kind of takes over the video. Now how you do this is you can hit R, and this is going to bring
up your range selector. And once you select how much
you want this song to increase, you can then drag it back up like this. Most people want to bring it to zero because that's how it just
imports as zero decibels. But that actually is going to be too loud because when I'm talking, you
know how we recorded stuff and it ends up being around
negative six decibels. Well, that's what I've found is that you don't want your music really going over negative
six decibel sometimes because it can just
sound really, really loud compared to your voice
when you're talking, you can see that also
have some key frames here and you can totally move these around, if you want it to fade in slower, or if you want it to
fade in really quickly, you can move these closer together and you still can change the loudness right here by dragging it up and down. Better and lot cleaner. (upbeat music) Okay well, I think that
sounds pretty good. Again, this stuff is all by ear. So what I recommend is
watching some videos that you like on YouTube, listening to it and hearing how their
background music comes in. Is it really loud, is it really quiet? And try to match that in your editing. So let's say this is the end of the video. If you wanna fade out
the music right here, we are going to, can't see it right now with the play head over it. But right here, we're
gonna see this little icon, and if you drag this over, this allows you to fade out the music. So if I drag it over even more, it's gonna fade out even slower. This should be a very quick fade out, and so this is what that sounds like, if you wanna fade out the music. (upbeat music) Now same at the beginning, I usually like to fade in
the beginning of my music just a little bit and you can do that at the beginning as
well, just by doing that. You can do the same
thing with a video clip. So if I wanna fade in the
audio of this video clip you can drag this in as well. And you can do that on
any clip, audio, video, you can fade it in or fade it out. Now, if you wanna separate your audio, if you click on a video,
you can right click and then you can detach the audio. And this is gonna allow
you to extend this over and maybe fade in, and then I can do the same
thing with this one as well. And this is gonna allow
your clips to be smoother as they transition into each other. Especially if you're talking
quick and your cuts are fast, this is going to help from
any sort of weird pops that might happen if
you're like a frame off, and it's cutting off the
very beginning of your word. If you detach your audio,
you can actually extend that, so that your word or whatever
you're saying is finishing. And you can also use this in many ways. So knowing how to detach the
audio is a very useful thing just right click detach audio. Now, I just found out about
this trick this last year. And it's been really, really cool, because I didn't even
know you could do this, but I've loved using that. And that is soloing a track. So let's say you added in your music, maybe have your sound effects, you have everything in, but
you wanna edit your audio, you forgot to edit your
audio and that's fine. You don't have to edit your audio first when editing a video, but let's say you have
all the sound effects, all this music and now it's time for you to do the EQ, adjust the levels, well, what you can do
instead of playing this, with music over it, like this, audio right now, then you are hearing me. You can either select your audio clip and hit V and that's going
to disable this clip. So if I play this again, here right now then you are hearing me. Now, all you can hear is my voice. I can click on the
clip, I can edit the EQ, I can do whatever I want to this clip. But let's say there's a
bunch of sound effects and maybe a whole bunch
of other stuff happening. Another way you can do this. Let's go ahead and hit V on that again, another way you can do
this is click on the clip that you want to solo out, and then you can hit these headphones, and that is going to make
everything else in this timeline grayed out because it's all muted. And now all that you can hear
is the clip you have selected. And you can also select
all the clips you want. Let's say you want all
the talking head clips just to be selected. You can select all of those, you can then hit the headphone icon and that's going to work as well. The shortcut for this is option S so let's say I want to
select all my talking head because I want to go
ahead and edit that audio. I can have option S and that's going to
disable everything else, so when I'm editing this
audio, all I hear is my voice. Click on the screen to watch another Final Cut Pro X tutorial and I'll see you guys in the next video. (upbeat music)
