How to Make Your Audio Sound AMAZING in FCPX (without any plugins)

it's been a little while since I've made a video so I take a quick break will not click was a two-month long break in the beginning of the year after I released the short film I just kind of wanted to take a break and work on some other projects but I am back and today I thought I'd show you guys how I edit audio inside of Final Cut Pro now the Pens when teach you today are definitely transferable across all editors so you should be able take the things you learn in this video and apply them to whatever video editor you use now I highly suggest when you edit audio you get a pair of good headphones to edit audio with using just your ear buds or the speakers of your computer usually is not a very good idea because it's not going to be an accurate representation of how your audio recording sounds so without further ado let's go ahead and jump into the computer alright I pulled up Final Cut Pro here and I've imported some footage that I shot for this tutorial the microphone I'm using is this little video micro and I record that into an external recorder but don't worry the techniques I showed you this video will apply to any microphone now since I'm recording audio separately I have to go ahead and sync up my audio and video so you guys do that in Final Cut Pro by selecting both your audio and video right clicking and choose synchronised clips hit enter and it will actually analyze the waveforms of both your camera's audio and the audio recorded separately and give you a synchronized clip which has synced up and muted the video layer now I've already selected the section that I want to edit today so I'm gonna go ahead and drag that down as a separate clip now let's go ahead and listen to what the audio sounds like directly out of the microphone today I'm going to show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better using just a few simple tools inside a final cut so it sounds alright the microphone is pretty close to me so that's obviously going to increase the quality a good rule of thumb is to always make sure your microphone is as close to the source as possible to get the best quality the first thing needs to do before editing any audio is make sure your levels are set correctly so I'm gonna go ahead and open up my meters inside of Final Cut Pro by command shift eight three three here you can see my audio levels are just hitting negative twelve and that's actually really good for when you're recording vocals just to have ins just tickling that negative twelve decibel level but it's not good for final export so what I'm gonna actually do is go ahead and go up here and raise the volume of that to where the very tips of those waveforms are just hitting the yellow region so now it's really hovering around negative two decibels which is a good place for dialogue to be next I'm going to add an effect called a compressor which will basically help even out the volume of my entire track if you go into your effects browser follicle Pro and search for compressor you will see that under logic there is a compressor effect that you can drag directly onto your clip and if you go over to the audio section of the inspector you can see all of the parameters for the compressor plugin now basically what a compressor does is it takes quieter sounds and raises their audio level to be more on par with the louder sounds of your footage this will give you a more even sounding audio track as far as volume goes now if i zoom in on the audio waveform here you can see when I turn off the compressor the whole track gets a little bit louder and if we go into the parameters and adjust the compressor threshold and bring that lower down you can see more of the track gets raised up that I usually leave to about negative 20 and if you want to adjust how much the audio gets raised you can change this ratio slider so if you bring that up you can see everything gets louder I usually leave everything here at the default settings next of an add channel EQ or equaliser and click this little Settings icon next to the name and the effects it will open up a new window which will allow us to change all the settings of our equaliser now you may have seen something like this before but just in case you haven't an equaliser will allow us to adjust the volume of different frequencies on our audio recording first you should go ahead and enable analyzer on the bottom left here and go ahead and play through your track so you can see what frequencies are in the track today I'm going to show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better using just a few just so we can adjust this just by choosing one of these little knobs and pushing it up or down so if we wanted to increase the audio of this frequency or bring it down we could do that so this is pretty useful for processing an audio but how do you actually go about making your audio sound better with this tool well there's basically two steps first take out any frequencies you don't like and second boost the frequencies that sound good now to find frequencies in a microphone that don't sound good what I usually do is just pick a point on the EQ and bring that game up and then sweep the frequency range as the audio plays and then when I get to if we're going to see that I dislike I can go ahead and remove it so that's what me do now so I'm gonna go ahead and bring my range down just a little bit today I'm gonna show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better using just a few simple tools inside of Final Cut okay so find a frequency around 350 360 that I think we're sounding really bad so I'm gonna go ahead and pull that frequency down now it's important that you don't pull it way too far down otherwise the audio is gonna sound really processed and you're also gonna lose a lot of the qualities of your source so it's best just to bring on this just a couple decibel here I'll do around six or seven so I'm just going to go ahead and keep repeating this process finding the frequencies that I don't like alright so now that I've removed a couple bad frequencies I'm gonna go ahead and try to look for some good frequencies I can boost with basically the same method although it's a general rule that when you boost frequencies you want to have a wider range then when you remove frequencies today I'm going to show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better using just a few simple tools inside a final cut alright so I think I want to boost a little bit of the low range here around 200 Hertz the idea with EQ is that you're just pulling away frequencies that aren't good and letting the good frequencies ring through so ideally you wouldn't really need to boost any frequencies but with this particular microphone I do find that boosting that bass helps me get a little bit of a fuller sound especially on dialogue now I think as a final adjustment I want to add a little bit more clarity to the track so I'm gonna boost my really high-end frequencies here just a little bit to help give it a brighter clearer sound and that is about all I would do to this particular track so let's go ahead and hear what our track sounds like before all adjustments and then after so this is before today I'm gonna show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better and this is with the effects today I'm gonna show you how to make your audio sound a whole lot better but I think that sounds a whole lot better but of course you don't have to go through this whole process every single time you make a video so that is where presets come in to save a preset in Final Cut Pro you just click this little save effects preset button on the right and then you can name it now whenever you import your audio you can go ahead and just go to that preset drag on your clip and all of your settings will be applied I have times a preset saved for different microphones and different recording situations so it's a really great way to save a lot of time and editing what hope this tutorial was informative and helpful to you let me know down in the comments you have any questions about anything I talked about in this video also let me know if you have any tips or techniques of your own for editing audio I'm shy thanks for watching [Music] you ah

Channel: Josiah Vaughan

Views: 71,977

Keywords: how to, how to edit audio in final cut pro x, how to edit dialogue in fcpx, how to make your voice sound better, fcpx, how to edit talking in fcpx, make voice sound better, how to sound better in videos, how to edit audio in fcpx, how to improve audio in fcpx, how to edit music in fcpx, how to process audio in fcpx, sound, how to edit dialogue audio

Id: J-53xutPxmY

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020