- Audio is half of video. Now, I'm no audio engineer and I don't pretend to play on on TV, but I have taught Final Cut
Pro to high school students for the past eight
years, and in that time, I've learned quite a few basics about how to make your
project sound a lot better when using Final Cut Pro. The importance of audio
cannot be overstated, and it really kinda seems
counterintuitive at first, but people will stick with a video, they'll watch it longer if
it looks bad but sounds good than they will if it
looks good and sounds bad. The audio really is just that important. So here are five quick tips to help you get better audio with no prior audio engineering experience required. As you're jumping into,
ooh, look at my arms. They're like, they're so
long on this wide angle lens. The first thing to do as
you dive into your project inside Final Cut Pro is to
press shift, command, eight, and that's going to bring up audio meters over on the right hand side. You can actually adjust how wide or narrow you want those audio meters to be, but I would pretty much
never, ever edit a project without having those meters available. Even in my classroom,
when students are editing, they know that they should
have those on there, and if they don't have it,
sometimes as I'm walking by, I will just push shift, command, eight, and just put the audio meters up so that they're there and
students can see their audio. And as you scrub through
your project on the timeline, you will see the audio
meters bounce up and down, and it's really important to
pay attention to those meters, even over your headphones
or your speaker monitors, because there are so many variables between how you're listening to your audio versus how your audience is
going to listen to your audio that these are accurate no matter what. If the levels are good here, they're going to be good everywhere. Simple step number two has to deal with how you adjust your audio levels within Final Cut Pro. If you've used Final Cut
Pro for any amount of time, you know the frustration that comes with trying to adjust your volume, especially accurately, using
just this little slider line that appears on the timeline. Whether it's a video track with audio or a separate audio track,
it's really hard sometimes to get exactly what you want. But, if you go up into your inspector and you click on the speaker, there are all of your audio options, and you can either type in the level that you want your audio to be, or you can just slide this slider, which is much, much easier to get exactly the level that you want. And now that you've got your audio meters and you know how to adjust your levels, what should those levels be at? What is a good level? This is a very general,
very broad rule of thumb, but as a very broad, very
general rule of thumb, you wanna keep your audio levels right in between negative
12 and negative six for like an average dialogue
speaking part of your video. And that doesn't mean it's not
going to bounce up and down, but it just means, as the meters are bouncing up and down, they're gonna be right in between negative
12 and negative six. That's not too soft,
but it's not too loud. As soon as you get up towards zero, that's when you're
gonna encounter peaking, which sounds like
distortion, and clipping, and you're not going to be
able to fix that in your edit. And if your levels are too low, if they're down in the negative 20s, it's gonna be so quiet
that people can't hear it even if they turn their
volume all the way up. Now, there's a whole different question when it comes to background music, and that's one of those things that is really tough. Sometimes you don't have background music, but if you're editing a short film, you might have sound effects, you might have a soundtrack. YouTube videos a lot of the time do have background music, just to help make it more interesting. In general, I have found that it is good to keep your background
songs somewhere between negative 35 and negative 40. That's gonna make them almost difficult to hear without headphones, but that way they're never gonna compete with your main audio. If you do want to have an audio spike, you have a loud explosion, or a very surprising moment in a video and you need that loud audio, you can have it spike close to zero, but I would keep it at negative one max, because as soon as your
audio goes to zero or beyond, that's where you get that
clipping and that peaking that just becomes impossible to fix. Tip number three is all
about effects and presets. Just like video, Final Cut
Pro has so many options that you can add to your
audio to make it better. As soon as you select any clip with audio and go into the audio menu, you'll see an audio enhancements option over to the right hand
side with some equalizers. There are some presets that
are actually pretty good. I've noticed that I have
kind of a nasaly voice, and after I've been editing
videos for a long time, I want to reduce that, so
I usually actually will add a base boost to my audio, and you can see, as soon as I added it, it
kinda change the waveform down at the bottom. But I've also found that,
with the base boost, my voice sounds then too basey, so rather than just leave
the preset as it is, you can click this little equalizer icon, and then you can adjust it
to your specific liking. So, I usually end up bringing down some of the low end so
it's not super basey, and then I also bring down
some of the high end too, which hides that nasaly-ness
of my natural beautiful voice. And once you have it set
the way that you want, you can actually save it as a preset and an audio category that you choose, and then you can go into
your side menu any time, go down to audio, find your preset, and then just drag it over. I completely misspelled the
word super, but that's fine. I spelled it Tom's Suoper Beautiful Voice. And the same really goes with any effects that you add to your
audio in Final Cut Pro. Just like with video, it's
best to use a very light touch. Use them sparingly. The presets are one
thing, but if you go down to where the video effects are and you go towards the audio selection, you have tons of different
things that you can add, which can be really great, but once you add them,
you probably wanna use a very light touch to keep them subtle. Anything that you add shows
up in your audio inspector, and you can adjust it,
you can equalize it. It can actually almost be overwhelming how powerful Final Cut
Pro can be with audio. But we don't need to worry
about that right now. My main thing is just to let you know that there are presets which
can sometimes be very helpful, and sometimes they sound even better if you go in and you modify
them just a little bit. Nothing scientific, just to
what sounds good to your ear. And last but certainly not
least are audio key frames. So, just like with
video, in Final Cut Pro, you can have audio key frames. This can be something as simple as when you want audio to fade or show up. Say you have this background song and I want it to fade in. I can just drag this little
circle from either end and it will fade in or out. You can also cross fade tracks into each other and around each other and get really into mixing. But if you wanna go beyond that, you can add in audio key frames. If you hold down option and then you click on your audio track on that little line, you'll see that key frames
now start to be added in, and then you can adjust those key frames and position them however you want. One way that I use this a lot is actually at the beginning of my videos. Even though I want my background music to be at like negative
35, so rather than fade, I actually like to start
a little bit louder. Not too loud where it
interferes with my voice, but maybe somewhere
around, like, you know, negative 15, negative 17,
and then slowly kind of dip down into the background. And it just sorta helps
pull the viewer in, hook someone, grab their attention, but it's not super disruptive and it's not really distracting since it's not staying there
throughout the whole video. You can also easily add audio key frames by using the range tool. If you click on the tool selector or you just press R, it will
give you the range option. You can just click and drag to select a portion of your audio, and then you can adjust just the audio within that portion. As soon as you go back to the select tool by clicking the arrow or pressing A, you'll notice Final Cut has
then thrown in key frames all on its own, and then you can fine tune and adjust these key
frames and these levels as much as you want. This is great when you need to mix in different audio sources. So, if I have a nice sequence
of B roll footage and music, and suddenly I wanna mix in a voice, you would want your music to come down, and the voice to come up,
and then you might want that to change as time goes on. And when it comes to key frames, you can add key frames for pretty much any audio effect the same
way you would for video. Any time you're mousing over an effect and you see the little
diamond with the plus sign, that means add a key frame. If you've reached a point
where you've played with a whole bunch of different effects and now you've got audio
key frames everywhere and it's hard to keep track of them, you can right click on your audio and then do show audio animation, and any key frames you
have for any settings will show up there. And my goal with this video isn't to be the definitive source
on Final Cut Pro Audio, it's just to help you
boost your audio quality, which in turn will help improve the overall quality of your entire video. And if you are a Final
Cut Pro editor like I am, I did make a video that
has five quick tips for Final Cut Pro in general to help make your editing
life a lot easier. Put that video right here
so you can click on it and go check out that video.
