Set Audio Levels in Apple Final Cut Pro

this is an excerpt from a recent power up webinar on working with audio in apple final cut pro hi my name is larry jordan in this short video tutorial i'll show you how to set audio levels in final cut in order to set audio levels we have to use the audio meters we can't do it just by ear to reveal the audio meters we're going to click this icon right here or type shift command 8 which toggles the audio meters on and off if we play the very beginning of this clip you cannot be a little bit over there you cannot got a little bit of garbage there let's double click this and we'll just trim the audio in right to where he starts talking you cannot and we've got some lip flaps so we'll tighten that up just a bit but not maybe all the way to the start of the audio you cannot be a technology when we were talking about audio levels during the definitions at the beginning of this presentation i said that the loudest your audio can be is at zero that's a hundred percent the maximum anything over that will distort when you export your project but we want to have it be as close to zero as possible because that means it's as loud as it can be the audio meters are measured in db and as our audio drops by 6 db the apparent volume is cut in half and cut in half again and cut in half again this is one of the reasons that we want to keep our audio especially for dialogue nice and loud because as soon as the db starts to drop it gets really quiet which is what's happened here look at our levels you cannot be a technologist you can i'd like them to be between negative three and negative six and are hovering around negative twenty we need to bring the levels up to do that the easiest way is to grab this line and drag it up we can make a 12 db gain change inside final cut you cannot be a technologist you cannot understand and use technology if you are not literate and numerate and so on we're a little bit soft but we're pretty much around that negative six levels just by grabbing this line and dragging it up another way we can change the level is to select the clip type control plus that raises it one db or control minus lowers it one db so we can do it with the keyboard i have two clips here if you want to adjust multiple clips at the same time select the clips go up to the inspector keyboard shortcut is command 4 go to the audio inspector and under volume set the volume to negative five or we can grab the slider and drag it as much as we want again we can only make a 12 db change in volume but the benefit of using the inspector is that it changes the volume of all the selected clips at the same time we'll set this back to 10. you could also click in here and type the number that you want that works well as well we can also add keyframes remember this section down here where we added the fade in let's go take a closer look we can add a keyframe and we always work with keyframes in pairs the keyframe is a point of change in this case for the audio hold the option key down and click and it sets a keyframe i'm going to click two keyframes next to each other pretty close like that and drag this one down now my audio will start 20 db down and very quickly ramp up and i can change the horizontal position of the keyframe by clicking and dragging as i play this now a caveman would who didn't understand the habits of a saber-tooth tiger the audio starts under and goes up and we can still have a little bit of a fade at the beginning if we want to caveman who didn't understand the habits of the saber-tooth tiger another cool thing is if we select a keyframe notice how it's gone gold and hold the option key down and type up arrow option up arrow raises and down arrow option up or down arrow raises or lowers the selected keyframe in 1 db increments this was an excerpt from a recent power up webinar on working with audio in apple final cut pro for the complete version of this online training please visit our store at larryjordan.com store and look for webinar 308 by the way when you need to stretch your training dollars membership in our video training library saves you money and time you can access all our videos for a low monthly price of only 19.99 that's more than 1900 movies hundreds of hours on a wide variety of subjects plus premium members can download practice media and projects our training covers apple and adobe software we update it multiple times each month and for more information visit larryjordan.com membership and thanks

Channel: Larry Jordan

Views: 2,324

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Id: L1Z5NsiA1iM

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021