Hey folks. Uh, my apologies. If you can hear a little bit of
background noise, uh, the air conditioner is on full blast. Right now. It is 115 degrees here in Palm Springs. I just tried to do a take of this
class without the air conditioner running and it didn't go well. So we're doing it again. With the air conditioner. So my apologies, if you can
hear that, just use not as good headphones for this one. Hi everyone. Hey, everyone and welcome to the seventh
chapter in my 12 part series on video production for small business owners
and nonprofits, you are watching the free version of this course available on
YouTube, but if you would like to access the entire course, which includes project
files, demo footage,library templates, PDF Guides, and a lot more, you
can sign up at the address below or I'll post a link in the video
description without any further ado. Let's begin the class. Hello everyone, and
welcome to chapter seven. Today. We are discussing audio basics
for final cut pro, including how to record a voiceover. Then we'll go over audio
ducking and how to make. Fade in and out. I'm going to show you a few
helpful audio tools that are built right into final cut pro. And finally, we'll talk about how you can
get music that you can legally use in the background in order to avoid a very messy
copyright strike against your account. And trust me, you don't
want to go through. One of the challenges. A lot of people experience when
filming at a place of business is it can be really difficult to
try to control background audio. I experienced this firsthand when
I was trying to film at Chequessett Chocolate, we had credit card
machines that were beeping in the background, phones, ringing customers
coming and going espresso machines. And while we got some really. Footage. I didn't feel the audio
quality was where I'd hoped. It would be. At this point, I realized that this
was a really wonderful teachable moment because frankly, many of you may find
yourselves in a similar situation at some point in time, rather than wasting
a lot of time, trying to isolate every little blip and noise in the background. Sometimes it's just easier
to go with a VoiceOver. So a few weeks ago, I asked Katie
to write a simple 32nd script that hit on the main talking points. We met at a quiet location
and recorded the voiceover. Now, those of you who are following along
on Thinkific can now access that file as a download, we did two takes personally. I thought take two was a little
bit better and I would like to play it for you because later. We are going to incorporate music and
you're going to see how this thing is going to start to come together. Let's take a listen. We are Chequessett Chocolate, a bean
to bar chocolate company, located on Cape Cod at eight Highland road
in north Truro, Massachusetts. We handcraft our chocolate
and small batches from fine flavor Direct trade cacao. We serve a full menu of delicious
coffee and chocolate drinks and an ever changing selection of chocolate. To add a voiceover to your project. If you want to use a shortcut, you can
use command option eight, or if that's a little too hard to remember, you can
just go here into the menu bar, click on window, and then select record voiceover. The goal is to get our levels to average
around minus six decibels and keep in mind if you need to adjust the gain later on,
you're better off having to bring those levels up rather than bring them down. You don't have to, but if you'd like
you can name your voiceover track. Where it says, input you'll
need to select your microphone. I usually leave the monitor turned off and
I would recommend that you do the same. The file we are about to create
does need to live somewhere. So if you don't already have an
event for your voiceovers, you can do that by going to file new. Now, just place the play head where
you want your recording to start. And when you press the red button
final cut pro will rewind three seconds and give you a countdown
before it starts recording. When you're done click the stop button. If you need to adjust the
timing of your voiceover, you can drag it wherever you need. There are a few different ways that
you can adjust the volume of a track. I'm going to show you two of those
methods now, and one I'm saving for the end of this class to adjust the
volume for the entire track, click on it so that it's highlighted. Then go into the inspector, click on the
audio inspector, then click into this field and drag up or down on your cursor. Ducking is a process where you can
temporarily lower the volume for a specific portion of a clip to do this. You can use the range tool,
which you can access by tapping the R Key on your keyboard. Now just click and drag to select the
portion of the clip you want to duck. And then drag this line down in order
to lower the volume, just to point out, one of the things I love about this
method of ducking is that final cut pro automatically creates the transition
so that it fades down at the beginning. And then up at the end, ducking is
also really great if you're ever recording and there's a loud noise in
the background, like a car horn, you can just use that range tool, select
it, and then bring those levels. I'm going to need to zoom way into the,
for this one to fade your audio in. Look for this tiny dot at the very left of
the clip down below in the section where you can see the wave lengths, then drag
this dot to the right in order to create an audio fade in to create an audio fade. Just go to the end of the
clip and do the same thing. Look for that tiny little dot
and then drag it to the left. Just in case some of you don't
see the wave forms appear at the bottom part of the clip. I want to show you where
that setting lives. It's right here in the center of
the screen, towards the right. And you want to look for
this film strip icon. These options will change what
information you see on the timeline. So for example, this option will show you
more of the clip and less of the waveform. To increase the physical size of the clip. Just use this slider, right here. Sometimes when you are editing, you may
want to, to temporarily hide a shot. This process is known as
disabling a clip to do it. All you need to do is make sure that
your clip is highlighted and then tap the letter V on your keyboard. So for example, if I place this shot
over these other clips, normally when I play it back, you would see
that shot because it's the top layer. But if I disable that clip by
tapping the letter V, Now I can see the shots beneath it. This technique also works with audio. So for example, if I'm trying to refine
Katie's voiceover, I might want to temporarily disable the song so that I
can focus on her track to mute a clip. You can simply grab this
thin line and drag down. At this point, let's go through
a few of the different audio tools that are built into final. Cut. If we were to truly dive into all of
the different audio tools that are built into final cut pro, we would
be here literally all day long. So I am just going to focus
on the tools that I think you guys need to know the most. The first tool is one that if
you've been following along this entire time is already automatically making your audio
sound better than the original. If you missed that part, just to
review, go into preferences, then go into the import tab and make
sure fix audio problems is checked. So if that by itself, doesn't
make your audio sound better. Here's a few other things. you can do. The main tool that I use is the limiter. You can find it here in the effects
panel, under the level category to apply it, just drag it and drop it
onto your clip to access the controls. Go here into the inspector
and click on this. The limiter is basically
a push and pull process. You are bringing up the volume of
the lowest parts of the clip without making the loudest parts too loud. I'm going to use Katie's voiceover here. As an example, the two most important
settings here in the controller are gain and the output levels. What I would recommend you do is just play
with it until you find the right levels. And just as a reminder, we want
it in the end to average around. Minus 12 to minus six decibels. Now there can be moments where it
goes a little bit above minus six decibels, but not by too much. So at this point, I'm going to move
the play, head back, tap the space bar and adjust the gain as the clip
plays while we are here on this screen, there are a few quick settings that
I would recommend that you change. Here where it says mode. Precision. I recommend that you change it to
legacy and turn soft knee on if you have absolutely no idea what I just said. Don't worry. I don't either, but that's what people
who are smarter than me told me to say, Hey, at least I'm honest with you guys. Three of the other significant audio tools
that are built into final cut pro are the compressor DeEsser, and channel EQ now wouldn't it be great if there was
just a really easy way to apply one effect that contained all three of those tools. You do know where this is going, right? Check this out, go into
the effects browser. Then scroll all the way down to the very
bottom where it says voice and then click over here and drag voice over enhancement
onto your clip to access the controls. You guessed it right
here in the inspector. And the first thing you want
to do is pull up the presets. What I recommend you do is just play
with these presets and find the. Best works with your voice and
then fine tune it from there. If you do want to dive deeper into
compressor, DSR, and channel EQ you are certainly welcome to explore. As I've said the whole time, I am making
this course for small business owners and I do not want to overwhelm people. So please keep in mind, you are making
a commercial, not the next star wars. At this point, I would like to talk a
little bit about music and we're going to start by going over a few of your options. As far as where you can get music,
then I want to play for you. The song that I've selected for the
commercial, for Chequessett chocolate. And finally, I want to show you a few
creative types of edits that I made in order to make this song fit our timeline. When it comes to licensing music
that you can legally use in your commercial, you have several options. There are some minimal resources for
free music, including creative commons, which I wanted to give a shout out to. But the problem with many of those
sources is that they have conditions where you can only use their music. If it's for something like a
student project and hence not a great fit for this audience. Another option is you can license an
individual song for a one-time use. There's a lot of different
websites where you can do that. For a lot more money, you can
license a song for unlimited use. And the last option is to sign up
for a subscription to one of the various music licensing services
that gives you access to an expansive library of content that you can use. As long as that subscription is active,
the service that I personally use, and the one that I recommend for this
audience is epidemicsound.com they have personal and commercial plans. If you are looking to ultimately
turn your video, into an ad that you can run online. In that case, you are looking
at the commercial plan. I want to explain why I think
this is a great solution for those of you who are taking my course. I have a link in the video
description where you can. Free month trial. And as long as you publish
your commercial within that month, you are legally covered. Now that being said, I do, recommend
that you probably go for two months. And the reason why is because that way
you have a month to run your commercial, get some feedback, then maybe try
changing it out with a different song. And now you can compare your results
and see how you do the important detail. I want to make sure you understand is that
after you publish your commercial, you do not technically need to keep your subs. I want to play a few seconds of
the song that I selected to pair with the chocolate commercial. When Katie was walking me through
the back and showed me the infamous chocolate waterfall, she said something
that stuck in my brain and ultimately led to the music that I selected. All right. For your, I love Lucy moment. Now I can't legally use music from,
I love Lucy, but one of the things I love about epidemic sound is that it's
very easy for me to find similar music. So I use the search tool and I
was just kind of trying to think of words or phrases that could
describe this genre of music. And one of the ones I typed
in, I think was variety show. And one of the tracks that came up
was lush Meadows by Martin, Landstrom. I downloaded that song with one
click and because I'm good about organizing my footage, I saved it
into my event for music, and now I'm going to bring it into my timeline. At some point, I'm going to
need to lower the audio where Katie's voiceover comes in. So now I'm going to show you the third
way that you can adjust the volume, which involves using key frames. Key frames allows you to
create your own transitions. You can use them with video or audio,
and in this case, I'm going to use it to tell final cut pro how long I want
us to take, to transition my music from the volume at the opening to the volume. Once Katie starts speaking to
do this, I'll click on the music track so that it's highlighted. Then I'm going to go here into the
inspector and next to the volume, you should see a little diamond icon. I'm going to click on it in
order to create a new key frame. And before I change the volume, the
next step is I need to tell final cut pro how long it's going to take
to transition to the new volume. Our project is playing at 30 frames
per second, and I think about a third of a second will be good. So that would be. 10 frames. Now, there are two ways that
I could advance 10 frames. I could tap the right arrow key
10 times, or you can hold the shift key and tap the right arrow. Now that I've done that I now
need to adjust the volume. So let's go into the inspector
and I'm going to bring our levels to around minus 17 decibels. As we get to the end of the piece,
we're going to have to get creative in order to shorten things. After all this song is three minutes long
and our commercial is only 41 seconds. In this type of scenario. What I usually try to do is snip off the
end part of the song, snip just before the commercial is starting to wrap up and then
create a crossfade so that the first part fades out as we fade in the other clip. And if we do it just right, no one will
ever be able to tell the difference. Let's hear how it plays. When I blend the two At this point, I'm going to
add back in Katie's voiceover. And I want you to hear how it sounds
when everything comes together. We are Chequessett chocolate, a bean to
bar chocolate company located on Cape Cod at eight Highland road in north Truro. Massachusetts we handcraft our
chocolate in small batches from fine flavor, direct trade cacao. We serve a full menu of delicious coffee
and chocolate drinks and an ever changing selection of chocolate confections. You can even watch the process
while you sip and shop. We also feature a craft chocolate
library from other craft makers from around the world. Come check us out in store or online
at ChequessettChocolate.com and learn where your chocolate comes from. It's not just a chocolate bar. It's an experience. Thinkific students, your homework is
to use the tools that we've discussed. Chapter to improve the
audio on Katie's voiceover. When it comes to music, you can
use whatever music you want. If you decide that you do want
to try out epidemic sound. If you like the song that I picked
out, I will give you a link to that. Down below in the video description,
chapter eight is a bit of a shorter class. We are going to discuss how you can use
the stabilization tools in final cut pro. And we're also going to cover a really
cool effect known as speed ramping. Thank you so much for watching everyone. Class dismissed.
