Blog Archives

Understanding the Media Manager is critical to successfully recapturing media, whether for creating the highest quality final master, or for resurrecting an old project. But the Media Manager is not that intuitive. This article walks you through what you need to know for successfully recapturing your project.

Panning balances audio playback between the left and right speaker to position the audio in space. In this quick technique, learn three ways you can pan multiple clips in Final Cut Pro.

This is a quick tip illustrating how to make your dialog sound like it is coming over the telephone.

A good question regarding soundtrack transfer is submitted in this article and Larry explains the problem with how scripts process – or fail to process – clips

Here’s a technique you can use to slightly modify a voice so that it is no longer recognizable, yet still understandable. This is useful for disguising speakers, or commercial effects.

You have probably used Final Cut’s audio mixer to mix your audio tracks in real-time. Did you know you can do the same thing with audio filters? This technique shows you how.

Soundtrack Pro has the amazing ability to reduce the background noise in a clip – like air conditioners or other machine noise. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a step-by-step procedure you can use to reduce the noise in your audio. (Note: For a video tutorial of this process, click here.)

Sometimes, especially when merging clips, you get more audio tracks in a Final Cut Pro timeline than you want. This article describes a couple of different ways you can get rid of them.

When you are working with multiple tracks of video, trimming clips on several tracks at once is essential. This article shows you how to trim multiple tracks quickly and accurately.

Even though Soundtrack Pro is, at its core, a surround-sound audio editing system, sometimes you just need mono (single-channel) audio out. The only problem is… how? This quick article explains what you need to know.

As we gear up for the 2010 NAB Show – where the Digital Production Buzz is the Official Podcast of the event – I thought you’d be interested in the gear we are using and how we are using it. Next month, I’ll report on what we did.

Creating good voice over recordings is part art, part craft, and part technology. In this short article, Ben Balser provides some suggestions on what kind of gear you need to make great-sounding recordings.

Have you ever wondered what that thin green line means at the top of some of your audio clips? Well, this short article let’s you in on the secret.

Here is a very slick technique to find audio in your sequence that’s distorting. It won’t fix it — but it will find it; and much, much faster than real-time.

The more I work with Soundtrack Pro 2, the more I like it. Recently, I spoke with Apple about STP and learn some quick facts I wanted to share with you here, including what gear you need to hear surround sound.

One of the hardest emails to read starts: “After years of work, I’m finally ready to submit my project to a festival. All I need to do is get rid of the audio echoes and I’m done.” The sad part is that is not a lot that can be done to reduce echoes — except for the ideas in this article.

It drives me nuts! The Link Selection tool is right there in the Timeline. But using it is likely to slip your audio and video out of sync. There’s a better way, and this article explains it.

Final Cut allows you to connect an unrelated audio clip with a video clip, using either Link or Merge. This article describes how and how to select the right one.

I got burned by this when I was prepping my most recent webinar for posting. My audio slowly slipped out of sync. I hate when that happens. What I discovered is that the Soundtrack Pro sample rate preference setting overrides the sample rate of the Final Cut Pro project, resulting in a slow sync drift that will drive you nuts. This article explains what you need to know to fix it.

Why doesn’t MP3 audio play nicely with Final Cut Pro? The answer is because Final Cut Pro was invented to support only uncompressed audio files. There are only three audio formats that Final Cut supports: AIF (and AIFF), WAV (and Broadcast WAV), and SDII. All compressed formats (like MP3 and AAC) need to be converted into an uncompressed format before you can edit them.

Final Cut does not like, in fact, it HATES, putting compressed audio files (MP3, AC3, AAC) in the Timeline. They sound awful. Instead, you need to convert your compressed audio to AIF before importing them into Final Cut Pro. This technique describes how.

It’s such a simple thing, but very hard to find. Here’s a table that allows you to convert the word count of a document into how many seconds it would take to read. Very useful.

Stuck trying to figure out how to delete audio tracks in Soundtrack Pro. Here’s the answer in about three paragraphs — including pictures!

It’s possible to drag files from the Finder into the Final Cut Browser. But do you want to? In this article, I explain the process and provide reasons both pro and con about doing so.

A common complaint about matching audio between DSLR cameras and digital audio recorders is that the audio sync drifts. This article provides three references you can use to resolve this problem.

I’ve taught this technique in my classes for a long time, but recently discovered that I have not written about it. When you are compressing a QuickTime movie for a DVD, the default settings for video and audio compression may need to be tweaked.

Soundtrack Pro is far better at editing and mixing audio than Final Cut Pro is. While this can make your audio sound a lot better, you still run the risk of knocking your audio out of sync. This article explains more about how to prevent this problem.

In the category of “you don’t know what you don’t know,” here’s an interesting piece of trivia. Ever wonder what that checkbox called “Little Endian” means when you are saving audio? This article tell you so you can now impress your friends.

Recently, Euphonix invited me to their LA offices to take a look at a suite of new products designed for video and audio editors. — a series of external control surfaces. Control surfaces have been a fixture in the audio industry for many year, but for video editors, this is a fairly new concept. This article takes a detailed look at each of the four units Euphonix provides, along with thoughts on where they fit into a post-production workflow.

PPMs are something we never hear about in North America. All our audio is measured in dB. However, in Europe, PPM is THE standard of audio measurement — and Final Cut does not support it natively. This article explains what you need to know, and how to measure audio in PPMs.

MXF is the native format for a variety of HD video formats. However, it is not one that Final Cut Pro currently supports. This short article details what you need to know to get your QuickTime video into MXF format.

Normally, when you export a QuickTime movie from Soundtrack Pro, the audio travels with the video. But, not always. This article shows you what you need to know to export audio and video successfully from this audio editing software.

Asymmetric trimming allows you to trim the audio and video in opposite directions at the same time. I’m still not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Here’s how it works.

These ten suggestions on ways to improve your audio recording are excerpted from The Sound Effects Bible written by Ric Viers. If you are having problems getting your recording to sound the way you want, check out these tips.

Final Cut expects all cameras to shoot audio at 48 kHz. But, what happens when they don’t? Well, you get audio drifting out of sync, or no audio at all. Many low-end cameras record audio at 32 kHz. This technique shows you what you need to know to capture your audio accurately.

There are very few things that cause as much confusion to video editors as working with audio. In this technique, I show you a very efficient technique for structuring where to place audio in your timeline and suggest audio levels that can make your project sound GREAT! If you read only one audio article this month, this is the article to read!

One of the signs of getting older is that our hearing is not as sharp as it once was. So one of the things I do in my mixes is to be sure that I make things as clear and easy to understand as possible. This article walks you thru the specific steps you can take in Soundtrack Pro to make your audio as clear and distinct as possible.

When capturing from tape, Capture Now should always be your last choice, not your first. Sometimes, when using Capture Now, your audio may drift. If that happens, read this article.

This article shows the best way to get audio out of FCP so you can finish your mix in your favorite audio program.

Here’s a neat trick to make a constant speed change to a video clip without changing the sound of the audio.

This is a quick simple technique to automatically create keyframes for an audio filter. Basically, audio key-framing in real-time.

Audio in FCP is clip-based, rather than track-based. This article describes a variety of ways to change the levels of more than one clip at once.

Ever wonder what levels to set your reference tones to? Should you output tone at 0 dB, -12 dB,-18 dB, or -20 dB. In this discussion, Larry is joined by Woody Woodhall, president of Allied Post, to get a better understanding of the issue. And, yup, it’s just as confused as we thought!

Final Cut Pro hates compressed audio. This article explains the problems you will having working with it, as well as providing a simple conversion process that solves the problem.

Using Pro Tools to mix your Final Cut Pro project is a great way to achieve excellent audio. However, there are some tricks you need to understand in this process, as explained here.

Setting the correct audio recording levels on a video camera is crucial to obtaining the best sound during production. This short article explains some of the choices and what you need to know.

Here is a great trick to solve one of the features of FCP that drives me nuts — we can’t slip keyframes. But, here, in this article, I’ll show you an undocumented way to slip audio keyframes. Very cool and very quick.

It’s easy to create burned-in timecode for video clips. But what about visible timecode for audio clips? The answer is “maybe,” but probably not.

Every clip in Final Cut supports up to three timecode tracks — a primary and two auxilliary tracks. This article describes how to access them, change the timecode they contain, and idea on what to use them for.

One of the common problems that inexperienced Final Cut editors run into is audio that slowly drifts out of sync. While the problem may appear to be within Final Cut Pro, the cause is actually due to mismatched audio sample rates between the video you shot and the way you are capturing it. What makes this worse is that many consumer cameras default to an audio sample rate of 32 kHz, while Final Cut expects 48 kHz. In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll explain what an audio sample rate is and how to change your Final Cut settings to capture your audio accurately.