From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

Audio post-production basics - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

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Audio post-production basics

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- [Instructor] So far this course has heavily been focused on visuals inside of Final Cut, but I would argue that your sound is equally as important because we as humans in general, tend to be more sensitive towards sounds than visuals in some cases. With that said, this chapter is all about sound and manipulating that in Final Cut. And before we begin, we're going to check out some sound essentials. So we're going to look at the difference between mono versus stereo versus surround sound, which we have the ability to also work with in Final Cut. How interview and dialogue sound is typically recorded on set, and then sound tips for working with it inside of Final Cut Pro. Let's start with mono sound. So this is commonly referred to as monophonic sound, and the audio signals are routed mixed together through one source. Now there is no level or directional cues just like my voice right now, and mono sound is commonly doubled as stereo. So a mono signal would be sent to both the left and right channel, and you wouldn't have these level or directional cues like you are listening to my voice right now. Now this is a great diagram for this. We can see the mono signal, and you can see that both arrows are feeding it to separate speakers. And then when you look at the actual volume, the decibel level of the sound, they're going to be exactly the same. Now let's compare this to stereo sound or otherwise known as stereophonic sound, sound is root produced from two or more independent audio channels, and it gives us this impression of sound from various directions, which is great because it mimics how we hear sounds somewhat in real life. Stereo provides also improved sound quality as compared to mono, and you can see here in this case, there are separate signals that are captured and they're fed to each speaker independently. Now compare this to surround sound. This actually usually refers to sound output versus sound recording although if you do shoot in the 360 VR realm, you might see a way of how sound is captured from multiple perspectives if you ever have seen an ambisonic mic where you'll actually see a capsule of four mics capturing sound from different directions and heights to mimic how we might perceive that sound. Now this is going to create a sound field around you, and it mixes mono and stereo sounds together to create a mix. Typically, this relies on the use of five or seven speakers. Just take this up to even more if this is going to be an output for something like IMAX, and I love to think about action movies that you might go to the cinema, and see where you're really brought into the movie because of this surround sound environment. Now, if we think about interviews in general, typically sound recorded in an interview at least when it comes to a DSLR are recorded as mono tracks. On sets for experiences that I've worked on, you would capture sound from two sources. You would have a boom mic that would be attached to the actual DSLR camera, and then you would have a second sound device like a Lavalier capturing sound as well. This would be recorded to separate mono channels, where you would have the decision of which sound is better in post. For instance, it might be typical that a person that has a Lavalier hits his shirt a few times, and having that boom mic might be the preferred source in those cases where boom mics being closer to the camera than the actual person are usually not the most desirable sound if you can get a clean audio signal from your Lavalier. Adding to this in terms of interviews, you might see two mono sources be captured even if you're filming with your phone. So your phone would be recording one source of sound, but maybe you're using a separate device altogether like a Lavalier to capture the really good quality audio, and then you'll sync those two sources in post. If we think about stereo, it's all about adding a sense of space, and direction. 360 VR video is a great example of this for the fact is that people want to capture sound from these directions to immerse audiences through a VR headset if that is the direction where the video is going. Now if we think about the human voice, we don't want necessarily it to be captured in stereo. I mentioned that my voice right now is actually being recorded mono for the fact is, that we want it to be constant. We don't want it to sound like it's an orchestra because having our voice fluctuating won't deliver a consistent message. Now, here are some sound tips for you in post. You want to know what formats you're working with, even if you don't know ahead of time from the production department, keep in mind, you can use the info inspector to find out information about audio on a clip or audio sources by themselves. You want to know where you're going with sound. As in, if you're going to YouTube, you're going to treat sound very differently than if you're going to be showing your film on a movie screen. You want to follow the zero DB rule, which is essentially that you don't want your volume to peak above zero decibels. If you capture audio that peaks above zero decibels, it's going to come in as distorted, which would potentially allow for audio to pop when exporting it. You also want to make sure that you don't go above zero DB when you're mixing sound in your Final Cut Pro project. Now audio is also recorded in samples. Let's just say that you're working in a project that is 30 frames per second. At that same time, your audio settings might be set to 44,100 samples per second, which is a lot quicker than 30 frames per second. There are tools in Final Cut that allow you to access sub frame audio editing just in case an M or A lands partially in between a frame that could allow you for some great advanced precision when it comes to dialogue editing. The Final Cut also allows several automatic options for fixing some sound problems. Some of these that you can actually trigger on import or during your editing process. Others that also as of recent in 10.62 allow you to automatically remove background sound using machine learning. So take advantage of these. Last, a big thing that we want to do, especially if we have a lot of interviews like in a documentary is normalized those sound volumes so that they are consistent. It goes really well capturing the human voice in mono because it is normalized. It's consistent at one volume. With that said, don't forget, you can take advantage of mixing your audio together seamlessly by assigning roles to them, and making sure that audio is assigned to the correct role, and something that we're going to be discussing more as we move forward with this course. With that said, it's time to start looking at some different audio sources inside of Final Cut Pro.

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