HD

564 Part VIII Audio Mixing
Cleaning Up Audio
Once you’ve organized your audio tracks by sound category and properly placed your
sound effects and music, you can clean up noisy audio clips and fine-tune levels in
preparation for the final audio mix.
Even when you strive for the best location recording possible, you’ll usually need to do
a certain amount of cleanup for every track recorded in the field. If you’re working with
vocal tracks, you might find yourself editing out background noises between lines,
deleting comments from the director, or even trying to replace words that the actors
tripped over during an otherwise perfect take. Final Cut Express HD gives you a fine
degree of control when editing audio clips, so you can make these kinds of changes.
You can also choose to edit your audio in a different application. For example, setting
an audio editing application capable of destructive changes as your audio file editor
would allow you to quickly make permanent changes directly to the source audio files
on disk. (You might want to do this to use a noise reduction filter available in that
application to clean up a particularly noisy clip.) In this way, you can apply effects or
special sound-sweetening filters before continuing work on your edit. For more
information on specifying external editing applications, see “Choosing Settings
and Preferences” on page 945.
Adding Audio Filters
Along with setting volume levels for the audio clips in your sequence, you may need to
apply audio filters. Some filters, like Compression and Equalization, can be used to
improve audio that’s already good, making the dynamic range of a clip more
manageable or further clarifying an actor’s voice. For audio clips with distortion,
interference, or unwanted sound, you may be able to use a filter such as Hum Remover
or DePopper to try to make the clips usable.
Setting Appropriate Volume Levels for Audio Clips in Sequences
You can adjust the volume level of all the clips in a sequence relative to each other so
that the audio blends together effectively. For example, if you’re editing a narrator
speaking over music in the background, you don’t want the music to overwhelm the
sound of the narrator’s voice. To achieve a balanced mix, you can bring up the level of
the narration and reduce the level of the music.