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• Broadcast safe luma and chroma levels: Even if you’ll color correct your images later, it’s
useful to keep the maximum broadcast safe levels for color and brightness in mind
when your titles and graphics are being designed. In particular, text should never use
100 percent white, as the high-contrast edges around pure white text can cause
unwanted spikes in the signal. All text should be limited to 95 percent white or lower.
(Don’t worry, this is plenty bright for white on a television.) It’s also common for regions
of the picture where highly saturated elements intersect with objects that are very
bright to cause problems with broadcast legality. Many third-party graphics editing
and compositing applications have “broadcast safe” filters that can be used to legalize
your compositions in advance so there are no surprises, but you can do the same thing
by being mindful when choosing the color palette of your graphic.
For more information about designing graphics for broadcast, see the Final Cut Pro
documentation.
Audio Cleanup and Sound Design During the Offline Edit
Final Cut Pro includes professional features for adjusting, mixing, and filtering audio.
However, there are times when it may be faster or easier to make corrections to
problematic audio clips with other tools.
Additionally, it can sometimes be difficult to work creatively on the visuals of a project if
the audio is incomplete, especially if there’s no music. You can use both Soundtrack Pro
and GarageBand to create temporary tracks that you can use to time your edited projects
prior to importing the actual music files. For more information, see the following sections:
• “Sending Specific Clips to Soundtrack Pro for Cleanup”
• “Processing Audio Using an External Editor”
• “Creating Temporary Music in Soundtrack Pro, GarageBand, or Logic Studio”
Sending Specific Clips to Soundtrack Pro for Cleanup
If you discover clips with problematic audio during the editing process, you have the
option of sending individual audio items to Soundtrack Pro for audio sweetening.
Soundtrack Pro has numerous tools and effects for quickly taking care of problems:
• Noise-reduction tools, to deemphasize unwanted background noise
• Ambient noise addition tools, to fill holes in audio clips with sampled background
ambience (room tone) to cover up lift edits
• Equalization-matching tools, to automatically add EQ to one or more clips to match
the sonic properties of audio recorded at another location
• DeEsser effect, for controlling overly sibilant audio
• Advanced compression and expansion tools, for controlling a clip’s dynamics
57Chapter 3 Integration During Editorial Development