2009

Final Sound Editing, Design, and Mixing
Sound editing, design, and mixing comprise a series of activities that are geared toward
polishing the audio of your program to enhance the final presentation. Never
underestimate the power of a good mix. Audiences may forgive problems with a program’s
picture, but they’ll never forgive poor audio. To clarify, audio post-production involves
the following tasks:
• Dialogue editing: Editing dialogue involves fine-tuning lines spoken by actors and other
onscreen speakers and fixing bad pronunciation, stumbled words, and other slight
defects of speech.
• Automated dialogue replacement (ADR, looping, or dubbing): This is the process of
completely rerecording lines that were originally recorded in unsalvageable situations.
For example, if there was an off-camera cement mixer in a critical location that filled
the audio with noise that can’t be filtered out, you can simply rerecord the dialogue
later.
• Voiceover recording: This involves pristinely recording narration in such a way as to best
capture the qualities of a speaker’s voice.
• Sound design: This is the process of enhancing the original audio with additional sound
effects and filters, such as adding car crash or door slam sound effects to a scene to
replace sound that was too difficult or unimpressive to record cleanly in the field.
• Foley recording and editing: This is the process of recording and editing custom sound
effects that are heavily synchronized to picture, such as footsteps on different surfaces,
clothes rustling, fight sounds, and the handling of various noisy objects.
• Music editing: Whether you’re using prerecorded tracks or custom-composed music,
the audio needs to be edited into and synchronized to events in your program, which
is the music editor’s job.
• Mixing: This is the process of finely adjusting the levels, stereo (or surround) panning,
equalization, and dynamics of all the tracks in a program to keep the audience’s attention
on important audio cues and dialogue and to make the other sound effects, ambience,
and music tracks blend together in a seamless and harmonious whole.
These tasks may be done by individual specialists, or they may all be done by one person,
but for nearly every type of program, they need to be done. The following sections cover
several approaches to finishing your audio in a Final Cut Studio workflow:
• “Organizing Your Audio in Preparation for Mixing”
• “Audio Finishing Using Final Cut Pro”
• “Audio Finishing Using SoundTrack Pro”
• “Audio Finishing Using Third-Party DAW Solutions”
90 Chapter 5 Finishing