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Note: It’s typical for the sound mix and color correction of a program to be done at the
same time. As with color correction, it’s most efficient to lock the edit prior to starting
work on your soundtrack. However, reconforming a sound edit that’s in progress to match
changes made to the video is a common occurrence, and Soundtrack Pro provides a
powerful reconforming tool for streamlining this process using the Final Cut Pro XML
Interchange Format. For more information, see the Soundtrack Pro documentation.
Stage 1: Organizing Your Audio Tracks
You’ll be able to work most efficiently if you take the time to organize the various dialogue,
sound effects, ambience, and music clips in your sequence into separate tracks. For more
information, see “Organizing Your Audio in Preparation for Mixing.”
Stage 2: Sending All Audio Tracks to Soundtrack Pro
The easiest way to send all of the audio tracks in your sequence to Soundtrack Pro is to
select your sequence in the Final Cut Pro Browser and then use the Send To Soundtrack Pro
Multitrack Project command in Final Cut Pro. A dialog appears, giving you options to
choose a location and provide a name for the newly created Soundtrack Pro project, open
it after sending, and include background video to use as a reference while you work in
Soundtrack Pro.
During the process of sending the audio tracks to Soundtrack Pro, the following clip
parameters are translated into their Soundtrack Pro equivalents:
• Audio levels, including keyframes
• Left/right channel pan settings, including keyframes
• Scoring markers
Stage 3: Sound Editing and Mixing
When you open the new Soundtrack Pro project, you see a series of tracks and clips that
match those from the original sequence in Final Cut Pro. At this point, you can edit these
audio clips any way you like, regardless of their original position in the Timeline.
As you work on your program’s audio, you can add more tracks and audio clips to those
that were sent from Final Cut Pro. You can incorporate sound effects and ambience tracks
from the Soundtrack Pro library or from other sound effects collections; record dialogue
replacement, voiceover, or Foley effects; and import music created by applications like
Logic and GarageBand that has been exported as AIFF and WAVE files.
When you finish, make sure you save the Soundtrack Pro project one last time before
sending the results back to Final Cut Pro.
94 Chapter 5 Finishing