4 Tips For Working With Audio In Final Cut Pro

I do quite a bit of my own sound work, partly because I enjoy it, but mostly because many productions don’t have the time or money for a mixer. On projects where I do work with a professional sound mixer, I spend a lot of time in the audio bay asking questions and picking up techniques. Below are four tips for making a decent sound mix without a formal mixing session. I used these techniques to mix the trailer for Godkiller, Halo-8’s new Illustrated Film. I used Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro, but these techniques can be applied to any software package.

1) Reference Professional Mixes.
Find movies and TV shows that have a similar sound aesthetic to to your project and use those mixes as a reference point. Listening to reference mixes on the monitors you plan to mix with is invaluable, but there’s more to see and hear if you’re willing to dig into those reference files. Its surprisingly easy to tear apart the sound from a movie and analyze the basic elements. In my case, I was mixing a trailer, so I went to the Apple trailer site where they offer high quality downloads of hundreds of trailers. If you drag those quicktimes into the Soundtrack Pro timeline, you can see the six individual surround channels as individual waveforms, and see each channels level on the output meter. I downloaded the latest Harry Potter trailer and found that they set the average dialogue levels between -12 and -6db. I used that as a reference for the dialogue in my Godkiller trailer.

Its nearly as easy to make a detailed analysis of any feature film. With a couple of Mac OS freeware apps, you can rip the audio off of a DVD and individually monitor each channel of the surround mix. I used Mac The Ripper to rip the AC3 surround file off of Kill Bill. Then a program called mAC3dec split the encoded AC3 into six mono AIFF files that can be played in Final Cut or Soundtrack Pro. That’s a fascinating, detailed way to see how the elements of a surround mix are spread out, and how the average mix levels are set for dialogue. Another useful tool is a program called Audioleak which analyzes audio files and measures average and peak audio levels for the entire program. You can run the same test on your mix to see how your average and peak levels compare to a studio movie.

2) Stay Organized.
Keeping track of individual audio elements is only possible if your tracks are methodically organized. Many editors still try to cram everything into 8 audio tracks. This is a bad habit left over from the days when the Avid could only monitor 8 channels of audio. Most Avid’s can monitor 16 tracks now, and Final Cut Pro has no such limitations. It took me a while to integrate so many audio tracks into my workflow, but I now work with 16-30 tracks of audio in Final Cut Pro, depending on the project. This allows very quick access to individual elements, and easy soloing of certain groups. If you use OMF or AAF to transfer your sound into an audio mixing application, working with a more detailed level of organization will save you the hassle of having to re sort every audio clip by hand in the audio app.

3) Start Mixing Early.
I find that the final mix is much easier if I had been paying attention to the audio levels as I was editing the dialogue and picture. Once you’ve referenced some other movies or TV shows, choose an appropriate average level for the dialogue and try to maintain that level as you edit. Sometimes I get lazy about this, and I always regret it later.

4) Mix Around The Dialogue.
When you’re ready for a detailed mix pass, mute everything except the dialogue tracks. Go through the entire show and adjust the dialogue levels so they are even throughout the timeline. How easy this is depends on how well your dialogue was recorded. Use your ears and the audio meters to make sure that everything stays within the average level range you have established. You can get pretty micro about this process, including using the keyframes and mix automation to adjust individual words, boost syllables that might trail off, and kill short peaks. Once the dialogue is set at an appropriate level, add the sound effects channels to the mix and go through the timeline again, mixing sound effects in underneath the dialogue. Do that process again for the music tracks, keeping an eye on the peak audio level, and you’ll have a solid mix right out of the edit. From there, you can send the sequence to  Soundtrack Pro or any other sound app using OMF export, and all of your mix work will migrate. If your tracks are well organized, it won’t take long to add some plug ins and dial in a tight mix.