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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro editing multiple audio sources (conversation) cutting back and forth

  • editing multiple audio sources (conversation) cutting back and forth

    Posted by Jason Brown on November 15, 2019 at 4:38 pm

    So…as I’m getting into this, I’m not sure the best approach. I have a conversation – 6 people on mic. Used 2 mixers (3 in each) which produced 2 POLY wav’s. The room was super noisy, so I can’t leave the mic’s open…I have to cut between them.

    What’s the best process for doing this? I do this a lot with 2 mics, but I normally have WAV for each mic and just make through edits for each to bounce back and forth – that has worked well. I’m wondering if I should first break these out and not have POLY wav files, but make independent files for each track?

    Joe Marler replied 6 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Mark Suszko

    November 15, 2019 at 5:54 pm

    My own way of working would be to keep each mic on a dedicated track, and ride the levels on each thru as many play-throughs as it takes.

    If you’re in a hurry, I was thinking, you could use multicam mode and tell the multicam to switch the audio with the corresponding videos- this kills the non-essential audio in between the various shots – then you can go back into that cut and refine the audio. Multicam can be set to lock to one master audio track, or switch the audio and picture together. One could just duplicate as many tracks as needed to make each “switcher” choice a particular version with the particular isolated mic on it.

  • Jason Brown

    November 15, 2019 at 6:44 pm

    How do you “ride levels”? Like automation gain in AVID?

  • Mark Suszko

    November 15, 2019 at 7:23 pm

    I keyframe mine as I go. If the stakes are much lower, I can apply a plug-in to suppress the noise floor in between the higher level of actual speech, it’s gating. But that would be a very casual way to do it.

  • Joe Marler

    November 16, 2019 at 12:45 am

    [Jason Brown] “I normally have WAV for each mic and just make through edits for each to bounce back and forth – that has worked well. I’m wondering if I should first break these out and not have POLY wav files, but make independent files for each track?”

    Just do Clip>Expand Audio Components. For a polyphonic WAV file you should see each mic. You can then select range mode with the R key, click and drag across each range you want to adjust. Do SHIFT+CMD+S to silence, OPT+SHIFT+CMD+S to to reset level. No need to blade anything.

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