help me…please! (very stupid audio question)

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

1. You do NOT want to “combine them”. (Once you do that, you’ll never get them “apart” at a later stage of production.
You can export the audio as multi-channel (two, in this case) and you should.

2. FCP will increase by 12 dB with doing anything “special” (the audio sliders will “increase” by 12 dB).
But if you still want MOREthan that… Add the Audio Filters > Apple > AUPeakLimiter and adjust the “Pre-gain” to any level you want.

[David Roth weiss]

As Thax said, don’t combine them permanently, but you can certainly center pan both channels so they will play out to your monitors combined instead of channle-1 left, and channel-2 right.

[Brian Pitt]

Yeah, I thought of that, but I only want to send one channel that has both streams of audio. I have a duplicate project saved with the audio in it’s original form.

Brian

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

[Brian Pitt] ” I only want to send one channel that has both streams of audio”

Although its POSSIBLE… why would you want to do this?

You should not combine two mics on the same person unless you have carefully made SURE there is no PHASE-cancellation between the mics.

Normally, you would keep the two channels processed separatly and only use the BEST channel alone.

[Brian Pitt]

I guess the only reason I wanted to join them was so that I only had to apply filters once instead of twice in Soundtrack. The Audio from each mic sounded pretty good, but it sounded great when they are played together. Maybe I’ll just take the Lav audio and kill the boom.

Brian

[David Roth weiss]

Brian,

Do whatever sounds best. Blending of boom and lavalier is quite common, as Lavaliers are typically incapable of picking up the “nat. sound” that often sells a real location. If there is any phase cancellation you can deal with that.

DRW

[Jeff Carpenter]

Yes, feel free to blend them by having them each play out of each speaker and adjusting the levels to what you want. There’s nothing wrong with that, I do it all the time.

What everyone is saying is that you should leave them both seperate tracks in case you need to change those levels later. It’s very common where I work to do a rough cut at my own workstation with “ok” speakers and then move back to our main editing system and find that my audio mix is not quite what I wanted once I’m listening on really nice speakers. That’s one possibility of a change you’d need to make later.

Now, you may have nice speakers, but the point is that you can’t be sure you won’t want to change it down the road. Maybe it’s perfect now but next week you decide to put it on the internet. All of a sudden the mix that sounds great on a TV is hard to hear on tiny computer speakers and needs to be re-mixed with more lav and less boom. There are a dozen reasons you might want to change your mind later that have nothing to do with doing it “wrong” now. Sometimes situations just change and you have to make changes to adapt to them.

So yes, you’ll have to apply filters more than once. That is a wasted step and I can see why you’d want to eliminate it. But by saving a few seconds now you could cause BIG problems for yourself later. That’s not for certain, but it’s a possibility, which is what everyone here is worried about. We just don’t want anything bad to happen to you down the road 😉

[Steve Wargo]

What you’re asking is a very important part of every day production. You were smart enough to record a back up audio track and you’re wise in asking what you should do before making a mistake which can’t be undone.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona

It’s a dry heat!

[Massimo Croce]

“I guess the only reason I wanted to join them was so that I only had to apply filters once instead of twice in Soundtrack”

you can edit as a separate file in STP and then send them to a bus
and apply an only one effect to bus

[Brian Pitt]

that’s a very good point…