Brad Hurley
Forum Replies Created
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FCPX has pretty sophisticated audio abilities but they’re not easy to discover; I’d recommend getting Ripple Training’s tutorial on “Sound Editing in Final Cut Pro 10.4,” which covers much more than just editing. It goes through the entire audio workflow and shows you the possibilities. It includes a segment on metering and volume adjustment.
You can solo any audio lane to view its levels in the built-in level meter (the “right and left speaker” meter). Final Cut can also add the multi-meter from Logic to monitors LUFs; see https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/final-cut-pro-logic-effects/lgex1d0722a3/mac
It’s worth noting that Final Cut Pro lacks is a conventional mixer, and many people are hoping Apple remedies that situation soon.
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If it were me, I’d buy another drive, format it using MacOS Extended (journaled) for MacOS, and copy all the files from the exFAT-formatted drive over to the new drive and work from the new drive.
exFAT is more susceptible to corruption than MacOS Extended, and since it’s not journaled it’s also harder/impossible to recover files from a corrupted disk.
When I’m shooting video, I always format my SD cards to MacOS Extended rather than exFAT, unless I have to use a Windows machine to transfer and store files in the field.
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Just to add: the thing to trust is your reference monitor, assuming you calibrated it, and that you calibrated it for whatever you’re delivering for (if for web, use Rec 709 gamma 2.2, if for widescreen TV use Rec 709 gamma 2.4).
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This sounds like a gamma issue to me. You should never trust Quicktime as it has well-documented gamma shifts; Quicktime always looks wrong when I use it (so I never use it). If what you see in FCPX is darker than what you see on your reference monitor, check the gamma settings that you used for calibration. My guess is that you’re using gamma 2.4 on your monitor but FCPX’s viewer on your uncalibrated screen is gamma 2.2. If you change your reference monitor’s gamma calibration to 2.2, they’ll likely be closer to matching in terms of brightness.
Gamma 2.2 is the norm for computer monitors, which are mainly used in brightly lit offices. Gamma 2.4 is what you’d use for viewing on a television screen, which are mainly used in darker rooms. Cinema is gamma 2.6, I believe; it’s viewed in a controlled completely dark environment.
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“Or BMD doesn’t want to pay Apple any licensing rights since they have a competing solution.”
I don’t think Braw is really “competition” for Prores Raw, though. It’s more of a threat to Apple: Because Final Cut can’t work with Braw, BMD camera owners who might otherwise stick with Final Cut have to go to Resolve or another NLE to make proxies and some of them decide to stay there and defect from FCPX.
For BMD, having the ability to work with both Braw and Prores Raw would optimal, since it attracts more people to Resolve who might otherwise stay with Final Cut or one of the few other NLEs that can read and edit Prores Raw. For Apple, the benefits are less clear: they’d really only be retaining the relatively small but not insignificant number of FCPX users who use BMD cameras or who need to work with footage from BMD cameras. And a lot of those people still use FCPX for editing: they’ll make proxies in Resolve, edit in FCPX, and go back to Resolve for color and possibly audio.
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On the Blackmagic Design user forum a few months back, someone from Blackmagic Design pointed out that the ball is in Apple’s court in terms of bringing Prores Raw to DaVinci Resolve. Apparently a lot of people have been pestering BMD to include it, but they’ve been talking to the wrong company: if Apple gets enough requests they may consider working with BMD to make it happen, but apparently not enough people have requested it yet so from Apple’s perspective the demand isn’t there.
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Unless Apple has fixed this recently, GarageBand can only record at a 44.1 kHz sample rate. What sample rate are you using to record audio in Zencastr or Zoom? If you’re using different sample rates it might account for the drift once you bring all those files into Final Cut; I don’t think the bpm in GarageBand is going to make a difference.
See https://larryjordan.com/articles/solving-problems-caused-by-audio-sample-rates-that-dont-match/
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That’s odd about the sample rate change not affecting playback. Normally, changing the sampling rate of a file recorded at, say, 96 kHz to 48 kHz would make the file play back at half its originally recorded speed and pitch. I’m assuming Final Cut expects to receive files recorded at 48 kHz, which is the norm for video, but maybe it automatically adjusts the project sample rate based on the sample rate it detects in the file?
Removing the stereo mix (channels 1 and 2 in the example file you converted) should cut the size of your polywav files in half; most people wouldn’t use the L-R mix and would use the individual ISOs (channels 3 and 4 in your example, for the two lav mics) instead so they can remix their individual levels to taste.
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It looks like you changed both the bit depth and the sample rate. It would make sense to reduce the bit depth from 24 to 16 to save space, but if you changed the sample rate isn’t that going to affect playback speed? What happens if you only reduce the bit depth (from 24 to 16) but don’t change the sample rate? You should still get smaller files and FCPX should be able to relink them.
Another option, but more tricky and tedious, would be to remove the stereo mix from those polywav files if you’re only using the ISOs. You can do that with Sound Devices’ free Wave Agent app, but I think you’d have to split the polywavs and reassemble them and I’m not sure if all the metadata would be preserved in that process. Note that you can edit metadata in Wave Agent, but this approach is likely too much effort for what it’s worth if you have a lot of files.
On some of the Sound Devices recorders you can set them up to record only the ISOs and not the stereo mix, which will reduce the size of your polywav files…that could be an option for future projects.
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Catalina on one Mac and Mojave on the other. Smooth sailing on both, no problems.