[John Fishback]

Is this studio for audio, video or both? Does it need to be isolated from environmental noise (internal or external to the building)?

Regardless, there are two parts to preparing a room: sound isolation and acoustical treatment.

Isolation is achieved by putting mass between the outside world and the studio. Isolation is not accomplished by placing Sonex on the walls. In your case you might build a room within your room. IOW, literally place a new wall filled with insulation (so there’s no resonance inside the wall) and covered with a couple layers of 5/8″ sheetrock around the interior. Also, since parallel surfaces in a studio are anathema ,as they create standing waves, you can angle the new walls (and don’t forget the ceiling).

Acoustical treatment depends a lot on the use of the room. Do you want live areas, dead areas, something in the middle? There are three main types of acoustic devices you can use to shape your room’s acoustics: base traps, absorptive materials (for mid frequencies) and diffusion panels. There’s a lot of good info about this here.

[John Fishback]

I’m not an expert, but some things to consider are create separation from the background by moving your talent forward. Displays usually are 5.6K so use daylight lights on your talent. Have dimmable instruments on your talent so you can adjust the exposure vs the background.

[John Fishback]

You said that the original gets very loud and distorted. That same distortion will exist in FCPX, although, it may present in different ways. The crackling (it’d help if you upload an example) is distortion. Usually it’s caused by audio that is too loud. Analog audio let us get away with recording very loud content without distortion. However, with digital audio, once you exceed 0, the audio will clip (distort).

How are you monitoring? Are you monitoring the original in a different way than FCPX? There are a number of amplifier stages that coupd be distorting: the power amp, a preamp, a mixer, an interface.

The first thing I’d try is to lower the level of the clip in your timeline and see what happens. You won’t remove the distortion you hear in the original, but it might help with other areas of your content. The only way I’ve been able to reduce clipping distortion is with iZotope RX5 Advanced (other versions might do that as well).

[John Fishback]

Some, but not all mics can use 48v Phantom power. So, don’t connect to 48v unless you are sure your mic can handle it. See this post from Sound Devices for more for more info.

Here’s a low cost 48 v to 12v converter.

[John Fishback]

Ty’s suggestions are excellent. If you can’t record ADR at the location, do you have room tone – just the sound of the location without dialogue? If so, adding that under the ADR wou;;d be a first step. The you can decide how well the ADR matches the original. You can also try Match EQ which is an effect included with many NLEs. If you don’t have clear location sound, can you get it? Sorry I’m late to this thread. But, maybe this would help.

[John Fishback]

If you have Motion5, here’s a way from Ripple Training to do what you want.

[John Fishback]

In the recording studio using a star-point grounding scheme is often preferred. I learned this years ago when John Storyk designed our studio. His tech people explained star-point grounding. This is where there is only one ground point (the star-point) in the facility. In our studio the star-point is the patchbay. All shields are connected at that end, and all shields are open at the device end. Each device in turn is grounded through its a/c third pin to the star-point. This ensures no ground loops. BTW, you only need the shield grounded at one end. You may have noticed in hospitals, data centers and other installations where quality grounds are essential, that the a/c outlets are colored orange. This indicates the orange outlet is connected to the star-point.

Modern buildings follow a similar plan. Power comes in from the street, usually passes through an isolation transformer and it is at that point a star-point is created and ultimately run through the building. But, the fact that there are different phases in power distribution opens up lots of room for bad grounding and hum in a building. If the power in the room you are shooting is on one phase, and you’re you’re using a snake or wall-mounted outlet connected to a device on a different phase, that can open a can of worms re hum. Sometimes a simple ground lift in an a/c plug and/or xlr connector) can fix a thorny hum situation like that. When we shoot, we only have one power strip to which all audio & video gear is connected. This useful in reducing the possibility of hum, though not always. As mentioned by those above, there are many and varied good ways of attacking hum in the field.

[John Fishback]

I have a 2012 Macbook Pro which runs FCPX flawlessly using 1080P ProRes 422 footage. I use Color Finale Pro for grading. It’s a terrific app that has color wheels and vector color as well. If you want, you can save presets (grades) and/or group clips so if you change one, they all change. I control it (and a MacPro) with the new Tangent Ripple panel. It’s a terrific solution.

[John Fishback]

You can use the free JES Deinterlacer app if you know you’ll be exporting for use on computer monitors and need de-interlaced footage.

[John Fishback]

What you describe sounds like your 2 channels are out of phase. The most noticeable effect of that is the cancellation of bass. Is that the case? Played back in stereo out-of-phase channels it will sound okay, but if your video plays back on a mono system, it’ll sound they way you describe.

You can change the audio phase in FCPX by first, applying the Gain audio filter (in the Levels folder in Audio Effects), then in the Audio tab of the Inspector, open (twirl down) the Gain Effect and click on Preset and choose Invert Phase- left (or right), Then, monitor the way you did originally. If it now sounds good, you in fact, had a phase reversal in one of your audio channels. If it still sounds bad, I’m at a loss as to why.