From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Adjusting your project's audio levels - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Adjusting your project's audio levels

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to look at adjusting a clips audio levels. So as we've been playing back our project, we've actually got some feedback from Final Cut just under the viewer that's telling us what our audio levels volume is at. I press the L key, I'll just start to play back some dialog here. - Recipes that I already created in France before we opened the restaurant. - [Instructor] I'll press K to stop, and I just want to draw your attention to these little two monitors right here. It's really small, but if we click on this button, it will reveal a bigger audio levels, which we can pay attention to. And I'll actually just make that bigger. And if I were to give you a rule of thumb, one major rule of thumb with audio, is you want to make sure that your levels do not breech zero DB, or zero decibels as they like to call it. Anything above this could cause clipping of your audio clips and unwanted noise to be generated depending on your type of output. So just pay attention to the audio levels right now. I'll press the L key. - Before we came to California, the place here I started with only 20, I think 21 different chocolates. - [Instructor] So we can see that our volumes are clearly under that point. And Final Cut Pro goes at great lengths to warn you if your audio is breeching zero DB. And one way that we can change our audio levels happens to be right on our clip. You'll see that I'm actually hovering over a audio level line, you will see that as I hover over it, it says adjust volume. As I increase it, we'll notice that a really small section here, we can see is identified by some yellow and red. In fact if I just zoom in by pressing command equals, we'll see that better, so we can see there the yellow and red there on the clip. And that's to say that right now, my audio is peaking above zero DB. Let me just play that back so you can see it here in the audio meters. - Chocolates, and now we. - [Instructor] We'll see it gets identified here, flagging that your audio is not doing so well. So we can use this or basically take down this audio in terms of its level and make sure that it doesn't breech that zero DB. Another thing, especially with interviews in the context of what we're working in is that we want our audios to be somewhat uniform in the way they sound. So we don't want there to be huge fluctuations between when different people are speaking. That might involve us raising the audio on one clip and then minusing it on another so that the overall levels that we see here are uniform. So just in this case, if I play back kind of halfway in chocolate recipes, by pressing the L key, let's just pay attention to the audio. - Opened the restaurant before we came to California. At the place here, I started with only 20, I think 21 different char. - [Instructor] I can see that it's slightly louder on the chocolate recipe CU shot, than it is on the chocolate recipe shot. So what I might want to do is just lower that volume, make sense, it's at three DB right now, just a little bit to try to do it at negative three, and see if this is now more uniform. I'll just sort of play back this material. - When we came to California, at the place here I started with only 20, I think. - [Instructor] And I can see there that it's a lot more uniform. One last thing about audio levels is all of our clips have the ability to fade in and fade out audio with these little handles right here. This creates little audio fades where your audio will start from where you can't hear it to develop volume that it's currently at. Now we're going to do a whole chapter on audio refinement. I wanted to give you some of the basics of being able to adjust your audio there of your timeline, especially if you start to add music to this project, you're going to want to adjust that audio level, make sure it's maybe a lot lower than the spoken word, so that people can hear what the subjects are saying. So there you have it, some basics of adjusting audio inside of Final Cut Pro 10.

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