From the course: Final Cut Pro X Weekly
Audio compression - Final Cut Pro Tutorial
From the course: Final Cut Pro X Weekly
Audio compression
- [Jeff] Welcome to Final Cut Pro Ten Weekly. This is Jeff, no Nick, and we're talking about audio compression. Audio compression is basically the idea that you would like to pull back the loudest items and bring up the quietest items, letting somebody who varies how loud and quiet when they speak into a narrower range. When we use a compressor, we're gonna end up pulling back the items that are too loud, and I'm gonna show you how it's gonna make up for that loss of signal strength. I've got a couple of adjustments here that we'll talk about as we work. One of the really cool things about using a compressor means that you have to do a lot less key framing of voices to make them sound even. Important note about monitoring audio. You just can't do it off your MacBook Pro or your iMac speakers. You wanna have studio speakers, such as the M-Audio BX5s or the Mackie MR6s. Those are kind of the minimum of where I'm going, that are $200 speakers, or a set of headphones that have open backs, like the Sennheiser 650s I'm wearing. I wanna give you the warning that noise reduction headphones add quite a bit of hiss. They hide a lot of what's going on, that Earbuds just don't have the dynamic range we need, and frustratingly, when you're in an open office plan, it's really problematic for you to get good audio mixing. You need a room that's got some sort of sound control. So just a quick explanation of this timeline that's out of Final Cut Pro. I've got a version with and without compression on it, and the shot here without compression, I've worked on it earlier, I'm gonna look on the inspector. Want to hide my project, wanna make my inspector tall. This has already had noise reduction done to it, it has a linear phase EQ put on it to help his speech. Generally EQing comes before compression. It has had some noise reduction on it, and I've cut out all the bad moments in his interview and used a flow transition. Something that I wouldn't be as, probably as liberal as I've used here, but I did it here specifically so we could focus in on clean audio. With the clip selected in Final Cut Ten I'm gonna hit x to mark the clip. I'm gonna be using the slash key to play from in to out. - As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. - [Jeff] And I'm even gonna go ahead here and say, don't bother showing me any of the video on the timeline. And let's increase the size of this so we can really see the audio, and I'm gonna use the letter z to zoom. I'm just gonna lasso the clip itself, a for the arrow, click on the clip, x to mark the spot. So now the slash key will play through the clip. Optionally, you can go up to the view menu and set the playback to loop, and this allows you to refine, refine, refine. I'm gonna need the compressor effect, and for that I'm gonna go to my effects, I'm in all my audio effects and I'm just gonna type in the word compress. I'm gonna drag this compressor directly to my sound byte. You can see it actually made things louder right away. Let's hide our effects, and with this selected I'm gonna click here to bring up the compressor information. The compressor is gigantic on-screen. I'm gonna go ahead and reduce it to 50% of its size in the top right, so we're able to see and work at the same time. And I'll call out there are a number of presets here, including some for voice, but we're gonna do this all manually. I'm gonna go ahead and play the footage, and turn this on and off just so we can see what the compressor's doing right out of the gate. And we probably could use here our audio meters, so I'm just gonna double-click right here to bring up our meters. Single click, there we go, and we can see what's going on just a little bit easier now. I don't want at this point the inspector height, so I'm just gonna close that back up, just so we have a little bit more space, there we go. All right, now that we're ready to go, let's go ahead and play back this by marking it with the x key and hitting the slash. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently one of the ways they remedy this is to put tubes into their ears. - [Jeff] You can hear how it's bringing everything up automatically, I wanna show you how this works. So I'm gonna turn it on, and I'm gonna get off the meter and go to the graph mode. This effect works by taking everything above this threshold, in this case it's 20 decibels, and bending it back. It looks like it's set to two, so whatever value it is above 20, it'll get halved, and then it's getting automatically gained up to zero decibels. We're gonna turn off the auto-gain. You see everything dropped. I'm gonna turn the ratio all the way up so everything that's too loud will get pulled back. I'm gonna start with the threshold at zero. With a threshold at zero, nothing's going on. As I begin to roll the threshold over, because the ratio was so harsh, it's going to start pulling back the tops, almost flattening them out completely. So as I drag here, you can see it's bringing back everything, everything, everything. And right now, it's set at minus 20. And I'll play this back and you'll see nothing goes above minus 20, because everything that's above it, it's a 30 to 1 reduction. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently, one of the ways that -- - [Jeff] So everything above 20 is getting reduced. I'll take it all the way down to 30. Still the same concept. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently one of the ways they remedy this is to put -- - [Jeff] This here is showing you how much it's kicking in, and this shows you how much it's working on the elements above that level. (man on video continues talking) And this graph part over here is showing you also, its energy, how much it's working to do its compression. This is why we use this rather than the meter to see what's going on. Okay, let's reset everything and take a look what we need to do. First thing I'm gonna do is turn off the auto-gain. This makes up the missing energy that's been robbed by the compression. When we pull things back and then make them up after the fact we gain them back up, we've pulled back the tops, lifted the bottoms, compressing our work. I'm going to set this to zero. I will use the ratio 2.0 is a good spot. You can't really go above three before you get any distortion. And I'm just going to go ahead here and play this. Nothing is being adjusted on our clip right now. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently one of the ways they remedy this is to put tubes into their ears. - [Jeff] He gets quieter, particularly say, in this section, as things finish because when we speak, we have less air in our lungs and we get quieter at the end of sentences. We'd like our material to average around minus 12. So what we're gonna do is take the loudest moments, so this would be the moments above minus 12, say minus 15 or around minus 20. We're gonna adjust this so it's compressing the elements that are above it. At the very end we'll use a little bit of makeup to pull the bottoms up, hence compression. Pulling down the tops, picking up the bottoms. I'm going to bring back with a two-to-one ratio. Now they're going to be right there about, right, if we're averaging minus 12, we're going to lose stuff. Everything between minus 20 and 12, so we're probably about six decibels too little, but let's play this back and hear it. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. - [Jeff] You can see it's averaging right here, about minus 14, about minus 16 or so. And I'm gonna wanna make up about three decibels. Notice as I do this, everything is much more even. With this off, we've got real highs and real lows in his speech. With this on now, everything is closer together. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently one of the ways they remedy this is to put tubes into their ear. - [Jeff] On the compression, it's doing exactly what we want, it's evening him out. We have the option, instead of using the makeup here, to just say, hey, get everything to about minus 12, and that's a really good spot for us to work. - [Man On Video] As we got a little bit older, one of the things that happened regularly was Lily got ear infections. Apparently one of the ways they remedy this is to put tube-- - [Jeff] When I approach using a compressor, I'm pulling back the items of speech that are too loud and I'm making it up after the fact. I want my ratio between 1.4 and 3.1, depending on how much they vary. I gotta be careful not to do anything more than distortion, and I'm gonna watch for the compressor to kick in on the graph mode. You have to just be a little bit careful about generalized noise, which is why you want to get clean recordings to begin with, because compression may bring up generalized room noise or spatial noise. And what you might wanna do is do your noise reduction before you get to it or record in a clean environment. Compressors are built for individual voices. Once you've built it, it means that you have to do a lot less key framing to get the voice to sound even. This has been Final Cut Pro Ten Weekly. Thanks for watching.
Contents
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Why the Range tool should be your favorite and why to use it more5m 26s
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It’s all about the color board9m 53s
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5 things you should know about Motion 510m 34s
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The ultimate short guide to mastering speed effects6m 52s
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3 things you should use Compressor for right now6m 38s
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5 keyboard shortcuts you should know in FCPX7m 9s
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Uploading videos to the web4m 27s
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Setting up workspaces5m 8s
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AE workflows10m
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Cool things about the Info panel5m 36s
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5 tricks for dealing with the inventible stills montage8m 35s
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Animation in a hurry: Have no fear, custom text is here7m 9s
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The least you need to know about After Effects10m 21s
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Video roles in FCP X7m 44s
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Three Timeline tricks7m 31s
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Split edits to elevate your storytelling5m 53s
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Color Finale for traditional color correction10m 37s
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Tricks for managing titles12m 21s
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Perfect slow-mo with HFR11m 35s
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The power of generators10m 49s
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Portable proxies12m 30s
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LUTs and you12m 47s
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Free Apple sound libraries6m 40s
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Getting more from the Ken Burns moves7m 46s
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Storyboards5m 18s
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Three things about 3D text9m 8s
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Playhead and skimmer management6m 22s
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360VR in Final Cut Pro, part 15m 46s
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360VR in Final Cut Pro, part 29m 23s
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Keyframing best secret: Solo animation4m 50s
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3D text in Motion7m 45s
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Smart collections8m 51s
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Transitions6m
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Frame.io9m 55s
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RED workflow10m 2s
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Timelapses, part 17m 32s
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Timelapses, part 27m 23s
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Setting up a stronger Color Workspace7m 34s
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Shortcuts for faster color correction in FCPX 10.47m 12s
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The Power of Overshoot6m 53s
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Better LUT Workflows3m 32s
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Eyedroppers in Curves4m 57s
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Clip Filtering in the Browser3m 2s
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Animation Headache Avoided2m 40s
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SpeedScriber7m 6s
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A Solution for Charts4m 48s
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Speeding Up Basic Transforms4m 33s
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Common Transform Libraries3m 58s
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Viewing Smarter in the Browser3m 46s
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TImeline Display Options2m 16s
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10 keys we wished more FCP X editors used: Part 16m 22s
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10 keys we wished more FCP X editors used: Part 27m
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3 things to know for working with 360 in FCP X6m 46s
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360° Patch6m 20s
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Finishing the job: Archiving best practices4m 11s
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Using auditions with color correction2m 36s
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Using a color chart4m 29s
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Using Motion color looks in FCP X6m 26s
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Using the Finder for easy organization6m 33s
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Flow transition: Hiding jump cuts3m 53s
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Using Palette Gear with FCP X7m 51s
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The ultimate reframe: 360 in everyday projects5m 44s
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Snapshots: Better than duplicates4m 43s
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Closed captions7m
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Which ProRes is right for you?10m 24s
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FCP X in the real world: A sit-down with Kelsey Wilson from the Toronto Star14m 50s
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Dual displays: Maximize your layouts6m 19s
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Creating custom clip names in FCP X5m 21s
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Creating a channel blur in Motion for FCP X8m 7s
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Tweaking flesh tones9m 32s
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Text design tips for video editors12m 57s
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Saving useful effect presets in FCP X8m 28s
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Audio compression9m 27s
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Creating great lens flares with mFlare 211m 48s
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Voice EQ: Making everyone sound better10m 40s
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Smarter effects workflows7m 57s
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The edits not taken5m 38s
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MacBook Pro: 2014 vs. 20187m 11s
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Using cameras and formats6m 48s
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OS X Finder search secret5m 41s
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USB-C, T3, and you3m 51s
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Nodes 2: Incredible motion graphics right inside of FCPX8m 57s
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Three things to know about taking the dive into FCPX8m 6s
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CommandPost6m 37s
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Three great OS X utilities4m 56s
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Build a custom Final Cut Pro custom template in five steps14m 58s
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Three hidden compressor tweaks8m 5s
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Make safe OS X media copies6m 38s
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Don't hit the panic button: Troubleshooting Final Cut Pro X problems, part 14m
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Working with 4K in HD production7m 37s
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Workflow extensions with Shutterstock4m 45s
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Don't detach the audio2m 24s
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Four tips for keying the green out of your screen8m 44s
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Upgrading safer4m 43s
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Understanding disk speed10m 33s
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Beyond Ken Burns: Working with photo cutouts in Apple Motion, part 111m 3s
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Automatic color4m 48s
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Color matching8m 9s
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External GPUs14m 58s
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Beyond Ken Burns: Working with photo cutouts in Apple Motion, part 210m 32s
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Pair kerning: The secret to professional-looking titles3m 19s
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Pro Res raw8m 40s
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Incompatible media for future OS updates5m 38s
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The future isn't just horizontal8m 29s
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Audio limiter5m 12s
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Easing animations8m 12s
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Three free effects9m 49s
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Making keyword collections work for you6m 57s
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Square video8m 52s
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Video noise reduction11m 39s
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Hard limiter2m 44s
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Exploring 3D type options and reflections9m 16s
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Preparing titles for vertical and square formats8m 11s
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Odd-sized assets and Spatial Conform3m 29s
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Stencil and Silhouette5m 5s
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Working with 180-degree video in Final Cut Pro X8m 48s
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Two workflow tips for 5.7K footage7m 6s
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Faking room tone6m 2s
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Free still and video content sites8m 28s
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FCPX system performance12m 37s
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Proxy files for collaborative workflows6m 33s
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EditReady4m 35s
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