Comments on: Mistakes Were Made

By: nathan

nathan — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 03:15:23 +0000

The zero-length crossfade and other seemingly unpredictable effects puzzled me at first, too. I think they relate to how much source material lies past the out point of the outgoing clip and how much lies before the in point of the incoming clip. In other words, the transition needs more footage to work with than just a straight cut. You could add silence at the beginning or end of the offending clip(s), but I think this would end up sounding like a fade out – fade in rather than a crossfade. I guess you could loop some room tone in there instead of silence. Caveat: I never did an experiment to test this, and I only have a few months amateur experience with this stuff. Feel free to call me a bozo.

By: peterb

peterb — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 01:10:01 +0000

Jeff, Kristen, thanks for the comments! The “close gap” command is exactly what I’m looking for, and I never knew it existed. Jeff, your comments about voiceovers and in-camera sound match my beliefs (I basically absorbed my sound philosophy straight from Jay Rose’s “Producing Great Sound for Digital Video”). But as T.S. Eliot once said, between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, lies the fact that I’m fundamentally cheap and lazy and don’t typically carry around an off-camera mic. My work suffers for it, and I’m the first to tell someone _else_ that they should get a wireless lav setup, and I admit it is a fundamental flaw in the stuff I’ve done to date.

I think the mixing issues go beyond the ability to create audio keyframes. Fundamentally, a mix is about taking multiple tracks and adjusting them on the fly. Even using the “looks like a mixer” mode in FCP, you’re still limited by the mouse pointer’s ability to move a single slider. That’s not how you do a mix in real life; in real life you listen to the mix in real time with a bunch of fingers on a bunch of different sliders, and you move them all at once based on what your ears tell you (if you’re mixing more than about four to six tracks, depending on how dextrous you are, you have more than one person working the sliders.)

The “FCP way” to achieve this seems to be to listen to the track over and over again, setting keyframes as needed on each track (or linked pair of stereo tracks), eventually zeroing in on the right sound, hopefully. That’ll work, but it’s a very different workflow than I’m used to when I have the luxury of using someone else’s very expensive equipment.

By: Kristen

Kristen — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 00:35:06 +0000

Another way to move everything to the left is to select the empty space between the clips, right-click and choose Close Gap.

And if the audio fade is only applied to one track, it’s because the channels aren’t linked. Select them both and press opt-cmd-L (I think, that’s right.) I have never quite figured out why sometimes the audio isn’t linked during capture, but sometimes it’s not.

By: Jeff Greenberg

Jeff Greenberg — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 18:41:59 +0000

Never use a computer’s microphone or the camera’s on board microphone. They’re lousy at best. While you could put a decent mike on your mac, usb or camera…trying to do a VO near your mac has too much ambient noise.

When you have the (A)rrow tool, hold down the option key to get the (P)en tool. This will allow you to create keyframes on your audio directly, if you have keyframe overlays turned on (this is in the bottom left of your timeline.

Never use camera stabilizers. Zoom out all the way, hold the camera near your body. If you need to get closer…get closer.

I believe opt-cmd-T puts an audio crossfade.

Use Shift Z to zoom out to see the entire timeline; command (or option) plus and minus to zoom in and out. It takes time to learn the lollipop zoom bars.

The T key selects the (T)rack tool. You can pull everything to the left (or the right) with it.

Make sure s(N)apping is on.

Email me directly if you have other questions.