OK, OK. As you can see, I’m not Martin Scorsese. I’m probably not even Ed Wood. But I still had fun.

I wonder how much work it would be to redo Spartacus with Fisher-Price figurines. The hard part will probably be getting the lead character’s shirt off.

My brother has uttered his semi-annual wish that someone would just tell him what DV camera to buy.

My reply is: I live to serve

People use their DV cameras for producing different types of work. Since I don’t know what, exactly, your brother is interested in doing, I’m going to construct an ideal consumer and write my advice to him. My ideal consumer wants a DV camera because he wants to produce some body of work. He wants to produce finished product (by which I mean, not just take a bunch of raw footage of his cats and then occasionally watch an hour of it, unedited). He wants that product to have some level of professionalism, although he is not a professional. In other words, he’d like to produce something that a complete stranger might look at and say “hey, this was pretty nicely done,” although not necessarily at the level of something one might make part of a portfolio for getting a job (hopefully, a person who is aiming to make their living as a videographer doesn’t need my advice on equipment).

(1) First, come up with a budget. For the sake of this example, let’s say your initial budget is $1000. Whether one is talking about cameras or computers, you’ll always be able to find something to spend “just $200 more” on. So it’s important to know what we’re working with before we begin.

(2) Go ahead and look at the cameras that cost $1000.

(3) Cut your camera budget in half — in this case $500 — and pick up pretty much any camera in that price range. Don’t spend more than half a day thinking about it. Consumer-level cameras are mostly interchangeable. This is more or less true of “prosumer” (a Japanese word that means “has too much money”) cameras as well.

(4) Now take the money you have left over from your initial budget ($500), and spend it on lighting, a good tripod, and balanced microphones/audio equipment.

If you follow my recipe, you have a chance at making far superior films (footnote 1) than you would if you blow your entire budget (or more) solely on the videocamera. The videocamera is just one tool in the filmmaking process. It’s certainly the most obvious tool, but it is arguably not the most important one. The cheapest balanced lavalier mic will get you better sound quality than the most expensive camera’s on-camera mic. Furthermore, your audience will notice that difference more than they will notice the difference in video quality between the most expensive prosumer 3-ccd camera and the cheapest miniDV device you can find. As a culture we are very finely attuned to subtle differences in audio. Poor video quality can be dismissed as a stylistic issue, and we are accustomed to accepting a variety of different video qualities in our day to day viewing activities. Poor audio is intrusive and jarring, because nearly all of the things we listen to, apart from AM radio, are of a standard professional quality. A poor audio track can make an otherwise fine video unwatchable. Therefore, I say: get a real balanced mic. (I actually wrote an article last year about what to do when your soundtrack sucks, but you’re much better off avoiding having that happen in the first place.)

There is one situation in which you can skimp on the mic, and that’s if you know in advance that you won’t be using the audio track from whatever videos you shoot (for example, if you will be overdubbing later, or setting your work to music). But if you intend for your movies to have sound recorded at shoot time, get a mic. Below, I’ll provide a link to Jay Rose’s book on producing audio for digital video, which is a worthwhile investment if you want your sound to be good. And you should.

Most consumer (and prosumer) cameras compete not on basic quality-of-video issues, but on “features.” Most of these features are completely superfluous to making good videos. Also, if this is your first camera, you probably don’t yet know what features you actually need. For example, 90% of the camcorder reviews talk about “low light performance.” But we’ve already established that my hypothetical consumer wants to make something watchable. Watchable films have lighting design. Ergo, you could care less about low light performance, because you’re going to use the money you saved on the camera to buy some real lighting. Obviously, I’m giving this as an example. If you’re determined to charge in to a darkened gothic cathedral and use your Panacanony’s super infrared feature, well, I can’t stop you. But if the Paris Hilton video isn’t enough to convince you that “low light” cameras are a bad idea out of the starting gate, you need to watch it again. Er, solely in the interests of Art.

So in my mind, the feature list is more or less a distraction that you want to ignore when evaluating cameras. The only things you should care about are: does it shoot video? Does it feel comfortable in your hand? Does it have the inputs and outputs I need? That’s about it.

Things you should specifically not care about: whether it takes still photos, and at what resolution. Whether it does dubbing. The “in-camera” editing features, which no one, in the entire history of video since the beginning of time has ever, ever used. Digital zoom. Digital image stabilization. Low/no light mode. Camera motor noise (you are using an external mic, right?).

Photo credit: David Reuther

The one thing to concern yourself with at the low end is “Sony vs. Everyone Else”. That’s what the decision comes down to. Many of the Sony DV cameras use a CCD that causes vertical “striping” on bright light sources that I find very distracting, whereas the Canons, for example, don’t. The photo to the right is an example of vertical smear. It looks like lens flare, but isn’t — it’s entirely due to the characteristics of the HAD CCD that some camcorders use. That was one main reason I avoided the Sonys. My personal pick when I had to make this decision was to find a used Canon Optura Pi. But that being said, the guidelines are simple: figure out what you want to spend, don’t spend more than that, spend as little as possible, and worry more about the process of shooting and editing than about the equipment.

I’m not being flip. My honest recommendation is that you figure out what you think you want to spend on a camera, and cut it in half. Get a camera half as expensive as you think you need, and spend the remainder on sound and lighting (and, start saving up for a moderately inexpensive or a really expensive non-linear editor software package). All of those things will be more important to the quality of your finished work than the camera you buy.

But, if you’re going to wrest a recommendation out of me, I would say, assuming your budget isn’t unreasonably large, get a Canon Elura 65. It is lightweight, inexpensive, and isn’t loaded with 800 stupid features that you’ll never use. I recommend this model instead any of the various Sony ones because I really dislike the “vertical lens-flare” effect from Sony’s CCD’s. Also, the Canon has a top-loading tape, so when your tape runs out in the middle of a shoot, you don’t have to remove it from the tripod to change it, as you do on some of the Sony models. I would have recommended the even cheaper Canon ZR models, but the most recent revisions of that line lack a mic input, making them little more than toys. An older used ZR with a mic input would be a good choice for a bargain hunter. If you’re absolutely, 100%, positively sure that you will never need to do in-camera recording, then the Canon ZR-80 becomes a reasonable choice, saving you over a hundred bucks and a few ounces in weight over the Elura.

Additional Resources

• If you’re doing anything at all with digital video, you probably want a copy of Jay Rose’s Producing Great Sound for Digital Video.
• David Reuther has some extremely detailed comparisons of the picture quality of camcorders from a couple of years ago. If you care more about picture quality than I do, you may want to spend some time contemplating his sample images, as well as his compendium of common video image flaws.

Footnote 1: Yes, I am well aware that works that are on video are not, in fact, “films.” In the name of international peace and goodwill I can only say: bite me.

This has led to me spending hours debugging my camera, film, and every element in my chain other than my computer before reaching the sad conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with my equipment per se. The 867 Mhz Powerbook G4 with 640 Mb of memory is just too slow to capture more than about 30 seconds of OfflineRT video (30 seconds, incidentally, sounding suspiciously like “the amount of time it takes some internal buffer to fill up before it has to page to disk.”) My working theory is it’s not a problem during the ‘true’ capture — after all, I’m able to capture full rate DV just fine — but the extra CPU time spent compressing the frames into photo JPEG is just a tiny bit slower than needed, resulting in hosage.

So, not particularly wanting to buy a new laptop, I arrived at a workaround: turn off “abort capture on dropped frame”. I leave the warnings on, just on principle. I turn the abort back on when I capture at full res.

I know, I know, I’m playing with fire. But what else can I do? I’m addicted to OfflineRT editing. It’s a sickness.

I’ve found precious little information on the net about OfflineRT, and of course nothing useful from Apple about system requirements. So let me turn the question around: is anyone else out there using OfflineRT on a laptop? What model laptop are you using? Do you experience dropped frames?

• I’m deeply unhappy with the voiceover. Without a real mic, I was reduced into shouting into the lousy condenser mic in my laptop, which sounds about as bad as you’d expect.
• FCP’s voiceover tool is simultaneously nice and lame. It’s nice in that it seamlessly supports multiple takes and gives sound cues and lets you synchronize voice to video. However, for me, this led to a stilted and unnatural reading. If I could do it all over again, I’d sit down with the script and make someone else do the actual recording, do 10 takes without syncing to the video at all, and then do any necessary sync completely in post. In other words: I think I’d have been better off not using the voiceover tool at all.
• I wanted to use the audio mixer to set audio keyframes so that the background noise faded in and out depending on whether narration was occurring or not. In order to set audio keyframes, you have to click the completely unlabeled “record audio keyframes” button. The button has two states, and you can’t tell by looking at it whether it is on or off. You just have to try moving the sliders and then go back to your clip and see if any keyframes magically appeared.
• Even with the Canon Optura Pi’s optical image stabilization, the picture was unacceptably shaky. A tripod wasn’t practical under the circumstances, but I still wish I had had one.
• When I first visited the shop, the cashier was a personable, photogenic young lady who was excited to talk in enthusiastic detail about the product, its history, its manufacture, the customers, and so on. When I came back the next day with the camcorder, the only person available to talk was the polite but much less communicative owner. This is the standard photography lesson of “If you don’t have your camera, you can’t make the shot.” There’s really nothing you can do about this if you’re not willing to have a camera with you at all times, but I still feel like complaining about it.
• Maybe I just haven’t learned the right shortcuts yet, but I somewhat loathe the seemingly random elements of Final Cut Pro’s user interface. Here’s one example: Line up two clips next to each other. Grab an audio crossfade transition and try to layer it across adjacent audio clips. Sometimes the transition straddles both clips (which is almost always what you want). Sometimes it will only ‘fit’ on one or the other clip. In particularly pathological cases, it will straddle neither, but will drop itself between the two clips as a 0-length element, mocking you. I’m sure there’s some sophisticated explanation for this behavior, but the UI sure doesn’t make it apparent why these different behaviors occur.
• The “zoom” effect you get by stretching or compressing the scroll bar in the sequence window (which gives you a finer or coarser view of the sequence by stretching or compressing time) is the single worst UI element I’ve seen on a Mac. I have never once succesfully managed to reach my target ‘view’ without having to stop, readjust the scroll bar to recenter, and start over again. And of course, I use it anyway because you pretty much need to to do fine-grained editing.
• I want a hotkey shortcut that says “take this clip I’ve selected and move it left in my sequence’s timeline until it bumps up against something, and then stop.” That’s one of the single most common tasks I currently do by hand (and it generally involves wrestling with the awful time-dilation scroll bar) Does that exist? I haven’t found it yet.

Although lots went wrong here, I’m optimistic about the format. I’m a big believer in tiny yet good things. Perhaps there will be more 2 minute movies about food in my future.

I love LiveType, but I only use it once in a blue moon, generally when finishing a project up. Unfortunately, Apple’s dopey installation program requires that LiveType (like all the Pro apps) be installed completely on the internal drive. Here’s how to route around their bogosity.

All we’re going to do is use the unix ability to have symbolic links from one directory to another allow us to store the most egregiously large directory on our external drive. Symbolic links are created with the ln command.

(I am assuming that your external drive is hooked up during this procedure. For instructional purposes, let’s assume the drive is named external)

That’s it! You’re done. (You could of course just do sudo bash and then issue the mkdir, mv, and ln commands from a root shell, but that violates the principle of being conservative when wearing your root hat).

You can do this not only with LiveType, but with Soundtrack, and in fact even with iTunes, if you’re willing to accept parts of your collection being unavailable when you’re not tethered to your drive. Note that iTunes goes to greater lengths than most to disallow this technique (in particular, it will actually insist that your “iTunes Music” directory is on a local drive, but you can set up symlinks within that directory for specific artists. I have two little shell scripts to let me migrate data back and forth as I desire. Here’s one:

…so from within my iTunes Music directory offline.sh "The Beatles" will migrate the entire Beatles directory to the external drive, and set up the correct symlinks so that I can still access it as needed. Of course, there’s an online.sh to reverse the process.

One thing of note is that most of the HFS+ savvy applications hate symlinks and do unexpected things when asked to store data in a symlinked directory. So if after migrating data offline you try to add anything to those directories (for example, by ripping another Beatles album, say Let It Be in iTunes), it will end up sticking that in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Let It Be rather than in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Beatles/Let It Be. It still works, it’s just unpleasant. This means that you should always be prepared to undo your symlinks before installing software updates, for example, lest you confuse the poor lost little Finder.

I hope this little trick helps you, and be sure to make backups of any unrecoverable data before trying it, lest a careless slip of the fingers (or a mistake on my part!) cause data loss.

Well, yes, you can print to tape. I do that too. Print to tape, keep the tape forever, yes, that’s a good idea and all but it seems so…low tech. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the danger?

Press to DVD, you say? Excellent idea — just write a DVD-R with the raw DV data, and — oh, wait. This file is bigger than we can fit on a single DVD. Well, that’s OK, we can use Stuffit or some other tool (live dangerously — use dd!) to split it into manageable chunks. Of course, if one of those DVDs suffers a media failure, you’re screwed. And writing multiple copies of multiple DVDs can be such a drag.

Here’s what I do, for when I’m feeling really paranoid:

Take your 5 gigabyte movie and split it into 100 or 200 megabyte chunks. Take the chunks and feed them into MacPAR deluxe or its Windows equivalent. Generate about 30 to 50 parity files; for each parity file you generate you’ll be able to tolerate a media error in one of your data files. At your leisure, write the data files and parity files to a few DVDs. Most of the media failures I’ve encountered on DVD-Rs tend to affect individual files rather than the whole disk, so I think it’s a reasonable strategy to just split the data and parity files over two discs. If and when you encounter media failures, you just use MacPAR to reconstruct the lost data from parity.

If you want to be super-paranoid, you can even sprinkle the parity files among any other DVD-Rs you’re writing at the time (I find that I always have some headroom when writing data DVDs).

Voilà! You have a redundant array of inexpensive DVD-Rs. You are now cyber. Congratulations!

It took me a month and a large project to be come face to face with the problems that you invite when you don’t log your clips. Now, I understand why the authors of Final Cut push us this way, and I’m a believer. Except for the most trivial of projects, always log your clips. Let’s have a brief discussion of what it means to log clips, what the process is for doing it, and most importantly, why you should log clips.

Capture Techniques

A clip is the basic unit of video (and, if applicable, audio) in Final Cut. Clips can be divided into subclips or built up into sequences. Final Cut offers three ways to capture clips: “capture now,” “capture clip,” and “batch capture.”

Capture now is the simplest of the three. Users migrating to FCP from iMovie or Final Cut Express 2 often want to use this mode, because it seems the most analogous to the capture workflow in those tools. Click the “capture now” button, hit “play” on your camcorder or VTR, and Final Cut will begin capturing the video until you hit the escape key, up to a maximum of 30 minutes of video. Capture clip involves logging a single clip, and batch capture involves logging a bunch of clips and then telling FCP “Go capture these clips now.” To log a clip, you tell FCP at a minimum the name of the tape or reel the clips are on and the starting and ending timecode of each clip. You can optionally provide scene or take names; if you don’t provide them, FCP will pick names for you, along the lines of “clip-1″, “clip-2″, etc.

Why Should I Log?

So why not just use “capture now” for everything? If I’m willing to live with the 30-minute-per-chunk limitation, isn’t it less work than doing all this logging stuff?

Well, no. If you use “capture now,” you are limiting your ability to use some of Final Cut’s most powerful features. The 30 minute limit is just the first subtle pressure FCP puts on you to avoid the use of capture now. There are other pressures, too: unlike iMovie and FCE 2, FCP won’t do the magic “clip separation” where it detects where you paused and unpaused the video camera and splits those clips into separate subclips for you. (Reader Bj¯rn Hansen correctly points out that you can use the “DV Start/Stop Detect” function in the “Mark” menu to do this splitting after the fact, and then make your subclips into independent master clips to approximate the FCE/iMovie experience. I personally have had issues with master/affiliate clips where FCP behaves unintuitively — for example, you delete a subclip or a ‘duplicated master,’ and a whole bunch of media that you didn’t expect to go offline disappears, so I avoid this technique).

When you use “capture now,” you end up with one big glob of video and audio data, and no metadata other than what you add after the fact (in the initial revision of this article, I claimed that this made it impossible to work in OfflineRT mode, but reader Tom Wolsky pointed out that I am mistaken). The lack of metadata is a problem in larger projects: I have an interview project which spans 5 DV tapes. All the interviews are with one subject. Frankly, I have no idea which segments of the interview are on which tape, other than through logging. Had I used “capture now” instead of logging the clips, when I wanted to reconnect media (either for offlineRT work or because I deleted media to conserve disk space), I would have to manually start looking at all the tapes to figure out which one I needed before recapturing. Sure, I could keep a page of copious notes attached to every tape, but avoiding that sort of drudge work is why I’m using a computer. If I log my clips, when I need to recapture, FCP prompts me to insert tape “interview-daytime-4″, I find my clearly labeled tape on the shelf, and I’m done. I think that’s worth something. “Capture now” is a workable solution if you always know exactly what scenes are on what tapes. I don’t; I prefer to let the database in Final Cut track that information for me.

Tom Wolsky still thinks I am being too hard on “capture now,” and he has written books about Final Cut Pro, so you should probably listen to him, and not me. Tom’s point is that even if you use “capture now,” you are still (morally) obligated to actually log information about reels, etc, and so really it’s no different than using “capture clip” or batch capture. I both agree and disagree with Tom — I agree that if you log carefully, the use of “capture now” is fine. My concern is that that path makes it too easy to say “Well, I’ll capture now and then log later” and then you skip the log later part, and now you’re in a world of hurt. I think this is especially true for people coming to FCP from the iMovie world, who are less likely to understand why one should log clips carefully. So my personal rule is to log them beforehand.

So this is one reason we log clips: Our tapes have timecode, the timecode never changes, so if we tell Final Cut what clips a project contains in terms of timecode and tape rather than in terms of “grab this clip”, we can recover. No matter what goes wrong, no matter how badly we screw a project up, at least if we have a list of logged clips and an original tape, given a backup of an edit list file that takes up just a few kilobytes, we can recover a lot of our work.

Another reason we log clips is it allows us to offline clips with impunity. If we are running low on disk space or memory, we can edit a project in OfflineRT mode at a lower resolution and increase the responsiveness of our machines. Or we can simply chose “make offline” and delete clips that we’re not actually using at the moment, knowing that when we want to work with them later we can just slap the tape in the camcorder, hit “reconnect media,” and go get a cup of coffee while FCP does the drudge work for us.

One final reason I want to suggest is that logging clips can actually help the creative process by giving you what amounts to a pre-edit winnowing. If you’re anything like me, you shoot too much material. Not being Orson Welles, I very often shoot from the hip. Sometimes I go into a project not having a plan, but just say to myself “well, I’ll shoot way too much and then edit it down later.” Logging your clips gives you a chance to look at your work in raw form and make the easy choices before devoting time and disk space to capturing it.

Typically, if I’m capturing from a 60 minute tape (assuming it’s on a project I haven’t organized carefully beforehand — there are of course exceptions), I’ll typically find only about 20 minutes of material worthy of actually capturing. Those 20 minutes get captured. I will also certainly winnow further while editing online, of course, but that first step gets a huge amount of material out of my way. That frees me up to look more closely at the material that was actually worth working on without getting distracted by footage that I knew was garbage to begin with.

How to Log Clips

Everyone has their own workflow for logging clips. I’ll share mine here. Generally, I’ll sit down with the camcorder or a monitor and a pad of paper and a pen. I generally don’t do this first phase at the computer, because otherwise I get tempted into making edits and moving too fast. Also, my tiny simian brain is easily distracted by shiny things, and the Final Cut Pro GUI is very shiny. By working with just the video and a piece of paper, I’m able to focus all my attention on the content. I’ll play the tape and start taking notes on what timecodes correspond to logical clips in my mind. It’s fine to be approximate here – rounding to the nearest second or two will be fine.

When I’m done watching the tape, I have a handwritten list of timecodes and names of clips. I then take those, choose “Log and capture” from the file menu, and start logging the clips. I’ll generally log even the clips I know I won’t capture, just so that I have the record preserved.. Some people might find the first ‘offline’ viewing to be intolerable; I find it helps keep me focused on the content and not the UI of my editing program. It’s entirely possible to do your first cut online and log clips directly into FCP as you see them. Some of the URLs in that follow this article give a good explanation of how to do this.

Last Words

Now you’ve logged your clips, captured what you want, and you’re ready to edit, right? Wrong! There’s one more thing you should do:

Pick up your carefully labeled tape, flip the write-protect tab to ‘read-only’, and put the tape away. Don’t use it again. Once you’ve logged clips from a tape never write to it again. All it takes it one slip of the finger to turn your carefully collected logging data into a worthless pile of junk. Sure, it means you have to buy more tapes. A tape costs $5. Your time is worth much more than the cost of a tape. Put the tape away.

And, lastly, don’t forget to back up your project files frequently.

I hope you’ve found this article useful. When I first started using Final Cut, I found lots of material explaining how to log my clips, but not really any in-depth explanation of why I would want to do so. If you’ve found this article to be useful, feel free to let me know. Likewise, if you see any errors or inadequacies within, I’d like to hear from you so I can correct them.

Additional Resources

• Logging and Capturing Video is a useful training course at Berkeley with step by step instructions for logging and capturing with final cut, using different methods.
• The LA Final Cut Pro User’s Group has another tutorial in a slightly more informal, chatty style (but strangely uses exactly the same images as the Berkeley course)
• Editing Offline in Final Cut Pro
• Tom Wolsky’s Final Cut books

The most important thing I learned is: in a video project, what you hear is more important than what you see.

That’s a pretty controversial statement, so let me explain a little bit. What I really mean to say is that producing good (or at least acceptable) audio for a video is harder than producing good (or at least acceptable) video. It’s harder for a few reasons: when we are shooting video with ‘basic’ equipment (a camera, some lights, a tripod) we have better previews available to us of video than we do of audio. Deciding whether the video is right is easier than deciding if the audio is right. We have better and more powerful editing techniques to cover up subtle video mistakes in postproduction than we do to cover up audio mistakes. Discontinuity in video has a different (and easier to compensate for) psychological effect on film and video viewers than discontinuity in audio.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about some of the ways you can improve the audio on your video production. Up front let me say that I’m not trying to tell you how to improve the quality of the audio during the shoot. I’m far too inexperienced to be able to advise even a five year old child on such matters, so if your goal is “get better audio into my editing software,” I will simply recommend that you pick up a copy of Jay Rose’s superb book Producing Great Sound for Digital Video, and follow that. This article, instead, is targeted at people who, like me, have already screwed up their project and have captured crappy audio. How do you know if you’ve captured crappy audio? Here are some rules of thumb: if you have thought more about lighting then about sound, your audio is inadequate. If you used an on-camera mic, your audio is inadequate. If you didn’t have someone monitoring the audio during the shoot while you concentrated on the visual aspects, your audio is probably inadequate.

Don’t use any audio from your camera

Getting decent audio quality is, as I observed, hard. It requires forethought. It requires some expense — a mic and perhaps a mixer or balanced adapter. It requires effort and care during the shoot. And it requires attention during postproduction. So one of the easiest ways to deal with all of this is: punt! Plan to not use any in-camera sound at all. Making a film of your kid’s soccer game? Find a piece of music you like and use that in the background. Making a short film for fun? Use silent film techniques and dialogue cards. Making a nature film? Record voice-overs later using better equipment than you have in the field. Obviously, you can’t take this route for every (or even most) projects, but it’s worth mentioning as a reasonable choice.

Listen Carefully

Video is easy to evaluate. Put an image up on the screen; your eyes will instantly evaluate it and you can say things like “That’s too dark,” “It’s out of focus,” “The frame is unbalanced.” Audio can be trickier to tease out. Often, the idiosyncracities of an audio mix are only apparent when listening at a certain volume, or in a room with certain acoustical properties. With my present project, I knew I had problems with the audio mix, but I thought I had brought them mostly under control. When I previewed the rough cut for my grandmother, who has hearing problems, we turned the volume up substantially. All of the blips and transition problems that were barely — or not — perceptible when listening at a normal volume became monstrously apparent and distracting.

The lesson here is: I was editing on a computer. But the video was watched in an entertainment room. No one watches TV from 10 feet away with the volume as low as they do when working on a computer one foot away. Either turn those speakers waaaaaay up or, better yet, get a set of good headphones and always use them while editing.

Room Tone

For each scene that you edit, find a gap where no one is talking and cut it into its own short clip. This is the “room tone” for that scene. When you’re done with your edit, look along your timeline and find any places where there are audio gaps (on my project, for example, I used title cards to introduce certain segments; those title cards didn’t have any audio with them. The first time I watched the video at full volume the first cut to the title card, with its hard, sharp, cut to no audio made me wince). Insert room tone — hopefully from the scene you are in — into those gaps. You can use the crossfade audio transition effect to smooth the transition between your room tone and the ‘real’ soundtrack, but if you play your cards right you shouldn’t even have to do that. If you feel that room tone is inappropriate for your project, consider using an audio fade-in/fade-out filter to lessen the harshness of jumps to and from black.

The ear is superb at detecting discontinuities. If you have a jump from room tone to no sound at all your viewers will hear it and be discomfitted by it, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it. Know room tone. Love room tone. Use room tone.

The rule of thumb here is “even room tone that sounds bad is probably better than no room tone at all.” Another rule of thumb is: when you’re previewing your video, pay as much attention to the quality of transitions between scenes as you do to the content and quality of the scenes themselves.

Postprocessing

So far I’ve found Final Cut Pro’s audio filters to be less than thrilling. They don’t seem to work very well to me, and the range of control they give you is very limited. However, the filters included with Apple’s bundled Soundtrack program are superb, and Soundtrack integrates very smoothly with Final Cut. For almost any dialogue-driven project where you haven’t carefully mixed at capture time you can’t go far wrong in putting a compressor filter into the loop. If you have lots of fricatives and plosives in the mix you can use a limiter to smooth them out. If there’s a constant background noise and you are very very lucky, you might be able to use the band pass filter to reduce its impact. Play around with the filters in Soundtrack. Explore.

Listen Without Watching

When you think you’re approaching the sort of sound mix you want for your project, hook your computer up to good speakers or headphones, get a notebook and a pen, play your project, and turn off the monitor. Just listen. Listen carefully. I guarantee you you’ll find at least three problems that you didn’t notice when you previewed your project while watching. Make notes on the problems when you find them, and go back to the drawing board to see how you can correct them.

I hope you’ve found this little discussion of what I learned by screwing up my project helpful. If you have tips of your own, feel free to use the comments section below to share them.