Mixing Multicam Audio in Apple Final Cut Pro X
In this tutorial, Cord3Films' Glen Elliott demonstrates how to mix audio from multiple off-camera sources in a multicam edit in Apple Final Cut Pro X.
Switching Between the Timeline and the Angle Editor
One last thing to keep in mind--and this is very important: There is no correlation to timeline cursor location once you step into the Angle Editor. What that means is if you move your cursor to an exact point, and then move into the Angle Editor, the cursor you see in the Angle Editor is not guaranteed to be the exact same frame.
For that reason, you have to be really careful about when you go in here and copy your audio and paste it back to make sure it’s actually pasting in sync. It was easy on the previous example because our audio started first, so we just copied our audio, went to the beginning of the timeline, and pasted it, so it was automatically starting at the first frame because the audio started at the first frame.
In this example, I doctored it a little bit to make things simpler, but our audio is not first. So if we went in and copied our audio (Command+C), went back out, and went back to the beginning of the timeline, we’ll see that the audio actually started a little later. So if we went back to beginning, and hit Command+V, it’s going to paste and butt it up against the beginning and this is not going to be in sync.
To get around this, once you go into your Angle Editor, you highlight your audio first like you need to, then zoom in close and see what is the very first frame. And it looks like the beginning of Camera 1 is the first frame in the timeline (Figure 15, below).
Figure 15. First frame in the timeline
So what we’re going to do is hold down the Command key and make this part of our selection (Figure 16, below). That’s going to be our reference as the beginning of the timeline.
Figure 16. Selecting the Camera 1 video track along with our three audio tracks
Once we have that selected, we’ll hit Command+C to copy it. We’re going to back out of the Angle Editor and go to the beginning of the timeline. We’re using that first camera angle that starts in the beginning as our reference. If we hit Command V, we’ll see that that video angle’s starting at the very first frame where we need it to be (Figure 17, below).
Figure 17. All tracks where they should be
Now, obviously we don’t need this video to do our audio mix. We just brought it in there as a sync point or reference to paste the audio in the correct spot. So we’re going to highlight that and delete it and then follow the rest of the directions to get these back in place holding by down Shift, and dragging below, being careful not to pull the tracks out of sync when we’re dragging them.
So that’s about it. I hope this tutorial will help you work with audio in a way that’s a lot easier to mix when you’re using several sources with multiclips.
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