Using Peak Detection To Modify Audio Hot Spots in FCP

When you play back a Final Cut Pro sequence, you can tell which audio spots are hot by simply looking at the audio meter clipping into the red area, but you cannot pinpoint the specific problem areas within your audio clip so that you can address them.

You can detect specific hot spots in your audio by marking audio peaks in Final Cut.

Marking Audio Peaks

1 Make sure that you have UNselected all audio and video in the timeline.

2 Go to Mark > Audio > Peaks > Mark. Final Cut Pro will then place peak markers in the Timeline Ruler above the sequence hot spots. If a section of your audio has a hot point that lasts longer than a spike, a peak marker with a duration will appear over that area in the Timeline Ruler.

Now that you have detected audio peaks now its time to fix them.

Lowering Audio Hot Points

There are multiple ways but here are two:

1 Select the area of the audio clip that was marked as hot underneath the peak markers. You can do this buy creating through edits with the razor blade tool to designate the areas right underneath the peak markers, then going back to the selection tool to make your selections (Shift Click to make multiple selections).

2 After you have made your selections, go to Modify > Levels > and adjust the gain. If you make the changes Relative, if you have already keyframed the audio in this area the keyframes will be maintained. By making your changes absolute, you will blast away any keyframes that where previously set and all audio will be adjusted to the assigned dB level.

Another way to adjust the audio in these problem spots would be to Toggle On Cip Overlays at the bottom right of the timeline > control click on the pink overlays on your audio to create keyframe points that you can drag up or down to adjust levels.