Results tagged “audio” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

When you are not having sound coming out of your Final Cut system it can be a number of things. Lack of audio can too often be something that makes you say "Duh". Like  Is the volume muted? Or are there a pair of headphones plugged into the system?  I t could also be that there is no audio associated to a clip. 

Here are two troubleshooting techniques:

1. Do you see the audio meters moving when the clip plays?

2. Load a clip into the Viewer window.  Click on the audio tab at the top of the Viewer window.   Do you see an audio waveform?

 If you answered "no" to either of the last two questions, you're not hearing any audio, because there isn't any.

If you're looking to improve your video and audio compression workflows Sorenson Squeeze is a tool that you need to have in your arsenal.  It's amazing for improving your encoding workflows.  Sorenson Media's Squeeze has been an extremely important tool in the compression space for quite some time and it's worth the investment.  It'll save you plenty of time in the long run.

You can find more compression settings articles in our Supercharging Compressor series index.

If you read our Final Cut to DVD tutorial, you may be wanting to dig a little deeper into the belly of Compressor.  I'll be writing at some length about the video settings in the coming weeks, but for an introduction, let's tweak a setting that's pretty noncontroversial.

Background (skip to Step-By-Step)
Out of the box, Compressor's DVD presets apply fairly aggressive dynamic range compression (see also) to your audio.  If we were only talking audio, we'd call this transformation simply a compressor -- but to avoid confusion, I'll call it a DRC for this article. 

In a nutshell, the DRC makes the loud parts of your audio quieter and the quiet parts louder, for a more consistent level of sound on your viewers' TV sets.  To be fair, DRCs are popular in broadcast media, they're often appropriate for audio that's being delivered specifically to TV sets, and Compressor uses a really solid algorithm from Dolby itself.  On the other hand, audiophiles loathe DRCs, and Compressor's default DRC algorithm is designed for movie theaters rather than DVD players.  If you haven't spent time mastering your audio tracks, you might be pleasantly surprised by the DRC's effects when you prepare your DVD -- but then again, you might not.

Personally, I hate surprises -- and when Compressor substantially modifies my audio without my say-so, I get a little annoyed.  So whether you want to turn the DRC off or just play with its preset values, read on for the (really quick!) step-by-step.

As a quick aside from my audio sermons, I'd like to take a quick look at something a bit more practical.  In Soundtrack Pro, we're all used to seeing waveforms when we open up clips.  But there's another perspective on the sound that, while it's a little more scary at first, can be almost as useful once you figure it out.  You can separate some sounds from others, spot areas with funny spikes that don't show up in the waveform, and even copy and paste specific sounds from within a flat clip.  With practice, you can even begin to recognize the "fingerprints" of individual words.  They call this view ... Spectrum View.

During Editing

You've laid down your sequence, you've got your clips sounding consistent relative to each other - now you should check for peaks.  In Final Cut, this is as simple as picking Mark Menu -> Audio Peaks -> Mark.  Markers will appear above the sequence anywhere there's a peak.  Now, you could just pot down the gain on those clips, but if you do that you'll lose the consistency between your clips' audio levels.  So instead, you can hack out the individual peaks themselves.

You can do it by hand, or you can do it with a single step in Soundtrack Pro.  Read on ...

During Shooting

The first step comes while you're producing your footage in the first place: if you happen to be a one-man show and you're doing your own taping, be absolutely sure to check your audio levels on your camera as you're shooting.  Most cameras can be set up to show some kind of audio meters on their display; as a last resort, though, almost all will let your plug in headphones and listen for gross distortion.

Ever seen your audio meters go into the red?  Marked those unsightly peaks in your audio?  Heard the raging distortion that happens when somebody shouts into a mic?

Oftentimes, despite your best efforts in production, you'll find yourself editing together clips shot with audio that sounds different.  Most importantly for our purposes today, some clips' audio might be louder or quieter than other clips'.  One way to bring every clip into the same volume range is called normalization - and, while audiophiles have good reason to turn up their noses, it's probably the best way we have to fix this kind of editing problem.

What does normalization do?  Read on now.  How do you actually do it?  Tune in again tomorrow for the cheat sheet ...

Just as a computer thinks of video as a set of images, it thinks as audio as a whole lot of "snapshots" of this sound wave - tens of thousands of snapshots every second.  Each of those tiny little snapshots reflects the energy of the sound wave at that point.  Now, the human ear is capable of hearing frequencies that repeat up to about 20,000 times per second (20,000 Hertz).  Because of some fancy math, we have a rule of thumb: if the computer taps in to the sound wave twice as many times as the highest frequency we want to represent, it will describe the sound fully for us.  That's where the most common full-quality sample rates - 44,100Hz and 48,000Hz - come from.

I'm going to shift gears into discussing ways we can enhance the audio on our videos.  In order to do this, we should take a whirlwind tour of how computers think about audio.

To avoid any issues with your audio, you will want to convert your audio files to AIFF. An easy way is to export using the Quicktime Conversion.  I had always done this in iTunes, but just discovered an easier way.

I locate the audio file I need in the finder, and drag it into the Viewer. If you don't know where it is, use the Spotlight to locate it. Once your audio file is in the Viewer, you will Export Using Quicktime Conversion. This is a good function to map to a key, because we are often exporting thru the Quicktime Conversion. When the Quicktime Conversion window pops up you will want to choose the location you want the converted to go to, and change the Format from Quicktime to AIFF.

When iTunes did the conversion it would put the converted file into the same folder the source was from. Using this method we can skip the step of moving the file from where it was saved to our Project Folder.