Removing Sound in Final Cut Pro X

Welcome to Final Cut Pro X in under 5 minutes. My name is Steve Martin from Rippletraining.com. As video editors we often need to deal with audio that’s less than ideal. In this lesson, I’m going to show you how to surgically remove unwanted audio from your dialogue track. Here’s a short film I shot last summer called “Second Impressions”. I have two characters discussing some extreme sports. And in this particular shot, with the lead character, there is a noise that happens about here. Let me play it back. [Lead character speaking, “hmmm, do I get a shark cage?”]. Now you could take care of the noise using a traditional key frame method, holding down the R Key and drag across the noise and drag the volume down and there you have it. I have key frames, I’ve knocked it out. And it works but it’s not the most flexible method of removing noise as you will see in a moment. Press undo. A better way to edit out the unwanted sound is to open audio components, where you can do surgical audio removal plus there are some additional benefits. Holding down to option key, double click right on the wave form. You’ll know you are in audio component mode when you move your pointer into the wave form and you’ll see a range tool icon. This is opposed to moving into another clip when you don’t see the range tool. So here’s where the noise happens, so I’ll just play it. So I’m just going to drag out the range. Now to disable that noise, I’m going to press the v key. Just like that, the sound is knocked out. But as you’ll hear, this presents a problem. [clip plays] With the audio completely removed, we’ve also removed the background ambience and it sounds unnatural. So I’m going to fix this by grabbing a piece of ambience from this portion of the clip by dragging out a range. Now the key is, you want to drag out a little bit more than the initial selection that you muted. Now I will copy that section by pressing command C. Next, move your play head right before the muted audio and in the edit menu, you will choose paste as connected clip. Option v. Just like that, the background ambience you copied is pasted at the playhead location and it covers that muted section. Let’s play back [clip plays back]. That sounds pretty good, but we can make some further adjustments. For example, let’s say in your initial selection, you had a little piece of the noise still remaining over here outside the muted section. If you place your pointer on the edge of the muted section, you’ll notice a trim icon. You simply drag and you can extend or contract the area that was initially selected for muting. What’s also cool, it that if you look at the top there are fade handles on either side of the muted section. This allows you to smoothly transition out of the speaking part to the ambient section without a noticeable click or pop in the audio. I also recommend you drag out fade handles for the connected audio. All you need is just a few frames to create that smoothing. Now let’s playback. [clip plays to show the sound correction] Perhaps I was a little bit heavy handed on this one here, so let’s back this off and move this a little bit this way and play it back again [clip plays to show further tweeking]. Perfect! Click the subscribe button below if you have an idea, comment or suggestions, leave those below as well. Go to rippletraining.com for fast professional training on Final Cut Pro X, Motion and DaVinci Resolve from industry professionals.