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.
The Challenge of Audio Mixing
Once you start editing, you can toggle to video only and get to a point where we want to start, and start choosing your shots. As you make those cuts, you’re just switching your video angle. You’re set for video only and all you’re doing is cutting between your video angles, leaving all of your audio untouched.
But every time you make a camera switch, it almost makes like a blade all the way through down to the bottom of your audio stack (Figure 11, below).
Figure 11. Camera switches make razor cuts all the way down your video and audio track stack.
Unfortunately, it disrupts your audio. Let’s say you wanted to gradually reduce or increase the audio in your mix in this area of the timeline, but now there’s a cut there, and it’s going to really make it really tough to do your audio mix. You really need long, full, uninterrupted tracks to do clean mixing. Editing the way you would normally edit a multiclip without mixing from multiple tracks, unfortunately, gets in the way of being able to do some complex mixing.
My Audio-Mixing Workaround
So I’m going to show you my method, my way of doing it. It’s a bit of a workaround, but it works wonderfully.
Let’s begin by going back to our basic multiclip with the single channel selected in the Channel Configuration panel like it was before. The first step is to right-click on the multiclip, and choose Open in Angle Editor once again. In this example, we’re going to do our mix with just the three sources of off-camera audio. So we’ll click and drag a marquee and select all three of them in the timeline and press Command+C to copy them.
Next, press the back arrow key to back into the timeline. Now we’re going to be careful to move our cursor to the very beginning of the timeline because that’s where our audio started. You can see in Figure 12 (below) that first audio channel to begin is the Officiant audio.
Figure 12. In this track, the Officiant audio starts first.
Just to ensure that it pastes in the same location, move to the very beginning of the timeline, press Command+V, and Final Cut Pro will paste the audio where we want it (Figure 13, below). So now what we’ve done is we’ve gone into the angle editor, copied our audio, and then gone back out and pasted it on our normal timeline in connected storylines. So now we have uninterrupted access to our audio sources. And now, when we make cuts in the video, it will not blade through this or disrupt our audio.
Figure 13. All three audio channels pasted into connected storylines.
I don’t particularly like having the audio pasted (by default) into connected storylines, but we can just pull the tracks out of the storylines when you need to. But for now, if you’re like me, and are accustomed to working with audio tracks on the bottom, hold down the Command key and click the gray shelf on each of the tracks to make sure they’re all selected. Then hold down the Shift key and drag them down to the bottom. By holding down the Shift key, you can lock the tracks in place, so you can’t accidentally nudge them left or right. The "+00:01.09" you can see in Figure 14 (below) means it did move a frame or so. If this happens to you, hit Undo, then hold down the Shift key and move it again, being very careful not to move it left or right. Make sure when you’re done dragging the tracks that it says 00:00 to know that you did not accidentally nudge it out of sync.
Figure 14. Audio slightly out-of-sync after dragging
Once you’ve got the audio tracks below the video and still in sync, they’re in a connected storyline, which is fine. You can edit that way or you can highlight them all, and press Command+Option+Up Arrow to pull them out of those storylines, and you just have to delete those empty storylines that are left behind.
But in this project I’m going to go leave them there and begin the edit. Since we’re only concerned with the off-camera audio that we captured on this shoot, we can actually just lower the audio from our on-camera mics and just start cutting video only and do our audio mix afterwards. Or we can just use an audio source from one of the cameras for some ambient audio as well.
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