Ways You Can Finish Your Audio
How do you plan to finish mixing your audio? This is an extremely important question,
because it affects what you’ll do to the audio in your edited sequence. Essentially, you
have two choices:
 Complete your final mix using Final Cut Pro.
 Export your audio for sweetening at an audio post-production facility.
Although Final Cut Pro is a capable audio editing environment, having your audio done
at a specialized post-production facility means you’ll have a professional audio editor
and mixer working on your soundtrack.
Another reason to use a post-production facility is to have your audio worked on in a
room where acoustics have been specially designed for mixing. Additionally, excellent
monitoring speakers and high-quality audio equipment will allow your editor to hear
everything that’s in the audio, so you can be confident that the frequencies and levels
being adjusted in your audio are accurate.
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Part I
Audio Mixing
If you decide to use an outside facility, make sure that you leave the audio in your edited
sequence alone, other than editing the audio clips you want for continuity and catching
any obvious editorial fixes, such as mispronounced words. Don’t add any filters and don’t
overedit your audio (that’s the audio editor’s job). You’ll export your edited audio tracks so
that the editors at the audio facility can import the audio into their system for further
work. Any filtering, mixing, and fine editing can be done by them.
Most editors focus on the picture and dialogue tracks of their edits and lay in scratch
tracks of music, sound effects, and Foley effects for reference. They then export audio
clip information from the Timeline along with the corresponding media files. This
allows a mixing engineer, music editor, and sound designer to “sweeten” the
movie soundtrack.
There are several ways to deliver your sequence’s audio tracks for audio post-production
work. You can export:
 Each sequence track as an individual audio file
 Each channel output of your sequence as an individual Audio Interchange File
Format (AIFF) file
 A multichannel audio QuickTime file
 A self-contained Open Media Format (OMF) composition (sequence) and embedded
audio media
 An Edit Decision List (EDL) and original audio source tapes
 An AC-3 audio file for DVD
Note: For information on how to export audio for DVD, see Volume IV, Chapter 19,
“Exporting Sequences for DVD.”