Long shot and possibly silly question . . .

Is there or has there been (maybe for FCP 7 but not yet X) a plugin that would identify different voices along the lines of a simplified version of Melodyne Editor for separating musical parts?

I have hours of DV of a seminar. There are two main voices - the Japanese lecturer, and the English speaking translator + questions coming from the audience. This is a restoration project so I don't have access to the original audio. Infuriatingly both the original live mix and the audio post production was so sloppy there are huge differences in levels between the speakers.

My first run through to clean up the audio has focused on the major stuff like feedback squeals from the PA and crashes when mic's were dropped, but now I'm trying to simply make it easier to listen to. Much can be done with manually selecting ranges and altering levels and then applying judicious amounts of compression. But it would be very sweet to automate some of the very time consuming process given that there's approx 50 hours of this to correct/restore.

Failing "magic" plugins any tips on workflow would be welcome. For eg having grappled with FCPX to get a few hours pretty cleaned up I'm seriously considering taking the whole project into Logic - it IS primarily an audio restoration project after all.

cheers

I feel your pain. It's not a pleasant task having to fix audio that has been poorly recorded or mixed. Alas there are no magical plugins for this kind of work, but if the differences in audio quality and levels between the three elements you mention are relatively consistent you might consider cutting up your timeline using the Razor Blade (CMD+B ) so you get separate clips for the lecturer (A), the translator (B ) and the public (C).

Then all you have to do is modify the audio of the first A, B and C clips to make them match, copy the first A clip and use Paste Effects (CTRL+OPT+V) to paste the changes to all the other A clips at once, then do the same for the B and C clips. This may save you some time.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hey Ronny, thanks for the reply and sorry for the delay in saying so!
What youre saying is very much in line with what I was thinking when I mentioned doing this in Logic where I can get the different voices onto separate tracks and apply EQ, levels & effects as needed, individually and to the main output channel too.
While I know it can be done in FCPX without a familiar mixer set up its less intuitive for me as someone who's primarily an audio guy.
cheers

I agree. FCPX is already excellent for single track audio enhancements but a real mixer would be nice. Or we can hope that the new Logic will perfectly integrate with FCPX so we can roundtrip for enhanced multitrack mixing.

With Automatic Duck being FCP X compatible and free now, you can in fact xml to Logic.

I'm doing a lot of audio engineering inside FCP X, and finding it to be much more powerful, easier and faster than you'd think. A mixer wouldn't do any good when trackless audio, anyway. And I'm a sound guy. I was mostly recording music and doing audio work before I got into video full time.

With the creative use of Compound clips and Secondary Storylines, you can do a LOT of really fast, easy mixing in FCP X.

In fact, I have a course in Audio Engineering inside FCP X coming out in a month or two for macProVideo. It's in production right now.

Ben, please keep us informed about the release date of this course. I am very interested.

Will do, in the mean time, I'm actually using FCP X to record and edit all the VO work for the three courses (Media Management to be released any time now, Crafting Professional Templates for FCP X) I'm doing for macProVideo, as well as all my singing and other voice work now. In the mean time, here's my blog post about doing VO work in FCP X.

www.fcproxuniversity.com/FCPro_X_Univers...rding_tricks%29.html

Many thanks Ben - I'll certainly be buying your Audio tutorials when they come out! Will also be studying up on being more creative with compound clips and secondary story lines!

cheers

Re Automatic Duck ProExport 5.1 - I haven't had chance to play with this yet - any tips for settings to Logic (which isn't officially supported?) as opposed to ProTools which I don't own?

I'm not ignoring Ben's comments on audio editing within FCPX - but I own some very tasty plugins that will work within Logic and not within FCPX + have access to control surfaces + familiarity - all add up to potentially saving quite a lot of time. at least 'til Ben's tutorials show me the way! I may well be wrong, but I'd like to give this workflow a trial.

Then besides re-importing the bounced audio files (48kHz 16bit) and using FCPX's sync - any tips on making the round trip as smooth as possible?

many thanks

It says "ProTools" but there's nothing special or proprietary about ProTools OMF exchanges, they're standard OMF. I have friends who are using it successfully to go from FCP X to STP and Logic. I'll be testing it out more this weekend.

I was going to start a thread but perhaps I'll just ask here....

I saw that you can go out from X to OMF/ProTools and watched the tutorial vids. Is that a one-way process? More specifically, once you've edited your sounds and done all your ProTools dirty-work, what's next? Import it back into FCPX? Does it just automatically update the audio files in FCPX? How's that all go down?

It's one way. Which is what I always did anyway. If I do all my mixing and sweetening and such in Logic, why do I need all that mess back in FCP? I just export an AIFF and lay down my finished audio track. But yes, at this point, it's one way. We will see legacy XML support eventually, just not sure when and from who.