Argghh!! Audio really does need an upgrade!

I'm getting really tired of doing fast turn around jobs in FCPX where there are more audio feeds than cameras (in these cases 3 camera angles and 8 audio feeds from live performances).

There's no time to take these in to alternative audio apps and sweeten offline, it needs to be done in-line with the video editing. Maybe 2-3 hours tops from beginning ingest to turn around a 30 minute piece and produce a DVD master for immediate on-site duplication.

Mixing using the visual wave forms and a single stereo output meter is a major PITA! And I really don't want to then have to make a compound clip to apply an overall audio limiter. C'mon Apple, please please please fix this audio nightmare in FCPX!

Sorry, rant over, but after 6 of these on the trot I'm about to explode!

Multicam? Are you detaching the audio?

I'm disabling the audio on all but one of the cuts then expanding the audio and stretching it to cover the start to end. I've tried detaching audio in the past too. Both work the same way in the end, but at least this way it guarantees to stay in sync.

The problem is these are stage plays with sound coming from different places on stage at different times, sometimes multiple mics when there's a group of people talking.

Due to the distance between mics, having two mics running at the same time when there's a single speaker or musical piece causes nasty echoes, so I'm having to lift and drop audio from different mics constantly.

When the entire cast is singing I have to balance between all of them, most of them or just some of them depending on where it's happening.

When the audience claps it can overload some and not others and finding a good balance, including the peaks using just the visual waveforms rather than individual track meters is a pain.

Adding a compressor / limiter can (does) help, but it's not an overall solution where sources (tracks) are being combined and I need a combined compressor / limiter to make sure they don't over load in combination.

This stuff used to be trivial in Premiere Pro because of the way it handled the audio mixing, a meter per channel plus busses and a master bus.

I was hoping Apple could have made use of roles to give us better audio mixing by now

I was hoping Apple could have made use of roles to give us better audio mixing by now

Or better yet, something totally seamless like "Edit in Logic" and it opens the audio in Logic and you could work work on it and it's immediately reflected in FCPX without exporting XMLs needed!

Some translation is required going from FCPX to LPX. The workflow is not bad, as long as your project isn't extra long.

BenB wrote: Some translation is required going from FCPX to LPX. The workflow is not bad, as long as your project isn't extra long.

If they put in some effort I'm sure they could do it almost seamless!

I agree with the OP, really hope Apple will vastly upgrade audio inside FCPX.
I have hope that this, as well as better round tripping with LPX will happen with next major updates. Apple has added lots of new features in the underlying frameworks/AVFoundations for El Capitan that should make this possible. So now is the time to (re)request features for FCPX/LPX in the apps feedback.

Stage work for plays adds extra audio issues, feel for you bro :ohmy: With concerts, you get overall general sounds that the "echoes" or "bleed" just adds fullness, but actors speaking highlights the issue.
Oh well, that's what they pay us the Big Bucks for, right :silly:

Hope this helps, Greg

If you're doing a lot of live events, it might be in your best interest to figure out a way to record everything live into a ProTools rig or something like that where you can mix everything and then send a final stereo master to sync with the multicam clips.

At my old job we did a lot of live concerts and this is the process that we used every time, it just makes everything so much easier.

So basically instead of trying to get the audio out of the cameras and then into a program like Logic or ProTools, start with the audio in ProTools or Logic, mix it there and then send a stereo master to FCPX.