Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 984)

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 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.
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 “Exporting Sequences for
DVD.”
Organizing Your Audio Clips for Multitrack Export
As you edit audio into your sequences, it’s important to keep your tracks organized. Not
only does this make it easier for you to keep your tracks straight when you edit new clips
in, it makes your job much easier when it’s time to mix your tracks and export them.
The Audio Mixer is easiest to use when you organize the audio clips in your edited
sequences based on their type. For example, put all sync-sound dialogue clips into one
group of tracks, background ambiences in another group of tracks, sound effects in
another group of tracks, and music in a different group of tracks.
984 Chapter 60 Exporting Audio for Mixing in Other Applications