Apple Final Cut Express HD - Manual (Page 446)

446 Part VI Rough Editing
Examples of Ways to Easily Edit Audio
As you work with audio, you may find it helpful to read through these two examples of
ways you can fix audio issues using Final Cut Express HD.
Example: Replacing Unwanted Audio With Room Tone
As you edit dialogue, you’ll often need to cut out pieces of audio that you don’t want in
the sequence. For example, the director may have given directions in between an
actor’s lines, or the sound recordist might have bumped into something while shooting
on location for a documentary. As long as there’s no dialogue happening at the same
time, it’s pretty easy to cut out unwanted sounds. If you simply delete the sound,
however, you’ll be left with a gap in your audio that sounds artificial. Since there’s
always a low level of background noise, known as room tone, in any recording, a
moment of complete silence is jarring.
In order to edit out unwanted sections of audio without creating obvious gaps, it’s
common practice to record a certain amount of room tone during a shoot. The
recordist simply has everyone stand quietly for thirty seconds or so, and records the
ambient sound of the room. If you’ve recorded some room tone during your shoot, you
can capture it so that, as you edit, you have a long piece of “silence” that you can edit in
whenever you need to cover a gap in the location audio.
If, for some reason, room tone was not captured for a particular scene, but you have a
gap you need to fill, you can try to copy a section from another clip in the same scene
that has a pause in the dialogue, and paste it to fill the gap. If you have no pauses that
are long enough to cover your gap, you can try to copy and paste a short pause
multiple times. But there’s a chance that it will end up sounding like a loop, which will
be too noticeable. In this case, you can use the following method to obtain a long
section of room tone from a short copied pause in the dialogue.