Apple Final Cut Express HD - Manual (Page 660)

660 Part VIII Audio Mixing
Organizing Your Tracks
As you edit audio into your sequences, it’s important to keep your tracks organized. Not
only will this make it easier for you to keep your tracks straight when you edit new clips
in, it will make your job much easier when it’s time to mix your tracks together. 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.
You might put one actor’s voice on track A1, and another actor’s voice on track A2.
Narration recorded with the Voice Over tool might go on track A3. Background
ambience clips such as wind and rain might go on tracks A4 and A5. Sound effects
could go on tracks A6, A7, and A8. Finally, four tracks for overlapping stereo music clips
would be dedicated to tracks A9, A10, A11, and A12.
If you’re working on a project that may be distributed to an international audience, you
should also keep your final mix separated into D, M, and E
stems (dialogue, music, and
effects). This will allow foreign distributors to dub over the voices of your actors
without losing the music, ambience, and effects that you’ve edited into your program.
Categories of audio tracks
Dialogue This includes most of the audio that was captured with your video.
Whether or not you place each character’s lines on a separate
dialogue track is between you and your audio editor.
Voiceover Narration should be put on a separate track from dialogue, as it will
probably have different EQ settings.
Music Stereo music from any source could use up to four tracks, if you’re
doing complicated music edits or cross fades.
Ambience Ambient tracks include background tones, atmospheric sound
effects, and possibly room tone.
Sound effects Effects include material from effects libraries as well as effects clips
you record yourself. If you’ve edited in Foley effects, they should
occupy a separate set of audio tracks.