Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 685)

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.
To create a section of room tone from a short pause
1 Find the longest pause you can in the dialogue clip with the gap you need to fill, then
copy the section that contains the pause. If you’re in the Timeline, you can use the Range
Selection tool.
The long pause in your
clip is selected.
685 Chapter 43 Audio Editing Basics