Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 964)

Chapter 10 Tips for Better Audio 177
I
Use keyframes to eliminate microphone pops in a voiceover recording.
Although you can use the Vocal DePopper filter in extreme problem cases, if you just
have one or two pops in your audio resulting from words with the letter P, you can get
rid of them by opening the clip in the Viewer, zooming in on the P sound, and setting
four keyframes to lower the audio level and soften the sound.
Use room tone to fill in audio gaps in a scene.
When you edit dialogue, any part of a scene that doesn’t have dialogue or clean source
audio should be replaced with room tone from that scene, as described in Volume II,
Chapter 17, “Audio Editing Basics.” This includes the beginning and the end of a scene,
even if nobody’s talking. If room tone only happens while people are speaking, it will
sound odd. The entire scene should have the same background noise.
If someone mumbles a single word, salvage the rest of the take.
If someone messes up part or all of a word, either by mumbling or swallowing part of it,
you can sometimes take part or all of another instance of that word, or of another word
that has the sound you need, and use it to replace part or all of the misspoken word.
For example, suppose an actor was supposed to say, “Get those cats out of that tree,”
and instead said, “Get dose cats out of that tree,” accidentally swallowing the “th” sound
in the word “those.” If you need to use that take, you could copy the “th” sound from
the word “that” and paste it over the botched beginning of the word “dose.” The
change is so small that nobody will notice the difference. The result in your sequence
would look something like this:
When you do this kind of edit, watch out for the beginnings and endings of words.
Sometimes people run words together if they speak quickly. If you’re replacing a word
in clip 1 with the same word from clip 2, make sure the sound that comes before the
new word in clip 2 is the same as the sound that comes before the word it’s replacing
in clip 1.