Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 966)

Chapter 10 Tips for Better Audio 179
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Be careful when combining dialogue from different takes.
People use different intonations as they speak a sentence, and it’s important to listen
for this. Sometimes, you’ll be unable to combine two sentences because they won’t
sound right together.
For example, suppose you have two clips of someone talking. In one clip the actor says,
“I’m going to throw that suitcase out the window!” In a second clip, he says “Should I
put the box in the closet?” You want to cut from the actor to a shot of the closet when
he says “that suitcase” so you can combine the line “I’m going to throw that suitcase”
with “in the closet.” Unfortunately, the second sentence is a question, so the two pieces
of dialogue don’t really sound right together. Since the difference is jarring, you’ll have
to try something else.
Edit in sound to handle a loud background noise at an edit point.
If you’re cutting from one clip to another, but there’s a loud sound right at the edit
point, such as a car or a plane passing, you can edit in sound to mask the cut. You
won’t be able to eliminate the noise, but if you take another car or plane sound effect
that sounds similar to the noise at your edit point, you can edit in just enough of the
sound effect in an adjacent audio track to complete the noise of the car or plane
passing that was cut off by your edit. You’ll need to play with the levels, mixing up the
sound effect prior to the edit point and mixing it down afterward, but you’ll be able to
mask it so that the cut sounds completely natural.
Swap onscreen sound effects with new ones using a replace edit.
If you want to replace the sound of a door slamming in your source audio track with a
more dramatic door-slam sound effect, you can easily and quickly line up the new
sound effect waveform with the old one by doing a replace edit, so that the new sound
is perfectly in sync.
Tips for Cutting Music
Use the natural beginnings and endings of music clips for your edits.
Instead of fading a piece of music in and out of a sequence at random points, try
matching specific parts of the music with parts of the video clips in the sequence for a
dramatic impact. Then, at the points where you need to start and end this music in
your sequence, edit in the beginning and the ending from that track, lining them up to
match the rhythm and melody of the part of the track that you’re using.
Using a music track’s natural beginning and end sounds much better than just cutting
into the middle of it, and you can usually create a series of edits using different pieces
of the same musical track to make it work.