The concepts are the same for a female voice, but the settings change slightly: High frequencies make it more understandable, especially for older listeners. Low frequencies make a voice sexier and more attractive. Add 4-6 dB around 2,800 Hz to improve the clarity of the voice.Add 3-5 dB around 200 Hz to warm the voice,.Here are my starting settings for a male voice: This is fine because each voice spans a wide range of frequencies. NOTE: Unlike video, where you can edit down to the pixel, in audio we are always working with ranges of frequencies. Higher Q’s become “notch” filters, targeting a restricted range of sound. To modify the range by making it broader or narrower, change the Q setting (the bottom number). To change the range of frequencies, drag a dot sideways. To boost a range of frequencies, drag a dot and drag up (to boost those frequencies) or down (to reduce them). NOTE: In fact, for simple mixes, we only need to adjust two settings: 2, as you’ll see shortly. This means that, when we are adjusting voices, we only need to concentrate on the middle three: 250, 7. The top two are above normal human speech. The first three ranges are below normal human speech. The Channel EQ filter divides this into eight ranges, each centered on a specific frequency: The distance from 20 to 200 Hz is roughly the same as 200 to 2,000 Hz and, again, from 2,000 to 20,000 Hz. If you look closely, you’ll see that human hearing is actually logarithmic. Bass is always on the left, treble on the right. It represents the range of human hearing with a line in the middle of the screen. When you first see the filter, no settings are applied. This opens the Channel EQ filter, ready to make adjustments.Open the Audio Inspector and click the small grid icon to the right of the Channel EQ name.Drag the Channel EQ filter (effect) on top of whatever clips, or subroles, you want to apply it to.Open the Effects browser, select All in the Audio section, then search for “Channel”.The operation of the Channel EQ filter doesn’t change when applied to multiple clips. To keep things simple for this example, I’ll apply the Channel EQ filter to a single clip. In Final Cut, EQ is best applied to a range of clips, with settings that don’t change. Why not apply the filter to individual clips? Mainly because it becomes too hard to make changes. NOTE: Here’s an article that covers this in detail. In Final Cut the best way to do that is to use Roles and audio stems. The best way to apply audio effects is to create “stems” or groupings of clips by function. For this article, though, I’m concentrating on making the spoken voice sound better. EQ is used extensively in music and sound design, which the Channel EQ can easily support. NOTE: We often refer to EQ as “shaping” the sound because we can manipulate different ranges of frequencies differently. To make a voice easier to understand, boost the high frequencies.ĮQ allows us to do all of this, and more. So, to make a voice sound warmer or sexier, boost low frequencies. Consonants allow us to understand what people are saying. Vowels give a voice its character, warmth and identifiability. Vowels are low-frequency sounds, while consonants are higher-frequency sounds.Men generally range from 175 Hz to 6,500, while women generally range from 400 Hz to 8,000 Hz. Normal human speech is a subset of human hearing.Audio frequencies and volume are logarithmic, not linear.Normal human hearing is defined as range of 20 Hz (deep bass) to 20,000 Hz (high treble).There are four critical concepts you need to understand in order to use EQ effectively: For anything challenging, I move the final audio mix into a DAW, such as ProTools or Audition. The settings discussed in this article work everywhere, but the audio mixing process in FCP X is best for podcasts, interviews and other fairly simple audio productions. NOTE: Audio mixing in Final Cut is quite limited when compared to Avid ProTools or Adobe Audition. I’ve written about the Fat EQ effect earlier ( read it here), this week, I’ll illustrate Channel EQ. If you are working with music or effects, the Channel EQ effect divides the range of human hearing into 8 channels, while Fat EQ only supports 5. If you are correcting dialog, either the Channel EQ or Fat EQ filter will provide the same results. NOTE: EQ is short for Equalization, which is a fancy word that means adjusting specific frequencies. What an EQ effect (called a “filter” in audio-speak) does is shape the sound, boosting some frequencies or lowering (called “attenuating”) others. Recently, I created a video illustrating how it works. I find it to be an indispensable tool in any mix. The Limiter effect controls audio levels.
#AUDIO VISUALIZER FINAL CUT PRO PRO#
There are two critical tools in Final Cut Pro X that can make a major difference in the quality of your audio: