Soundtrack Pro, Final Editing and Exporting from FCP

It was time to add sound effects to my movie, having finished editing. The original recorded sound will be kept for the first few seconds, but the rest shall be replaced with pre-recorded media from Soundtrack Pro library.

These tracks are royalty-free, meaning that the content is licensed under a set of guidelines that I have to follow not to breach copyright laws.

Above: Soundtrack Pro library, in the bottom left-hand window.

After previewing the media from the library, it's a matter of double-clicking to place it in the project window, from here, no tweaking to the current sound needs to be made. You can simply export this as a format FCP likes, and then import it into your FCP project. I saved mine as a 48khz WAVE.

Above: Track saving formats in Soundtrack Pro.

Once imported into FCP, I used speed changes and cuts to synchronise the audio with my footage. I also made use of 0db crossfades to ensure my audio slipped in and out of scenes un-abruptly.

Exporting from FCP

Exporting was a simple process as I'd taken the time to set-up my project before-hand. This meant that FCP could export using the source media settings, which were a size of 720p @ 60FPS, contained in a ProRes 422 QuickTime movie.

Above: Exporting as QuickTime.



Above: QuickTime movie settings.

The size of the file exported was around 250MB, which is quite large for a 15 second clip. I will explain my working methods for using Compressor to encode for a PAL DVD next.