Sound effects, part 1 — browsing, connecting and panning

There are loads of websites out there offering high-quality sound effects. However, few are free and the few that are rarely offer high-quality material. Luckily, Final Cut Pro X comes with more than 1,300 royalty-free, high-quality sounds effects for you to use. And while there are some cheesy ones (that is, 35 variations of "Cartoon Accent"), there are plenty of genuinely useful ones such as crowd noises, Foley effects, transportation sounds, and more. You'd be amazed how much a crowd sound in the background of a public scene or insect noises in an outdoor night time scene can add atmosphere and realism to your video.

Additionally, FCPX offers easy to use tools to pan and animate sound, which we will explore in the next few recipes. Panning a sound refers to shifting a sound from its original channel(s) to another. For example, perhaps we have a scene in a movie where a person walks off the left of the screen after an argument with...