14. Boost the Signal: Audio Sweetening

"To me, "driving" Final Cut Pro feels the same as taking control of an Autodesk Flame or Smoke — you truly feel like an artist and a musician, where the tools can keep up with your mental thought process."

— Chris Hocking, LateNiteFilms, co-developer of CommandPost, latenitefilms.com

With the picture looking good, this chapter shows how audio can be improved, or sweetened. To make sure you have some appropriate content to work with, we'll begin by recording an original voiceover. With those fresh voiceover clips in hand, we'll move on to audio adjustments. Starting with simple controls over volume, you'll discover more complex ways to animate (or automate) volume over time. Few recordings are perfect, so you'll find out how to remove problematic parts of the audio such as background hiss and hum, how to massage levels in subtle ways, and how to apply more complex audio effects for compression...