QuickTip: Audio Mixing in the Timeline

One more Final Cut quick tip today guys!

You probably know that you can fade audio tracks in or out by adding a "Fade" effect to your clips in the timeline.  But you can do the same thing much quicker by using Clip Overlays and Keyframes.

You can turn on Clip Overlays by pressing the Toggle Clip Overlays button underneath the timeline.  The keyboard shortcut for this is ALT and W.  When you turn this option on, Final Cut puts a pink line over the audio tracks.  The pink line is a volume control for the sound clip measured in Decibels (dB).  Pulling the line down with the mouse will make the whole clip quieter and pushing it up will make it louder.  Even better, you can also adjust the volume of parts of the clip by adding keyframes to split the line into sections.

To add keyframes to the volume, turn on Clip Overlays then select the Pen tool from the tool box by clicking on the icon at the bottom -- it looks just like the Pen tool icon in Photoshop.  The quickest way to activate the Pen tool is to press the P key.  Switch back to the normal mouse pointer by pressing A for Arrow.  If you hold down the Pen icon you'll see that there are actually three versions of the tool.  For now you'll only need the standard Pen but once you've mastered that, play around with the others to see what they do.

Once you have the Pen activated, just click on the pink Clip Overlay line to add keyframes.  If you want a fade in or fade out, you'll need at least two keyframes -- one to set the clip's normal playback volume and one to turn the volume down to silence.  When you're measuring volume in Decibels, silence isn't Zero like you might expect.  Instead silence is defined as minus Infinity Decibels.  Put two keyframes near the end or begining of the sound clip then press A to turn the Arrow tool back on so you can pull the line up or down.  Moving the line sections nearest to the ends of the clip down to -inf dB (minus Infinity) will create a Fade-In or Fade-Out Effect.  You should see that the line makes a smooth curve from the playback volume down to silence.  This gives the best sounding fade effect, but you can set this to go in a straight line if you want.

Fade-In and Fade-Out added to a clip by using Keyframes in the Timeline