I’m continually surprised how few people understand how audio components work in FCPX.

For those of you who don’t, here’s a pretty basic primer I did awhile back on Audio Component Workflow:

http://wemakemovies.org/2012/10/fcpx-audio-component-editing-workflow/

I’d update a few things since it was made (like the fact that fade handles on disabled ranges have since been added), but it does give you a pretty good sense of what you can do with components.

Now, the reason I bring this up is that if you’re dealing with multi channel audio files in FCPX, and you want to get to Logic correctly, you better tag your components with sub roles. Basically, if you tag your audio components correctly, you’re going to get AAF’s coming into Logic/Pro Tools that will likely make your Sound Designer/yourself get teary eyed over how beautifully organized they are.

Like most other things in FCPX, the more prep you do ahead of time, the less work you’re going to have to do later, and the more automated everything is going to be as you move through your edit.

For instance, if your production sound person labels his mic channels correctly (or you name them in an app like Wave Agent), and then you use Sync N Link from Intelligent Assistance to sync your clips, your audio will automatically come into FCPX correctly synced with Sub Roles attached to your individual components already in place.

From there, you can move through your edit, roles easily selectable at every turn, and you don’t need to worry about any of this stuff when it comes time to make your AAF or export your roles as quicktimes/AIFF’s later.

In the event you don’t do this (and I know most of you won’t), here are a few tips to still get to the finish line with your roles correctly laid out in your DAW:

1. If you want your Roles correctly tagged as you edit them into the timeline, and you don’t want to deal with the below (this will be far more efficient if you have an assistant editor helping you prep):

– Go into the the info tab of the inspector, and from the roles dropdown, select “Edit Roles”
– Add in the sub roles for characters/mic types that you want to be able to send out to Logic (you may need to add these gradually). Make sure you do this under the Audio Roles (not video)… and probably your best bet is to do it as a dialogue subrole.
– If your audio components are not already labeled correctly in the inspector based on mic/character (you production sound person didn’t do this), label these now. An easy way to figure out what’s what is to use the sound report your sound guy gave you (if they did that), or simply hover over each component from a character in the audio inspector and play back to figure out what mic is what. You can group label components across multiple takes that were recorded in the same way by shift selecting them and then re-labeling the component name in the audio inspector.
– When you import your audio into FCPX, before syncing or placing your audio into your multicams, open your each audio file into it’s own timeline using the “Open in Timeline” Command, select each of that file’s individual audio components, and tag them with a Sub Role. You’ll know how to tag them because you just labeled all of your components correctly.

FYI, this will be time consuming and may not be worth the effort if you’re a one man band and don’t have an assistant. However, if you do take the time up front, You’re going to save a TON of time on the back end, especially if you are working on a large project that will be going to the a DAW in multiple incarnations using Change List Software like Change List X. What I described above is really for long form/collaborative workflows.

If you’re working on something quick and dirty with a tighter turnaround, you’ll want to do the following:

2. If you don’t care about Roles until it’s time to go to Logic/Pro Tools, do the following:
– Make sure clip skimming is turned on (cmd-option-S)
– Go into the the info tab of the inspector, and from the roles dropdown, select “Edit Roles”
– Add in the sub roles for characters/mic types that you want to be able to send out to Logic (you may need to add these gradually). Make sure you do this under the Audio Roles (not video)… and probably your best bet is to do it as a dialogue subrole.
– Select all your video clips that have dialogue in them (quick way to do this is search your timeline index with “dialogue” then select all the clips that come up) and expand their audio components (ctrl-option-S)
– Shift select across similar components, and then from the info tab of the inspector in the role dropdown, tag them with their correct sub role.
– Do this for all components you want grouped in your DAW, and check your work by going into the Timeline index, in the roles tab, and quickly select each of your different subroles to make sure your components are correctly tagged (they’ll light up when you click on the name of a role)

BTW, Apple, if you’re out there reading this… a big feature request for me would be making it easier to tag audio components with roles, modify roles easier… and in general, make this awesome concept you’ve create just a bit easier for working editors to implement into more complex workflows.

Anyway… in the next blog, we’re going to dive into how to send some of this stuff out to X2Pro/DAW once it’s correctly tagged…

Here’s a link to past blogs in case you missed them:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: Logic Pro X Tutorials
Part 3: Logic XML Roundtrip Really Does Work

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Mestman, FCPWORKS.

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Workflow Architect, Sam Mestman. Sam’s also a regular writer for fcp.co and MovieMaker Magazine, teaches post workflow at RED’s REDucation classes, and is the founder and CEO of We Make Movies, a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto which is dedicated to making the movie industry not suck. If you’ve got any FCP X questions or need some help putting together a system, drop him an email at workflow@fcpworks.com and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

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