Here’s some stuff you should know about how to get the most out of X2Pro, whether you’re going to Logic or Pro Tools:

– Export your XML from FCPX after doing as much role tagging with your components as possible (see part 4), and then import this into X2Pro.

– Set the Destination where you want your AAF to be saved (if you’re not referencing media, expect a large file, especially if you’re doing long handles).

– If you want all of your audio directly embedded into your AAF (likely if you’re delivering to a sound designer), you’ll want to make sure Trim Embedded audio is turned on or you’re going to have a massive sized AAF. If you want your AAF to reference your original audio files, leave “reference WAV files in place” checked, and when you get to Logic, your audio will be referencing the same files it was in FCPX.

Ordering your Roles in your AAF:

When you hit the “Roles” button, all of the roles from your XML are going to pop out to the left. These will reflect the order that you’ll see them in Logic. To change the order, select the role you move and use the up/down arrows to change where it appears in your track stack.

X2Pro Preferences:

General Tab – General rule of thumb is that you keep your transitions, but don’t really expect them to be 100% accurate. I discard my disabled clips, and I’ll convert my audio to PCM audio, usually at 16/24 bit (you need to do this because most DAW’swon’t read .mp3 or AAC audio unless it has been converted… also, expect Logic to convert this audio to the project’s sample rate when you import your AAF).

Media Handling: I’ll generally set this to 20 seconds (or whatever my sound designer wants)… and I’ll typically not “reference multi-channel WAV files” as that isn’t supported in Pro Tools anyway. Also, the next one is a big one… You’re going to want to keep “embed media, optionally trimming” turned on… otherwise, expect a bunch of unexplained errors that will drive you crazy… basically, this option ensure that if there are any problem clips, they’ll just get embedded into the AAF with handles.

Roles: I can’t think of a good reason why you wouldn’t want to keep your roles on separate tracks if you bothered to take the time to tag them in the first place.

Media Locations: Because of App Store sandboxing, this is necessary… X2Pro can’t just search your computer for files unless you give it permission. If you’ve used the consolidate feature in FCPX, the good news is that you’ll only have to put one directory there. Also, X2Pro will scan your XML and tell you the folders that you need to give it access to. You don’t have to give it access to each individual folder either. Rule of thumb is to give it access to a folder early in the tree (or a hard drive), and then X2Pro can do the digging to all the subfolders on its own.

Anyway… that’s a general overview of how to make X2Pro work for you… and whether you’re creating AAF’s for yourself, or for a sound designer, if you understand how all of the above works, sound turnover should be pretty painless.

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
Part 4: (sub) Role Management

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.

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.

So… If you’ve tried to just get into Logic quickly with an FCPX XML, you’ve probably had some problems. I know I did initially. The main reason you’re probably having those problems is that there’s one little box dropdown you need to hit while you’re exporting your XML in order to make things lay out in Logic correctly.

You need to set your metadata view on XML export to “Audio”.

If you do that, you’re going to get a MUCH cleaner XML import into Logic Pro X.

Your primary audio roles should come in as tracks (e.g – Dialogue, music, effects, ambience), and you won’t have the sync issues that you would likely face if the metadata view was set as something else.

However, from what I can tell, your sub roles will not be respected getting over to Logic. Also, I’ve had some experience with some patching/playback issues on some some of my dialogue that’s coming in… in addition, I would love to see EQ and compression that I’ve applied to my clips be applied to the tracks on XML import.

Currently, the best way to get to Logic is to manage your components and roles correctly (ideally from the very beginning), and then build a beautiful looking AAF using X2Pro or even bring in mixed down versions of your roles as tracks in Logic using the Share menu.

At the end of the day, the better your role management is, the better your Logic workflow is going to be, and we’re going to dive into best practices for Role management in the next part in this series.

Previous Blogs in the Series:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: Logic Pro X Tutorials

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.

Here we go with part two of our series on using Logic Pro X for sound design with Final Cut Pro X. There are a million tutorials out there to choose from. Here are the ones I went with (if you have no idea where to get started):

https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/logic-application

There’s a lot of them there (many of which can be found on the Mac App Store)… but if you want to know what some essentials to get you started, I’d go in this order:

1. Logic Pro X 101: Core Training
2. Logic Pro X 102: Signal Flow
3. Logic Pro X 103: Audio Recording and Editing
4. Logic Pro X 105: Mixing and Automation

Start with those and broaden out based on your interests from there. These particular four are all on the App Store at about 20 dollars each. Core Training gives a nice basic overview of what what the basic Logic process is.

The Signal Flow course is a bit dry but completely essential to understanding the methodology behind everything else you do in Logic and how it all works. Audio Recording and Editing is probably most important as it goes through how to get around in the timeline and approach actual sound editing in Logic.

Mixing is pretty self explanatory but probably won’t make much sense to you without having a solid foundation in the other topics. Don’t start with this one unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

One thing to keep in mind as you go through these tutorials… you might be a bit put off by the fact that all of these tutorials are about Music creation and not sound design for picture. This is all true. Logic is designed to be the go-to app for musicians, and that makes up a MUCH larger segment of the sound world.

The good news is that everything you’ll see on the music creation side is largely applicable to the sound design side as well, and if you put enough time in, you might actually figure out how to score your movie too (or at least point your composer in the right direction).

It’s a time commitment but one that is very much worth the hassle. And as far as how you should go about mixing and get your projects to and from FCPX… well, that’s what the rest of this series is going to be about. Stay tuned.

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.

In my experience, it’s very rare to meet a picture editor with a lot of hands-on DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) experience. And it’s also just as rare to find a sound designer who has a ton of experience with NLE software.

As much as this makes logical sense, since specialists are supposed to specialize, I feel like this situation holds a lot of projects back and can cause a lot of problems (and inflated post budgets).

When it comes to DAW’s, Pro Tools is the industry standard. But the main problem is that you have to basically start over when you hand off your sound to your mixer, regardless of how much you knew about EQ, compression, and noise reduction. The sound engineer always wants a ‘clean slate’. Also as an application, Pro Tools is not a cheap proposition, especially once you throw in the plugins and extras you might need for a specific workflow.

As a Final Cut Pro X editor, I wanted more control over my projects and my mixes. I wanted to figure out a better way to get my projects into a DAW so that when I brought in a sound designer, they could spend their time making my mix better and not reinventing work I had done already. All of this led me to Logic Pro X.

I chose Logic over Pro Tools because I’m fairly convinced Avid is never going to get on the same page with Apple to incorporate FCPXML the way that I want them to. Logic also uses all the same plugins that I’m already using in FCPX. So, if there was going to be a platform that allowed me to take work I had begun in FCPX and bring it cleanly to a DAW, it was going to be Logic Pro X.

As an alternative DAW to Pro Tools, Logic Pro X is much more affordable and it accepts FCPXML (even though that translation is not quite as robust as I’d like it to be yet). Before we get going, though, some key takeaways about where the Logic-FCPX workflow currently stands:

• All of the FCPX native audio filters come from Logic.
• XML import from FCPX is possible but compared to using an AAF import from X2Pro projects lose a good amount of fidelity.
• If you use sub roles correctly with audio components, AAF’s created using X2Pro import will import great.
• If you want to maintain audio work begun in FCPX already, tagging your components with roles and beginning a Logic mix with exported FCPX roles as tracks is a very effective starting point for a mix.

Anyway, as I continued working more between Logic and FCPX, I realized that there’s a reason audio turnover is so complicated for people. Video and audio people really have no concept of what the other one does or how they do it, and they work in completely different ways.

For most post-production workflows, when it comes to video and audio integration, it’s like having one person on your team that only speaks French, and another that only speaks German… and then occasionally you have to ask them to work together and build something. But they can’t really communicate with each other, and prefer to work separately and hand each other finished items back and forth without truly colloborating. But if you can have a common language going back and forth easily, that opens up a whole world of possibilities.

Over the coming weeks, we’re doingt a series of blogs detailing some of the advantages of going from FCPX to Logic, as well as some strategies you can use to really take advantage of the strengths of both applications. Before we get started with the series, here are the main reasons that an FCPX editor would take on the transition of learning a new way of working and a new “language” of editing:

• I’m going to be a better editor because of it… and my projects are about to go to a whole other level.
• I’m going to have more control over what I want to do with my mixes.
• I’ll no longer be held back from a high-end mix by not having access to Pro Tools.
• I’m going to be able to be to collaborate properly with sound designers if I need to.
• I’m going to have an entirely new skill set that I can bill my clients for.

Also, as you delve into the DAW world, much like color correction or visual effects, you should prepare yourself for a difficult learning wall to crawl over. Sound editing in Logic is VERY different from picture editing in FCPX, and your approaches to things will need to change in order to really achieve the benefits.

In short, think about how moving from FCP7 to FCPX felt. Initially it was slower, but once you got the hang of it, you likely had a bit of an epiphany and began turning out edits much faster and at a much higher quality. It’s the same with transitioning to mixing in Logic.

Once you build the muscle memory and understand the way Logic is designed, it’ll feel like you’ve gotten a new toy and you’ll begin a whole new level of experimentation. Logic has become my new secret weapon.

The bottom line is that once people figure out that you CAN mix a movie professionally in Logic X, Pro Tools has a lot to worry about in terms of maintaining its stranglehold on the audio world… especially as the FCPXML implementation continues to improve between the two Apps.

There’s going to be A LOT more to come on all of this. Stay tuned.

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.

So… Izotope recently released RX4 and RX4 advanced, a large update to their suite of audio repair tools, which for those of you who didn’t know, is just an AWESOME set of audio tools that you can use right in FCPX.

The really big news is that my favorite plugin from of theirs, the dialogue denoiser, is now included as a part of the regular Izotope RX package (about $400) and is no longer only part of the Advanced Suite ($1200).

If you’re curious what the dialogue denoiser does, it’s literally a “make it better” button for dialogue. You slap it on pretty much anything, and the background noise gets sucked out without really affecting the dialogue.

My other favorite plugin from the suite is the dereverb plugin, that basically pulls some of the “space” out of your dialogue to make it feel like it wasn’t recorded in a room that isn’t meant for recording sound.

In terms of what the advanced suite got in its arsenal, it now has EQ matching, which is pretty fantastic, as well as some built in loudness tools… which is you aren’t aware why that matters, you may not need them at this point, but I think the industry is largely heading toward a new standard for broadcast delivery, which is loudness as opposed to the traditional DB readings.

Anyway, If you’re an FCPX editor, and you need a rock solid, really useful set of Audio repair tools for basic tasks, Izotope RX is a great option, in my opinion… and the fact that the dialogue denoiser is now included with the standard package makes this a far more affordable and useful purchase for the average FCPX editor.

Just a heads up, BTW… don’t try and use the learn button for these plugins in FCPX. It’ll cause some headaches.

Instead, especially for things like the dialgue denoiser (which should do 95% of what you need just by applying it), work with the sliders in the inspector, and for any advanced heavy lifting, just go into RX standalone editor and make your changes to the file.

On a side note, you can expect a lot more sound and Logic related stuff in this blog coming soon.