Curtis Judd 1/23/23 Curtis Judd 1/23/23

Simple Sound in Premiere, Final Cut, or DaVinci using Accentize's DialogueEnhance2

In this week’s episode we have a look at Accentize’s DialogueEnhance 2 plugin. This multipurpose plugin can run in non-linear video editors — Premiere Pro, Final Cut, and Davinci Resolve — as well as digital audio workstations and includes everything you need to clean up audio for your videos, podcasts, and other dialogue-based projects. In this video, we walk through the DialogueEnhance feature set and explain how you might go about using each module to best clean up your dialogue sound. Let’s take a closer look!

If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses including processing dialogue audio in Adobe Audition and DaVinci Resolve/Fairlight, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F4, F6, F8, and F8n, and how to get the most from the Sound Devices MixPre series of recorders. Our latest courses cover Sound for Live Streaming with the ATEM Mini and an Intro to Izotope RX.

Support my work creating videos by donating at Ko-Fi.com.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVEStore, Perfect Circuit, Trew Audio or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Accentize DialogueEnhance 2 Plugin — https://www.accentize.com/dialogueenhance/ (not an affiliate link)

- Sound Devices MixPre audio recorder — B&H, Trew Audio, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Amazon

- Rycote PCS Microphone Quick-Release System — B&H

- Aputure LS 300X used for background light — Aputure, B&H, Amazon

- Aputure Spotlight Mount — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store. Amazon

- Rosco Gobo creates the pattern on the back wall — B&H

- Canon C70 cinema camera — B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L lens — B&H, Amazon

- Schneider Radiant Soft 1 diffusion filter — B&H

- Panasonic GH5 camera — B&H, Amazon

- Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 II lens — B&H, Amazon

The intro and outro music for this episode is from Musicbed - “Dynamo” by Virgil Arles. Take your films to the next level with music from Musicbed. Sign up for a free account to listen for yourself.

Curtis Judd 1/2/23 Curtis Judd 1/2/23

Sync Audio to Video in Resolve 18 Using Auto Sync or Manually

In this week’s episode, we demonstrate two ways to sync your separately recorded audio to video clips in DaVinci Resolve 18 for single and multicam video footage. The first method is auto sync based on sound — in this case, Resolve uses the audio recorded by the camera as a reference to sync up the audio from your separate audio recorder. If auto sync fails, and it will for some video formats in Resolve 18, we also demonstrate how to manually sync your audio clips to your video clips.

Support my work creating videos by donating at Ko-Fi.com.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode — or that I use in my regular episodes. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, DVEStore, Perfect Circuit, Trew Audio or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K — B&H, DVE Store, Amazon

- Earthworks ETHOS microphone — B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Sound Devices MixPre audio recorder — B&H, Trew Audio, Sweetwater, DVE Store, Amazon

- Rycote PCS Microphone Quick-Release System — B&H

- Aputure LS 300X used for background light — Aputure, B&H, Amazon

- Aputure Spotlight Mount — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store. Amazon

- Rosco Gobo creates the pattern on the back wall — B&H

- Canon C70 cinema camera — B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L lens — B&H, Amazon

- Schneider Radiant Soft 1 diffusion filter — B&H

- Panasonic GH5 camera — B&H, Amazon

- Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 II lens — B&H, Amazon

Curtis Judd 9/26/22 Curtis Judd 9/26/22

Final Cut Pro Voice Isolation Audio Noise Reduction

In this week’s episode we take a look at Voice Isolation, an audio processing effect built in to Final Cut Pro (versions 10.6.2 and later). This effect runs on a machine learning algorithm that separates dialogue from extraneous background noise, and you can adjust how intensely you want it to affect the clip you’re applying it to. In this episode we walk through what Voice Isolation is and how it works, listen to some unprocessed versus processed samples, and discuss how you might use it in your post-production workflow. Let’s take a closer listen!

Have a look at our Izotope RX Voice De-Noise tutorial for other ideas on how to reduce background noise in your dialogue recordings.

Support my work creating videos by donating at Ko-Fi.com.

- Izotope RX 10 Advanced — B&H, Sweetwater

- Waves Clarity Vx and Vx Pro — Waves

- Aputure P300C LED used as key light — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store

- Aputure LS 300X used for background light — Aputure, B&H, Amazon

- Aputure Spotlight Mount — Aputure, B&H, DVE Store. Amazon

- Rosco Gobo creates the pattern on the back wall — B&H

- Canon C70 cinema camera — B&H

- Canon RF 24-70 f/2.8L lens — B&H, Amazon

- Schneider Radiant Soft diffusion filter — B&H

Curtis Judd 10/18/20 Curtis Judd 10/18/20

My YouTube Video Workflow: Review and Tutorial Video Creation Process

In today’s episode, I run through the process and workflow I use to create product review and tutorial videos for YouTube.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, Pictureline or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K - B&H, Pictureline

- Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 ART Lens - B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Aputure 300x LED Light - Aputure, B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Aputure Light Dome 2 soft box - Aputure, B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Canon C200 camera (used for the talking head portion) - B&H, Pictureline

- Canon 24-105mm F/4L Lens - B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Panasonic GH5 camera - B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 OIS Lens - B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Lupo Superpanel 30 Full Color Soft - B&H

- Aputure MC RGB LED mini light (for color in the background) - Aputure, B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

The intro and outro music for this episode is from Musicbed - “For the Kids” by Utah. Get a free trial of the best music for your videos at Musicbed.

Curtis Judd 10/10/20 Curtis Judd 10/10/20

Live Sound for Video Session: Q&A

This week's session is a Q&A session where we answer your questions.

Thanks to Musicbed for the music for this session - “All I See Is You Featuring Jacob Steele” by Utah. Get a free trial of the best music for your videos at Musicbed.

If you'd like to submit your questions ahead of time, please join over at School.LearnLightAndSound.com. Opt in to the mailing list and I'll contact you once a week where you can reply with your question.

Mixing Principles by Chris Burgess

If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses including processing dialogue audio in Adobe Audition and DaVinci Resolve/Fairlight, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F4, F6, F8, and F8n, and how to get the most from the Sound Devices MixPre series of recorders. We also just added a course on sound for live-streaming with the ATEM Mini.

Gear used or mentioned in this episode. The links below are Amazon.com, B&H Photo, Sweetwater, Pictureline or other affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases:

- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel - B&H, Sweetwater

- Earthworks SR314 - B&H, Sweetwater

- Canon C200 Camera - B&H, PictureLine

- ATEM Mini Pro ISO - B&H, Pictureline, Amazon

- Sound Devices MixPre II Series Recorders - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Samson Q2U - B&H, Sweetwater, Amazon

- Audio Technica AT4053b microphone - Amazon, B&H

Curtis Judd 3/11/16 Curtis Judd 3/11/16

Before/After Wipe or Animated Crop Effect in Premiere Pro

You’ve probably seen those color grading tutorials or demo reels where you first see the video clip before it was color graded and then a wipe across the screen reveals how the clip looks after it was color graded. It’s a fun and effective effect for showing how you colored your piece.

But how do you do that? Here are two quick ways to do this in Premiere Pro CC 2015.

Curtis Judd 2/24/16 Curtis Judd 2/24/16

How to Remove a Boom Microphone from a Wide Shot

There are a variety of ways to capture dialogue sound from your talent in a wide shot. The most obvious choice is to use a lavalier microphone or plant (hide) a microphone in the shot near the actors. But another option that may give you better sound is to use a boom or shotgun microphone in the frame and then composite the microphone out for the final shot. Here’s one way to do that using Premiere Pro CC 2015.

If you are using an earlier version of Premiere Pro, you can do the exact same thing using a Garbage Matte effect instead of the Opacity effect we show here. The only difference is that the Opacity effect gives you a few more options such as feathering the edge of the mask/matte to make the effect even smoother.

Curtis Judd 10/27/15 Curtis Judd 10/27/15

Video Editing Apps: Which Should I Use?

Short answer: Try a few for a month each and go with the one that works best for you. Power Director was my first consumer level editing app. You could actually sync audio to video in the app but it was manual. And it crashed quite often (this was a 32 bit app back in the day).

Then I upgraded to one of the lesser versions of Sony Vegas. Not bad, but also still 32 bit. Not quite as crashy but not exactly stable. crashes were more common when the timeline was longer than a couple of minutes. No way to live if you really want to produce content.

When I first started editing video a little more seriously, I had a look at Premiere Pro (then version 5.5) and Final Cut Pro X. At that point, I really liked how fast and responsive FCPX was but it crashed. A lot. About every 5 minutes. I don't know why and maybe it was just my particular computer at the time, but that wasn't going to work for me. So I settled on Premiere Pro, starting with CS 5.5 and kept with it up through CC 2014. Premiere keeps getting better and better. But it is sort of like Photoshop in that it is still using the same basic approach as NLEs have used for a long time. The timeline is like a table and you lay out your clips on the table. If you make an edit where you decide to pull a clip from earlier in the sequence and then want to insert it farther to the right, you have to move everything around. Or at least I never learned a better, more efficient way to do it. It might just be me.

Then I decided to give Final Cut Pro X (10.1.something) another try. They definitely fixed the instability issues I experienced on my first try. But this time, FCPX made me angry. Well, not really angry, it just didn't make sense. But I forced myself to stick with it for a full month through the trial period.

And eventually, it all clicked and made sense and saved me a lot of time when I needed to pull a clip or add a new clip from the middle of the timeline. The magnetic timeline just shifted everything over perfectly. And that included all the secondary footage and titles and everything. Rad!

The metadata and search features were nice though I believe a lot of this has been added to Premiere since I moved to FCPX. The library structure, while a little maddening at first because Apple uses different names for things (e.g., project = timeline or sequence), is very useful. I can have a library of related videos broken down into separate events. So my YouTube series on a particular topic, can all live in a single library which makes it easy to re-use clips between episodes. I always found that more difficult in Premiere, having to import an additional project or just go find the clip out on the hard drive.

Audio workflow: No, FCPX doesn't round trip audio to Audition like Premiere with a simple right click. But for short pieces like I typically cut (usually no more than 10 minutes in length, often less), I actually post-process the audio in Audition first, then bring it all into FCPX and sync to the video and then cut. So my audio post is already done. This works fine for simple pieces where you're not doing any sophisticated sound design. This inverted process works nicely for most of the corporate pieces I do.

Same goes for color grading. I pull all the raw footage into Resolve first, color it, export, then bring it into FCPX for editing. Am I crazy for doing this? It is completely backwards from traditional post workflows. I think it works fine for short pieces. But I totally see why they do it the inverse way for longer pieces. No way do you want to do all the post work on every single clip when you will eventually only use 3% of the footage.

So for now, I've landed on FCPX as my editing app of choice. But now there are more options than ever.

DaVinci Resolve 12. I cut one of my recent YouTube pieces in Resolve 12. Wow. They've come a long way even in the last 2 releases. I think that I would consider Resolve 12 a genuine candidate and for those on a tight budget, a very good candidate. The free version seemed to have everything I needed to get the job done. I was a little clumsy with it, simply because it was my first edit, but it looks really great. The only thing is that you have to have a full-fledged computer with a discrete graphics card. So this isn't going to work on your MacBook Air or a similarly spec'd PC. In many ways, Resolve 12 felt very much like Premiere to me.

There are other options of course, some of them free. HitFilm 3 Express is available for free. I simply haven't had time to dive in and assess it. There's also Lightworks. Avid Media Composer is still in wide use in the feature film and TV markets. So many options create an almost dizzying landscape for the budding video editor.

But my take is that you just have to find what works for you. Most of them have a trial period. I'd suggest you download them and give each of them a month trial to see how they fit your style.

Then make a decision and learn the ins and outs. Don't waste time endlessly trying every new version of every new NLE. I keep up on what comes in the new versions but have decided to switch no more than every 2 years or so. That's why I'm staying with FCPX for now.

Curtis Judd 10/9/14 Curtis Judd 10/9/14

Learning Final Cut Pro X

I've been listening to this podcast called FCPX Grill hosted by @ChrisFenwick over the last several weeks. Chris bills it as, "An open, honest, and level-headed discussion with users of Final Cut Pro X to discover how they are using the application." And I must say, it is interesting.

He concedes that he is overly opinionated, but makes many good points. He used to edit in Premiere, switched to Final Cut Pro 7, was outraged when Final Cut Pro x was announced, but now has become a huge proponent of FCPX.

When I first switched to a Mac almost 2 years ago, I tried the trial version of Final Cut. It must have been version 10.0.something. It was pretty cool but one thing scared me away quickly: It crashed. Way too often.

Since I'm a photographer, I had to have Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom so Creative Cloud became my solution. And by default, Premiere became my non-linear editor app. And over time, I've become reasonably comfortable with Premiere Pro. I was skeptical about whether or not Adobe would really deliver new functionality and bug fixes more quickly with their Creative Cloud offering but I must say, they've been doing a pretty nice job on that front. Seems like we're getting a solid 2 functional enhancement releases per year and several bug fix updates in between. That's way better than the previous 18 to 36 month upgrade cycle.

I also found myself relying on After Effects more and more for my corporate video gigs. I still haven't fallen in love with SpeedGrade and much prefer Davinci Resolve despite SG's round-trip capabilities with Premiere. Also not a huge fan of audition, though it is hard to beat it in terms of the roundtrip workflow as well.

But Fenwick had me convinced that I at least need to give FCPX another look. So I downloaded the trial again a few days ago and have been watching a few tutorials online to get familiar with it.

Wow. It is very much an Apple approach encapsulated in an app. I mean they really questioned some of the fundamentals regarding NLEs. So far I'm still getting my bearings. I'm starting to wonder if I'll really be able to make a good decision with only 30 days of trial time, but we'll give it a go and force myself to use it for my projects in the next few weeks.

Evidently, the quality of the H.264 exported files from FCPX are better than from Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder. I have to say, it looks good on that front so far but is it something my audiences/clients will notice? More tests ongoing.

I also haven't tackled my round-trip workflow with Resolve yet. Or with audio apps. To be honest, for short pieces, I just color correct, grade, and edit audio before even taking it into Premiere. That's fine when you just have 10 or 20 short clips. Not reasonable for most indie filmmakers when you're doing a longer piece, even a short film.

One thing that alarmed me last night was that FCPX crashed. That's the first time this round so far, but not a good sign. Are any of you experiencing that on 10.1.3? Some of the reviews/comments in the app store express pretty serious frustration along these lines for this version.

For Pro apps, crashing needs to be very rare and Premiere has delivered well on that front, at least for me.

More to come.