Broadcast Mixing In FCP X
Thought I’d pop in with a little post about what’s been up. Doing a couple interesting things Using X in concert with other NLE’s lately. First one is broadcast Mixing in X. 🙂 Cut some spots in Premiere and we decided to mix in house. I could of course use Logic, but these are pretty basic spots and everything I need is in X, so in it goes!
Export final 422HQ pix from Pr. All done and colored already, so why re-invent the wheel? Then use SendToX to get the audio in. A few minutes to set roles correctly, and off we go.
Get everything to a nice even level, comp the VO and add the handy Voice Over Enhancement effect to the VO comp. I really like this, because it’s just 3 bundled effects in one, which you can open and adjust (or not) to taste.
Do the mix, then comp it all, use Klangfreund Multimeter to get the mix CALM compliant, toss a Broadcast Safe filter on the pix… Done.
Honestly, for uncomplicated mixes, X is way faster than using a DAW. Using Compound Clips as ‘buses’ for signal processing works essentially the same way really. And the plugins are exactly the same as those found in Logic or other DAW’s. Could the functionality be better? Sure. But for short form stuff like this it works great as is. It’s fast, and uncomplicated.
Compositing FCP X
Cutting some other spots in Premiere as there are multiple folks working on them so… 🤷♂️ A lot of other GFX are being done in AE, but these spots have a ton of shots requiring tracked iPhone screen replacements with video playing onscreen. Some of these have fullscreen video zooming in/out of the phones. To lighten the load, I’m building the Screens with video in X…
Importing to Resolve and doing the screen replacements with Fusion and doing some light CC on the comps…
Importing the comps to FCPX and using Coremelt SliceX to track some moving fingers covering the screen and osmFCPX Add Motion to do the zooms in/out of the phone to fullscreen. — Side Note: osm.iPhone is pretty great too, used that in some other stuff for this campaign.
Export, stick into the spots in Pr… done. 🙂
Sadly, these projects need to remain ‘undisclosed’, but they look/sound great. They’re out in the world on National TV and/or the big 3 Social Networks. FWIW, Fusion does really great tracking. IMO it’s better than, um… the other one most people use. And FCP X, along with all its amazing built in and 3rd party plugins makes the ‘complicated’ stuff easy. As usual. 😉
Ah well, back to work….
EDIT: Got a good question about the mix in comments.. “would (it) have saved time if you simply used buses and the track editor in Premiere and avoided round tripping altogether?”. You can see my reply below, but just for laughs prepped the timeline in Premiere, and they did the equivalent prep in X.
Pr: Split clips out. Assign tracks to submixes.
X: Assign Roles to clips
Here’s the result…
Update: Someone on Twitter asked to see how I mix levels. Here it is. Just how I do it, not a definitive guide 🙂 I’d love to be able to play it but unless I can find the spot on Youtube and link to it, no can do. 😦
Final Cut Pro X Babbling 
I have to ask, would have saved time if you simply used buses and the track editor in Premiere and avoided round tripping altogether? Admittedly, the FCPX plugins are better but for a simple mix like this is that necessary?
Short answer is yes, it’d work. But in either case I need to “clean up” the tracks… they’re all over the place, so the prep is about the same. Once the Roles are set (using he index to find and select multiple clips rather than doing the track tetris dance) the “bussing”, for lack of a better term, is done. And it’s honestly faster to just comp a Role and toss effects on it rather than assigning tracks to busses/subs etc. Way more clicking in Pr (or Logic/PT for that matter) I also need to output split versions as h264.mov files (per client), which Pr can’t do anymore. It only does mp4 which doesn’t support multichannel files. Lastly, as you note, plugins are way better in X than Pr.