“Hi Doug. I am about to send a short film to my sound editor and he has asked that all audio have 100 frame handles on each clip.
How do I best/efficiently achieve this without changing my selected audio in the film?”
Traditionally you would export an OMF file but OMF export is no longer supported as it was in FCP7. This is one of the things that has changed in FCPX that is not for the better and still needs to be addressed.
A lot of people were expecting a slick and elegant solution to this when Logic Pro X was released recently but it didn’t happen and now all eyes are on the next release of FCPX in October to address it.
Currently, you use FCPX’s Roles functionality and export what are know as Stems.
• Roles are a way of telling FCPX what each clip of audio is (Dialog, Music, Sound effects etc) in the absence of tracks.
• Stems are split audio tracks that last the entire duration of the project. They do not have the option of handles (extra audio included beyond the cut) which is a distinct disadvantage.
Usually FCPX does a pretty good job of identifying which audio is which role but not always. So you manually assign any that are incorrect and then export – > Roles as separate Files
You’ll end up with several wav or AIFF files of the same length, one for dialog, one for music etc
I would say to just be careful to make sure you set all audio to default level without any filters – these will be baked into the stems and limit what your audio mixer can do with them.
Your other options – if you have FCP7 – is to use a $50 app called Xto7 which will convert your FCPX project into an FCP7 project. From there you can export a OMF file and set handles. There is also a application called X2Pro if your audio is being mixed in ProTools.
I like roles a lot, but they need to be improved so that creating clips with handles out of FCPX is as easy as in FCP7. I’m fairly confident we’ll have that in the next 6-8 weeks.