Regardless of whether you’re editing a simple home movie or a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster, what it sounds like will have a major impact on how your audience responds to the film. There’s no need to feel intimidated by the importance of your audio, though, because Final Cut Express has all the tools you need to deliver a soundtrack that shows your movie in a great light, and reveals just what a talented film-maker you are.

Just as video files come in various guises – footage and title sequences being the basics – audio also comes in a host of different forms. There’s dialogue and the background noise recorded with your video, and then there’s music, sound effects and even recorded voice-over files. When you’re editing audio, your job is basically to transform all of these files into a coherent whole, and then to make sure that it is perfectly in time with your video. It’s no small task, but the building blocks of the job are the same as when you’re editing video, which certainly makes the process easier. All you have to remember is that you’ll fill your ‘Browser’ with audio clips as well as video ones, and that you have to place them on the ‘Timeline’ with equal care and attention. It’s not called editing for nothing, though, and it’s worth remembering that what’s not there can be as important as what is. Sometime silence really can be golden. It all comes down to what suits the movie you’re making, and the only person who can decide that is you.

In just the same way as you composite video clips by piling them on different tracks on the ‘Timeline’, you can stack your audio clips there and adjust how they interact with each other. You can also add filters and transitions in exactly the same way as you would video ones. In the following steps we’ll show you how you can put audio tracks together to form the basis of a movie soundtrack, before mixing and polishing it to perfection over the pages.