[ This article was first published in the March, 2009, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]
Peter Zersch writes:
I saw your Soundtrack pro tutorial (very useful). Immediately I could make use of it. But something didn’t work out as you described. Maybe you can help.
The problem was. I had a hum in my rough material (all captured as small clips, couldn’t capture it as a long clip). I exported one clip to test if I could get rid of the hum. The hum remover didn’t work (analyses did nothing, don’t know why) and also the noise print/remove noise didn’t do a good job (the voices got distorted, and the hum was still noticeable).
So I opened the spectrum window (a super feature). And there I decided to get rid of a lot of noise in the 150-200 Hz region (selected this range and hit the backspace key). This did a superb job. The hum was completely gone and the voices in the clip where like nothing had ever happened. So far so good, but then I wanted to repeat this this action on all my other clips (which was a lot of clips). Because it would take me hours to do this same action for all these clips I decided to make an apple script (like you described in your tutorial).
So I saved the script and went to FCP. Made a copy of one of the clips just for testing (because of the destructiveness of the scripts), and then send it to the apple script I saved. I did it once with the ‘yes’ and once with the ‘no’ button. In both cases it didn’t work out. When I went back to FCP the audio was gone (completely deleted) except for one frame.
To be sure I didn’t do anything wrong in this process I made another script in Soundtrack (normalization) and tried if that would work. That one worked fine.
It looks like the delete audio action made in the spectrum window doesn’t work as a script.
Am I still doing something wrong or is this some kind of a bug. Do you have a solution or workaround for this?
Larry replies: Peter, this is a great question!
The problem with scripts is that they only process the entire clip – they don’t understand selection. So, the script did not see “select this frequency range, then delete.” Instead it just saw: “…delete.”
I don’t know of an easy way to clean up a selection of frequencies within your audio using the batch processing scripts in Soundtrack Pro.
