Improved Audioby Diana Weynand In Final Cut Pro 7 you have several new audio features as well as enhanced integration with Soundtrack Pro. One of the features I gravitated to first was the new Audio Normalization and Gain filter. Let’s look at the audio clip we have in the Timeline.
Notice how the audio level is a little low.
You could drag the audio level line up to raise the level or down to lower it.
Sometimes this is a hit or miss proposition - you might raise it too much, or not enough and have to continue adjusting. You can also apply an audio Gain filter
But again, how do you know exactly how much to raise the audio level? Instead, let’s do it automatically with the new Normalization Gain feature. First, select the clip. And then access this new feature, by choosing Modify > Audio > Apply Normalization Gain.
Next to the Level field, you see a reference to dBFS. If you’re not used to seeing this, these letters stand for decibels full scale. 
Here you enter the value of what you want the highest peak in the audio clip to be. The default is 0, and you don’t want to peak over that level or you will clip your audio. I’m going to change it to -6 DBFS. When I play the clip again, the audio is raised to a healthy level without peaking.
You may notice that the audio level line on the clip didn’t change. What’s really happening here is that Final Cut Pro is adding an audio filter to this clip - a filter that automatically raises the level of a clip to its maximum without distortion.
In the Filters tab, you see the filter and the setting you first entered. Here, you can modify the Gain filter to raise or lower the volume. Any normalization is applied only to the area between the In and Out points, not the full length of the media file. So if you trim the clip longer, you may need to reapply the normalization gain of the newly defined clip, which will simply change the level, it won’t add another filter.
Keep in mind, Final Cut searches for the peak in the clip and resets audio level to that. For example, if you have a loud slate at the head of the clip, followed by quiet dialogue, it’s going to set to the slate clap. So if necessary trim the clip to after the slate before normalizing the audio. This is a non-destructive process – so any change you make will not affect your original clip.
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