Clipping issues

When looking at the waveform, any clipped areas will appear as flat spots at the height of the wave. Unfortunately, there's not really anything you can do to reverse the effects of clipping with the sound tools you have at your disposal.

It sounds as if one of two things is happening. Either the Beachtek's gain was set too high (the clipping occured at the Beachtek unit) or something is happening upon importing it into FCP. To get to some type of solution, I should ask a few questions. When you listen to the audio from the camera (through the headphone jack), do you hear the clipping? Also, what did you have plugged into the Beachtek - wired or wireless mics? If you were using condensor mics, did you have phantom power turned on? Were you using the limiters on the Beachtek?

One of the unfortunate things about the Beachtek is that there are no real level indicators or meters on it, so you're never really sure what your levels are (unless you activate the limiters and you see them light up). That's why portable sound mixers have tone generators built in, so that all gain stages can be calibrated to 0 dBu.

I was hoping you wouldn't hear the clipping from the camera, indicating that FCP was causing the problem. I'm sorry to say you are stuck with the clipping in that portion of the interview.

The battery going low appears to be the likely culprit, especially if you changed it and the clipping disappeared. The shotgun and the lavalier are both drawing phantom power (assuming they aren't powered by internal batteries) and probably are creating quite a draw. How long did the battery last before you started hearing the clipping? Are you using regular alkaline or lithium ion?