How To Overlap Audio In Imovie

This chapter is from the volume 

More Sound Advice

Waveform Tips

When you've used the View bill of fare to display audio waveforms, iMovie Hard disk drive's timeline snapping feature snaps the playhead to silent portions of clips (specifically, when you ringlet to within three frames of silence).

To work with more than precision when viewing waveforms, zoom in on the timeline. If the sound in a rail is on the placidity side, the waveform may be hard to see. Solution: select the audio clip and press the up-arrow key. This accentuates the spikes in the waveform. To make the spikes smaller, press the downwards-pointer cardinal.

When you import an audio prune or music rails, iMovie Hard disk drive must render the track's waveform—a red progress bar appears at the bottom of the audio track, and the waveform appears a bit blurry until iMovie HD renders it. Because this process takes some time, you may want to leave the waveform display turned off unless you need it for precise editing or book adjustments.

Trimming Audio

You tin can trim the start and end of an audio clip using the same direct-trimming techniques described on folio 232. As with video clips, you can reclaim audio that'due south outside of a prune's boundaries past resizing the clip.

Scrubbing Audio

Hither'due south a handy way to locate the exact spot to trim or divide an audio clip. Zoom in on the timeline, and then press the Choice central while slowly dragging the iMovie HD playhead. Your sound plays dorsum, but is slowed downwards. The sound even plays backwards when you drag the playhead to the left. (Beatles fans: import some White Album songs from your iTunes library and have fun.)

Extracting Sound

At times, you may want to use only the audio portion of a clip. For example, you're making a documentary about your grandmother's childhood and you'd like to show old photographs as she talks.

To do this, elevate the video clip to the timeline, then select the clip and choose Extract Audio (1-J) from the Avant-garde menu. iMovie Hard disk copies the sound, places it in Audio Track 1, and mutes the audio in the video prune.

Next, select the video prune in the timeline and press the Delete key. The video vanishes but its audio lingers on, and you tin now position even so images and other clips in the video's place. You tin can also elevate the audio elsewhere in the timeline.

Overlapping Audio in the Timeline

iMovie Hd may provide just two audio tracks, but that doesn't mean you lot're express to 2 simultaneous sounds. You can overlap multiple sound clips in the timeline'due south audio tracks: simply elevate 1 audio prune on elevation of another.

Repeating Sound Effects

You might want some sound effects to play for a long menses of fourth dimension. For example, iMovie HD'south Hard Pelting sound event is less than 10 seconds long, simply maybe you demand 30 seconds of rain sounds for a particular motion picture.

For cases like these, only repeat the audio effect past dragging it from the Sound pane to the timeline as many times as needed. Yous can also duplicate a sound by Option-dragging it in the timeline. If the audio effect fades out (every bit Difficult Rain does), overlap each copy to hide the fade.

You can build magnificently rich audio effect tracks by overlapping sounds. To create a thunderstorm, for example, drag the Thunder audio effect and then that it overlaps Difficult Pelting. Add the Cold Wind sound while yous're at it. And don't forget to use iMovie HD'southward audio controls to fine-melody the relative levels of each effect.

Camcorder Sound Settings

Most miniDV camcorders provide 2 sound-recording settings: 12-scrap and 16-scrap. Always record using the sixteen-bit setting. If your sound and picture synchronization drift over the grade of a long flick, information technology'south probably because you recorded using 12-bit audio.

Muting an Audio Track

You tin can mute an audio track entirely by unchecking the box to its correct in the timeline viewer. If you uncheck the box adjacent to the video rails, iMovie Hard disk drive mutes the video'due south sound. This tin be handy when you're replacing the audio in a series of clips with an audio bed—a segment of background audio that will play beyond multiple clips.

Splitting Audio Clips

You can separate an audio clip into two or more separate clips whose position and volume you can accommodate independently. First, select the audio clip you lot want to separate. Next, position the playhead where yous want to split the clip. Finally, choose Split Selected Sound Clip at Playhead from the Edit carte du jour or press -T.