Using sound effects in Apple iMovie

To view a list of sound effects in iMovie, click the Audio button above themtimeline and choose iMovie Sound Effects from the menu at the top of thenaudio pane. A list of soundneffects appears (as shown in Figure), includingbstandard sound effects as well as special Skywalker Sound Effects that were new with iMovie 3. Skywalker Sound, as you may know, is the brainchild of George Lucas of Star Wars fame, and the sound effects included with iMovie are very high-quality. To preview a sound effect, choose it from the list and click Play in the audio
pane. To use a sound effect in your project, simply click-and-drag it to an audio track in the timeline. You can trim and adjust the volume of sound effects just as you would any other audio clip.

Working with sound effects

Sound effects can really separate a good movie from a great movie. I suggested that if a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a sound is worth a thousand pictures. Consider how various sound effects can affect the mood of a scene:

• A quiet room somehow seems even quieter if you can hear the subtle ticking of a clock.
• Applause, cheering, or laughter suggest how the viewer should feel about an event in the movie.
• Chirping birds suggest peace and serenity.
• Footsteps make movement seem more real, even when the feet are not shown in the video image.

Those are just a few examples, but you get the idea. You can create and record your own sound effects if you want. Fortunately, most video-editing programs now come with ready-to-use libraries of common sound effects to enhance your movie projects.

Adjusting volume dynamically

Believe it or not, I very seldom adjust the overall volume of an entire clip or track. Usually I prefer to adjust volume dynamically throughout the clip. Adjusting volume dynamically allows me to fine-tune audio to better match other things that are going on in the project. I adjust volume dynamically at times like these:

• Narration is about to begin: I may reduce the volume of background music a bit so that the spoken words are more easily heard.
• The sound changes between video clips: Such a change often sounds abrupt or harsh. I can reduce that by fading audio in at the beginning of the clip, and fading it out at the end. Studio has handy Fade In and Fade Out buttons, which automatically make fade adjustments to the audio rubberbands for a clip.
• I can eliminate unwanted sounds from a clip: For example, the Scene 1 sample clip from the companion CD-ROM shows a motorcycle passing by the camera on a racetrack. But the beginning of the clip has the sound of another motorcycle that is actually behind the camera. I can eliminate the sound of that other off-camera motorcycle by dynamically adjusting volume as I’ve done in Figure.

Dynamic volume adjustment is where audio rubberbands really come in handy. Click once on a rubberband for one of your audio clips. When you click the rubberband, you’ll notice that a little dot appears. You can click-anddrag that dot up or down to adjust the volume of the clip. Not only can you place as many dots as you can squeeze onto a rubberband, you can also move those dots around on the rubberband to make constant adjustments throughout the clip. Like real rubberbands, audio rubberbands are stretchy and can be moved quite a bit, but unlike real rubberbands, they don’t snap back when you stop moving them. Play around a bit with the rubberbands to see just how fun volume adjustments can be!
Those little dots on audio rubberbands act like pins to hold the bands in place. If you want to get rid of a dot, click-and-drag it off the top or bottom of the clip. Twang! The dot will disappear and the rubberband will snap back into place.

Adjusting overall volume

Modifying the overall volume for an audio clip or a whole track is pretty simple, but the procedure varies a bit depending on which program you are using.
In Apple iMovie, follow these steps:

1. Click a clip to select it. (To adjust multiple clips simultaneously, hold down the Ô key as you click each clip.) Be careful not to click the purple rubberband line. If you accidentally click the rubberband and a dot appears on the line, press Ô+Z to undo the change.
2. With the desired clip(s) selected, adjust the Volume slider leftward to reduce volume or right to increase volume.

As you adjust the slider , you see the rubberband lines move up or down.
Pinnacle Studio provides a variety of volume controls in the audio toolbox, as you can see in Figure. To open this toolbox, click an audio clip in the timeline and choose Toolbox➪Change Volume. The toolbox contains a separate set of controls for each of the three audio tracks:

• Left: Main audio track
• Middle: Sound effects/narration track
• Right: Background music track

To adjust the overall volume for an entire track, turn the knob at the top of the track’s volume controls. As you turn the knob, you see the blue audio rubberband line for the entire track move up or down in the timeline. If you want to adjust the volume for a specific clip, place the play head at the very beginning of that clip in the timeline and move the volume slider for that track up or down. Then place the play head at the end of the clip, and adjust the volume slider back to the middle to restore the volume of subsequent clips in the timeline.
You can also mute whole tracks in the timeline if you want. In iMovie, simply remove the check mark from the right side of the timeline next to the track you want to mute. In Studio, click the icon at the top of the volume controls in the audio toolbox to mute a given track.

Adjusting volume

Perhaps the most common thing anyone does to audio tracks is adjust the volume. As you preview your project, you may notice that the background music seems a little too loud or the narration isn’t loud enough. You may also have sounds in the main audio track that you want to get rid of altogether, without affecting the rest of the audio clip. Virtually all video-editing programs allow you to adjust volume in two different ways:

• You can adjust the overall volume of an entire clip or track.
• You can adjust volume dynamically within a clip, making some parts of the same clip louder and some parts quieter.

If you don’t have audio clips of your own to work with. Place all three scenes in the timeline in sequential order.
To begin adjusting volume in iMovie, place a check mark in the Edit Volume check box at the bottom of the timeline. In Studio, click the clip you want to modify and then choose Toolbox>Change Volume so that Studio’s audio toolbox appears above the timeline.
Each program displays audio rubberbands across audio clips. Rubberbands aren’t just for holding together rolled up newspapers or your hairdo; in video programs, they show you the volume for an audio clip, and they allow you to make dynamic adjustments to the volume throughout the clip.

Adding audio to the timeline

Adding audio to the timeline is pretty easy. Record and import your and then simply drag-and-drop it to an audio track.
Video Sound effects Background music You can move clips by dragging them left or right in their respective tracks, and you can trim them by dragging on the edges. In fact, you’ll find that editing audio tracks is a lot like editing video tracks. Sometimes you’ll want to edit main audio independently of the video clip with which it is associated. In iMovie, first extract main audio from the video clip by selecting the clip and choosing Advanced>Extract Audio. In Studio, click the track header on the left side of the timeline to lock either the main video or main audio track. When the main video track is locked, you can edit the main audio track without affecting clips in the video track. One nice feature of iMovie is that it allows you to link audio clips to video clips. For example, suppose you’ve recorded some narration to go along with a video clip. If you decide to move that video clip to a different part of the timeline, you have to move the narration clip as well. If the two clips are linked, moving one will also move the other. To link an audio clip to a video clip in iMovie, follow these steps:

1. Position the audio and video clips that you want to link in the timeline.
2. Move the play head to the beginning of the audio clip.
3. Click once on the audio clip to select it.
4. Choose Advanced>Lock Audio Clip at Playhead.

A yellow pin appears on both the audio and video clips. If you move the video clip to a different place in the timeline, the linked audio clip moves with it. To unlink the clips, select the audio clip and choose Advanced>Unlock Audio Clip.

Understanding audio tracks

A movie program can play several sources of audio at once. For example, while you hear the audio that was recorded with a video clip, you may also hear a musical soundtrack and some narration that was recorded later. When you’re working on a movie project in your editing software, each of these unique bits of audio would go on its own separate audio track in the timeline. Most editing programs provide audio tracks for main audio (the audio that was recorded with a video clip), music, and narration. More advanced editing programs offer you many more audio tracks that you can use any way you see fit. Adobe Premiere, for example, can provide up to 99 separate audio tracks in the timeline. Although it’s difficult to imagine anyone actually needing that many audio tracks, having too many is better than not having enough. Pinnacle Studio provides three separate audio tracks. To lock a track in Studio, click the track header on the left side of the timeline.
Apple iMovie handles audio tracks a little differently, but you still have essentially three audio tracks to work with. The main audio track is actually hidden inside the video track. Two other audio tracks handle sound effects and background music. You can extract audio from video clips if you want (simply select the clip in the timeline and choose Advanced>Extract Audio), but doing so causes the main audio to take up one of the other two audio tracks. You can enable or disable audio tracks by using the check boxes on the right side of the timeline. This is helpful during editing when you want to hear just one or two audio tracks at a time.