Quick Tip: Adjust the Audio of a Picture with a Secret Trick

"What, what? Pictures don't have audio right?"

You're right. They don't. And iMovie doesn't think they do either. If you select a still image in your project and bring up the Inspector, you only get two choices: Clip and Video. The audio tab doesn't appear like it does for video clips. At first glance, that seems right because pictures don't have an audio track to adjust.

But what if you are making a slideshow and you want your background audio to duck (get quiet) under a specific picture for dramatic effect? Well, without the audio tab and the ducking checkbox that comes with it, you'd have to go through the very tedious process of dragging in three overlapping copies of your song and cutting them with precision so that they just sound like one copy of the song that gets quiet at just that point.

OR YOU CAN USE THE SUPER-SPECIAL SECRET TRICK!

Alright, fine. It's not that special, but it is really useful. Hopefully you noticed that the above image of the Inspector is a little weird. It's showing you the audio adjustments panel, but there's no Audio tab to select. How did I do this, you ask?

The letter A. Just select the picture in question and hit A on your keyboard. The shortcut works with pictures, even if the Inspector doesn't think it should. So now you can adjust the background audio behind a still image. Duck away!

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How to Do Cutaway Sound in Three Different Ways

We've come a long way, baby. In the not too distant past, doing cutaways was a pain the neck. iMovie '09 makes cutaway audio so easy, you have three different ways to do it, each fitting different circumstances.

So if you are trying to get the audio from clip A to cover clip B, here are three ways to do cutaway sound:

1. Insert a cutaway.

The cutaway feature is the obvious choice really, but not perfect for every circumstance. This works great if you want clip B to remain permanently subordinate to clip A, but doesn't work great if you only want clip A to cover part of clip B. Plus, this is a pain if you want clip A's audio to cover clips B, C, D, etc.

To insert a cutaway, first turn on the Advanced Tools in the iMovie preferences, under the General tab. (Once you turn these on, there really isn't much reason to ever turn them off again.)

With clip A already in your project, select the footage for clip B from the Event Browser. Drag and drop the selection onto clip A, and you will see something like this:

Just choose Cutaway from the menu, and your clip B sits on your clip A, casting its shadow and everything.

Because we want to promote clip A, select the cutaway that is now clip B and either change its volume via the Inspector or just mute it entirely by pressing Shift-Command-M.

2. Use the Precision Editor.

This works best if you want clip A's audio to cover just part of clip B.

Add both clip A and clip B to your project, side-by-side. Double-click on the space between clip A and clip B. (Don't double-click on the transition, if you put one there. If there is a transition between A & B, double-click the space just above or below it.) This brings up the Precision Editor (Let's call it the PE for short).

At the top right corner of the PE, there is a sound wave button. Click that to show the audio tracks that go with your clips. Your PE window should look something like this:

Now that you can see the sound for your clips, you can also change the cut point for the just the sound. To see what I mean, grab the part of the blue cut line that crosses the audio track of clip A. Drag it to the right and it snaps off the big blue line and drags independently. That little blue fragment of the bigger line will be the new cut point for the audio, covering as much of clip B as you want.

3. Extract a clip's audio.

This way works best if you only want clip A's audio without the video or if you want the audio from clip A to extend over multiple clips.

There are two ways to get the audio track out of a clip, which depend on where the clip is:

Clip A is still in the Event Browser. Just drag the selection from the Event Browser and drop it onto another clip. The Drag and Drop Menu appears, then just choose Audio Only. iMovie inserts just the clip's audio as a green audio banner in your project. Drag it wherever you want.

Clip A is in your project. Select the clip and right-click (Control-click) on it. From the shortcut menu that appears, choose "Detach Audio". iMovie will split off the audio into a purple banner, and it also mutes clip A. (That way you aren't playing the audio twice.) Drag the purple banner wherever you want.

Orders of Magnitude
It's a great thing when you go from one painful way of doing cutaway audio to three easy ways, each with their own strengths. If the trend continues, maybe someday we'll all have brain implants and editing iMovie projects will be done while we sleep. Maybe we can expect that in iMovie '63.

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How to Edit to the Beat

Just looking at the title to this post makes me think of some sort of nerd version of a Gloria Estefan song. Hmm. Come to think of it this post is especially well suited for Gloria Estefan songs.

What follows is, in my opinion, the one feature that should have been demoed at MacWorld but wasn't. Seriously, this feature is awesome. Here is how to edit to the beat of a song.

Like I said, this feature didn't get much attention at MacWorld, and I am stunned that it hasn't gotten more attention since. We all need it and will use it. My rigorous (entirely anecdotal) survey (sample of 1) of home video projects reveals that most of us don't make home videos, we make home music videos. And it's no wonder. Kids running around Disneyland are a lot cuter if they are doing it to Bibbity Bobbity Boo.

Enter iMovie '09 and the beat marker. To sum up how this works, iMovie will now allow you to premark beats (or any point in an audio track for that matter) so that footage and photos will autofit to the beats you mark. This feature, by the way, has a serious wow-factor as you actually use it.

Before you do anything, though, click on the View menu and select "Snap to Beats", or just hit command-U.

Pick a Track, Any Track.
Start a new project then add a song to it. Once you've done this, your project will look a lot like this.

Experienced iMovie users will recognize that the song won't go anywhere without a video track, as iMovie automatically ends your project when the video ends (and not when the song ends). But this doesn't mean that you can't do stuff to the song in the meantime. If you click the gear icon on the track, you can select "Clip Trimmer" from the menu that appears. Once you do, your event footage is replaced by a window that looks something like this:

Pay particular attention to that little music note in the top right corner. That is a draggable beat marker, which works just like chapter markers and comment markers. Dragging is great and all, but I find it a lot simpler to just hit the "M" key on the keyboard. Alternatively, you can right click on the spot you want to mark and choose "Add Beat Marker" from the menu that appears. The actual markers appear as thin, vertical, white lines with a dot in them.

Now here is where it gets pretty fun. Start the audio track playing from the beginning. As the song plays, just tap the M key for every beat where you want to cut to a new shot. Go ahead and boogie while you do it. No one is watching.

Once you have done this through the whole song, you can take a moment to fix your mistakes. For the beat impaired, the handy soundwaves can often point you to the right spot. Beat markers are draggable even after you have placed them. You can remove them entirely by dragging them off of the top or bottom of the Clip Trimmer window. If you want to start over, just right click and choose "Remove All Beat Markers".

A useful tip: Usually if you are cutting right on the beat, your video cut will actually appear to be late. If you can practice tapping the beats just barely before the beats, your cuts will look just right.

Also, don't group your beat markers too closely together unless you are trying to get a very fast-paced effect. Once you are happy with all of the beat placements, click "Done" in the top-right corner of the Clip Trimmer.

Video Goes Here
You should be back in your Event Browser now, having a basically blank project awaiting some footage. Go ahead and select a length of footage then add it to the project above.

Voila. There it is. iMovie cut the end off the footage you selected and added it to the project. Try it with a photo now. Isn't that cool?

After very little work, you will have a project that looks something like this:

Notice how the beat markers show up in your project to remind you why the cuts are taking place there. Having them show up directly in your project allows you to refer to them in case you want to edit around them or want something in the middle of a clip happen at the beat. (Notice how in the second line on my project I extended a clip through one of my beat markers.)

What if the video isn't showing exactly what you want when the cut takes place? Not a problem. Just select the gear icon on the video clip and choose "Clip Trimmer". There you will be able to move the edit left or right to make sure you are seeing what you want to see. Just don't adjust the time unless you want to override the beat marker.

Not Just for Cuts
Beat markers work with pretty much everything else you might do in your project:
1. Titles, either the beginning or end of them, will be magically drawn to beat markers. This is also true of cutaways.
2. Layover audio tracks that display as flags under your video, in addition to the background-style audio track I used, work with beat markers as well. Beat markers inserted into layover tracks will snap to the beginnings and ends of clips, titles, cutaways, etc.
3. Beat markers even have the same effect in the Precision Editor.

Mistakes Were Made...
One of the really annoying things about previous iMovie versions is that as you edited to the beat manually, a tiny change would have cascading consequences. Multiple edit points could be thrown out of whack. iMovie '09 tries not to let that happen. If you adjust or delete a clip, you get this message:

It's nice to be warned, but iMovie will continue to warn you as you make changes. The dialog will stop appearing once you turn off Snap to Beats from the View menu.

Fun AND Functional
Before beat markers, editing a movie to music was pretty time consuming. Beat markers in iMovie '09 are a big time saver, but also pretty fun.

Enough of this, back to your boogie.

EDIT: Per Nathan's request in the comments, I uploaded my project from this post to YouTube. The shakiness of the footage is explained by the 10x zoom in the tiny camera I was shooting with (a Canon TX1). That, and an absolutely crazy stadium crowd.

(For those into football, this was the October 2007 Monday night game between Denver and Green Bay. Denver staged a last minute comeback only to have Brett Favre throw a 78-yard touchdown pass in the first play of overtime. I left that out of the video on purpose.) :P

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How to Fade Audio Within a Clip

We've all had it happen, or something like it. In my case, it was an Ultimate Frisbee highlight video I was editing with music and everything. For a number of clips I wanted the music to dominate up until a score, at which point I wanted the hooting and hollering to win out. The handy rubber band in iMovieHD always obliged. Not so in iMovie "the Rebirth". In your case there may have been the occasional car vrooming by or an unwelcome bout of flatulence by Uncle Ralph. Either way, just because the rubber band ran off doesn't mean your hopes did too.

Okay, being completely honest you can't fade audio, or "duck" audio, within a clip, but you can accomplish the same effect. Another caveat is that this How To does not cover all audio editing issues you will face. This is just about audio levels in general and you may come across issues with audio levels that this post does not address.

Here is how to fade audio in iMovie '09.

Video Killed the Radio Star
Editing audio levels in iMovie '09 is very "video-centric." In iMovieHD, editing audio always involved going to the actual audio track and making changes. If you wanted a track to be quieter than another track, you reduced the volume on that track. With iMovie '09, you will have a much easier time by generally focusing on making audio changes to the video track. Put your song in place. Put your sound effects in place. Once they are in place, focus your audio level editing on the video tracks. This might seem counter-intuitive to you like it did to me, but it helps me focus on how the new iMovie works.

How do I make the song quieter than the video?
First it's important to understand how audio ducking works in iMovie '09. In the interest of simplicity, Apple automated the audio ducking process. Instead of having to manually fade an audio track in a sound or video clip, iMovie will subordinate one track to the other depending on the audio settings for a given clip. This is pretty reasonable, as long as you like the actual levels iMovie gives to the quieter track.

To auto-duck other audio tracks, select the clip you want to dominate and either hit the letter "A" or select the "Adjust Audio" button.

That will bring up this floating window:

Notice that I have already checked the box titled, "Reduce volume of other tracks." You, too, will need to check that box. Once checked, all other audio tracks that run during that video clip will fade to become quieter and then, when the clip is finished, will fade back up to full volume.

To this you may say, "Wow! That's great. No more fiddling around with the sound levels. All is as it should be." I suspect a lot of you are saying, "Boo! Bad iMovie! Who's in charge here? I am the director of this movie, not some algorithm!"

Well, if you are really picky about your audio levels, editing the audio of the sound track itself looks to be a much messier operation if you want to make the change for only the portion of the clip. For a song, from what I can tell it would involve actually importing the song three times and trimming each of the three copies of the song to the particular fade points, reducing the volume of the middle copy, and lining all three songs up in the "Arrange Music Tracks" window. Even then, I don't think the audio would fade, but just drop off then jump back up. The auto-ducking option suddenly makes me feel a lot less picky.

Of course, if you want to fade an entire song, you can select that song, open the "Audio Adjustments" window I mentioned earlier, and just reduce the volume on the volume slider.

What if I want to duck more than one clip?
You can prioritize the audio on as many clips as you like. To do this, you could use the old fashioned way and, while you have the audio adjustment window open, click on the each of the other video clips and check the same "Reduce volume of other tracks" button. Or, you could use the fancy-new-super-duper-mega-cool way and select the first clip you prioritized, press "Command-C" to copy the settings of that clip, and then select each of the other clips and press "Option-Command-U" to paste the audio adjustment to those clips. (The "audio paste" ability can also be accessed in the Edit menu under "Paste Adjustments".) Now that you have done that, you can feel totally ridiculous because the fancy-new-super-super-mega-cool way took the same amount of time and effort. Curse this new iMovie and its inability to select multiple clips at once!

(An Aside: Selecting video clips for adjusting audio has a slightly confusing UI-thing going on. Consider the following:

If I select a clip and open the "Audio Adjustments" window, I will get this. This looks normal.

If I then immediately click on another clip to edit its audio, I get this. This is confusing. For which clip am I editing the audio? The one on the right with the fainter yellow border.

If I had originally selected only part of a clip to edit its audio and then open the "Audio Adjustments" window, I get this. This is a little weird, but it at least tells me that I am editing audio for the entire clip.

This is behavior I don't expect to continue into future versions of iMovie because it will probably change as iMovie's audio editing abilities are improved.)

How do I make the video quieter than the song?
You might think that all you need to do is select the entire music track and choose the "Reduce volume of other tracks" checkbox. It doesn't work. That option is greyed out for music tracks. Lame.

Again, focus on the video clips, not the audio tracks. In this case, you want to select the video clip you want to be quieter than the music and, upon opening the "Audio Adjustment" window, reduce the volume on that clip by moving the volume slider to the desired amount. iMovie knows to fade the clip, so don't worry about a sudden volume change when your movie gets to that point.

If you want to do the same to multiple clips, you might want to use the "audio paste" feature I described above. It's not much of a time-saver, but will help you be more consistent. If instead you decided to drag the volume slider for each clip, it opens the opportunity to get different levels between clips.

Quick Tip: If you plan ahead, you can save your self a little monotony in changing the audio levels for a lot of clips. Before you begin adding video clips to your project, select the source video you are using in the Event Browser and make the audio adjustments you need. All of the clips you drag into your project from the source video will land in your project with the same audio adjustments.

How do I make these changes within a clip?
You can't. iMovie can only make audio changes to entire clips. This doesn't mean you can no longer get the same result. The trick is to create a new clip for the range of video you need to adjust. Odds are you want to make sure your audio adjustments cover a very specific range of audio. If you haven't already seen it, I covered how to make frame-precise edits in another post. Go read that if you need help making accurate video edits.

How to make frame-precise edits

The easiest way to make a new clip for a range of video is to use the "Split Clip" ability from the Edit menu.

This will take the range of video you selected and make three clips: the video before your selected range, the selected range itself, and the video after your selected range. If you make a mistake in splitting, just select the middle clip and choose "Join Clip" from the Edit menu.

Once you have made a new clip from the range of video you need to fade up or down, just select the new clip, open the "Audio Adjustments" window, and do what you need to do.

The rubber band won't bounce back
Looking over this How To, many people can complain that the rubber band was more elegant, intuitive, and accurate. They're right. For example, you can't extend an audio fade for over a second or two. Nor can you easily adjust the audio levels of multiple tracks all in the same window. In spite of these reasons, I don't think that the rubber band will make a comeback in iMovie. In its place, I hope this How To helps.

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