Clip audio gets recorded with your video footage. It stays fixed to the clip unless you ask iMovie to “detach” it—see Detach Clip Audio for how and why you’d want to do that.

A lot of iMovie owners like to add music to their movies. It’s a fun way to augment otherwise mundane shots, and can evoke the feeling of the moment. (Think of an end-of-year slideshow set to “Gangnam Style,” or whatever song was big that year.)

To make editing music easier, iMovie can set it as background music, a solid block of audio that sits “under” the clips in your project, playing through everything, no matter how you shuffle the clips around. You can even line up a playlist of several songs; iMovie plays them consecutively, with a nice crossfade in between.

Background music remains steadily in place no matter how you rearrange your footage, but some audio should move with your video. When you add a connected audio clip, you attach an audio file to a specific spot in your video. You’d use connected audio for things like sound effects, to trigger a laugh track, for example, or the roar of applause. As you rearrange your clips during the editing process, the connected audio goes along for the ride.

In addition to the audio built into every video clip, you can add sound to a project from any of these sources:

This chapter covers all these sound varieties.

If “rubber-banding” makes you think of office supplies instead of volume levels, then meet an iMovie tool that’s super useful. (Audio editors call volume adjustments “rubber-banding” because the line you grab to adjust the fade-in and fade-out points in an audio track seems to stretch as you fine-tune those points.)

Finding the Rubber Band

To see the rubber-band tool, turn on the Show Waveforms checkbox, hidden in the Clip Size slider you read about on Phase 1: Review Your Clips (see Figure 11-1).

Note

A “waveform” shows volume changes in your audio. It looks like a bunch of peaks and valleys (see Figure 11-1). Waveforms let you visualize sound changes without having to listen to them.

When you do, iMovie displays an audio track just below your filmstrip. It represents the audio levels for everything in your project that produces sound.

A single, thin line runs horizontally across your waveform, looking as though it wants to chop off their tips (Figure 11-1). That’s the rubber-band tool.

Figure 11-1. Behold the once-missed rubber band! To see a clip’s waveforms and this handy little audio tool, turn on the Show Waveforms checkbox.

Use the Rubber Band

The height of the rubber band determines the volume of your clip. The higher the line, the louder the clip. The band’s starting position, about a third of the way down from the top, is the standard 100% volume. If you drag the line higher or lower, iMovie displays a floating bubble that shows you the new volume level (Figure 11-2).

If all you could do was change the height of the line for the entire clip, there wouldn’t be much point to the tool. (After all, you can change the volume of a clip in the Adjustments pane.) The beauty of it comes when you stretch it up or down on just part of your clip. You can, for example, soften the background music when Grandma Alice tells her story. Alternatively, you can increase the volume when a soft-spoken interviewee appears onscreen.

Figure 11-2. Top: If you drag the entire rubber band up or down, iMovie shows you the new volume level in a floating window. Middle: To adjust the volume for just part of a clip, click and hold the mouse button down until you see a yellow line. Drag the line to select the part of the clip you want; as you do, the line changes to a highlight box. Now you can drag the rubber band inside the box to change the volume for that part of the clip only. Bottom: To adjust the fade for volume changes, making them gradual or abrupt, grab the small yellow diamond on either side of the volume change. Drag them outward to fade gradually, inward to fade abruptly.

To make these adjustments, first select the part of a clip you want to affect. To do that, click the clip and hold down the mouse button until a vertical yellow line appears. Then drag your mouse—as you drag, the yellow line expands into a box that selects the underlying clip fragment (Figure 11-2, middle). Drag the rubber band within that selected area to adjust the volume. You can see the rubber band move up and down as you drag.

Note

Any whole or partial volume adjustments you make in your project are project-specific. That is, other projects that use the same clip don’t see (or hear) the changes. That’s not true, however, for volume changes you make to clips in the Event library. Any volume changes to Event footage affect every project that uses that footage.

Once you deselect the clip fragment by clicking anywhere else in the storyboard, you can see the “stretched” parts of the rubber band, where iMovie fades the volume in or out to reach the fragment’s setting.

To change the length of the fade—that is, to make it gradual or abrupt—grab the little yellow diamonds on either end of the adjustment and drag them horizontally (Figure 11-2, bottom). Dragging them outward makes the volume change more gradually. Dragging them inward makes the volume change more suddenly, which you might do, for example, to make a song pop back in really loudly.

Note

You might have noticed that some of the waveform waves go above the rubber-band line, while most stay below it. That’s because the rubber band just sets the base volume for your clip. Every movie still has loud parts and quiet parts, no matter where you set the volume. The high peaks in your waveforms are the loud parts.

Finally, you can add your own yellow diamonds—iMovie calls them keyframes—by Option-clicking the volume-level line. You can drag these added keyframes the same way you do the iMovie-generated diamonds, and to the same effect—fading the volume in or out.

To delete a keyframe, right-click it and then select Delete Keyframe, or select the keyframe and then choose Edit→Delete Keyframes, or press Shift-Option-Delete.

Anytime you hear competing audio tracks in a movie, the editor has probably dropped the volume in one track so you could hear the sound in the other. (You’ve seen this when actors in a music montage stop for a moment to have a brief discussion. The music dips down so you can understand the dialogue.) This is called ducking, where you “duck,” or drop the volume in, one audio track to make room for the audio in another.

Ducking is a convenient way to make sure your audience hears your audio, regardless of where the rubber band is—that’s because ducking makes the volume adjustments for you. It really all comes down to a checkbox and a slider.

To make sure that one of your audio tracks is always heard, do the following:

To undo the ducking on a track, turn off the “Lower volume of other clips” checkbox.

Before getting into the details of how background music works, you need to add a song to your project. iMovie gives you three ways to do that: via iTunes, Garage-Band, and the Finder.

iTunes

When you have a project open, iMovie displays a list of media sources in the Content Library in the bottom-left corner of the window. One of the options is your iTunes library, where you can tap into your entire iTunes song list, without actually having to open iTunes itself, a real convenience.

When you click iTunes in the Content Library. iMovie replaces the Event browser with a music browser (Figure 11-5) that displays your song list and a waveform representing the currently selected tune. A dropdown menu lets you sort your music by stock iTunes listings (My Top Rated, Recently Played, and so on) or by playlist.

Tip

Playlists are a great way to store music you want to use in your movie. Just create the playlist in iTunes and then choose it from the drop-down menu in iMovie. Voilà! All your movie music in one place.

If you can’t find the song you want, use the search field in the top-right corner of the music browser. As you type, iMovie narrows your choices. You can search song titles, album titles, and artist names all at once. (Typing “fun” would show the results for the band Fun., the album “Funeral” by Arcade Fire, and the song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”)

Note

iTunes holds videos in addition to music, and you can bring those into iMovie through the music browser, too, so long as the movies aren’t copy-protected iTunes purchases or rentals.

Figure 11-5. The music browser. This image shows your iTunes library, which you can see without having to open iTunes itself. You can winnow the song list using the search field, and preview songs here as well.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Fun with Copyright Law

Don’t I break some kind of law when I use iTunes music in one of my movies?

Exactly what constitutes stealing music is a hot-button issue that has tied millions of people (and recording executives) in knots. That’s why some iMovie fans hesitate to distribute their films in places where lawyers might see them—like the Internet.

Frankly, though, record company lawyers have bigger fish to fry than small-time amateur operators like you. You’re perfectly safe showing your movies to family and friends, your user group, and other limited circles of viewers. In fact, Apple encourages you to use iTunes Music Store purchases in your movies. After all, Apple is the one who made them available right in iMovie.

You’ll risk trouble only if you go commercial, making money from movies that incorporate copyrighted music.

Still, if your conscience nags you, you can always use a GarageBand composition (see Garageband). And even if you’re not especially musical, the world is filled with royalty-free music—music that artists compose and record expressly for the purpose of letting filmmakers add it to their work without having to pay a licensing fee every time they do (they pay a one-time fee). Some of it’s even truly free. You’ll find 200 free music pieces in the Jingles folder of your Sound Effects browser, for example, ready to use.

Or check out www.freeplaymusic.com, a website filled with prerecorded music in every conceivable style. You’re welcome to use it in your movies at no charge for noncommercial use.

If that’s not enough for you, visit a search engine like Google (www.google.com), look for music library or royalty-free music, and start clicking your way to the hundreds of sites that offer information about (and audio samples of) music that you can buy and use without fear.

As you go over your list of songs in the music browser, position your mouse over any one of them and a small Play button appears on the left. Click it to play back the song and see its waveform. (Double-clicking the song does the same thing.) A playhead line drifts over the waveform.

You can skim the playhead to any point in the song and hit the space bar to start playback from that spot.

You can add an entire song to your project in two ways. One is to drag the tune from the song list to the very bottom of your storyboard, where you see the clip silhouette that has the musical note in it.

The other is to click the + button in the song’s waveform in the music browser (Figure 11-6). That has the added advantage of automatically trimming the end of your song should it go longer than your project.

You can add multiple songs to your project’s background track. If you do that through the + button in the waveform, iMovie lines them up sequentially. If you already have a background song in your project and drag another one in, iMovie starts playing it at whatever point you drop it, even if it has to trim the song added beforehand.

You can use the green waveform to select just part of a song, too.

Drag the mouse across the waveform to highlight the song section with a yellow border (Figure 11-6). You can refine the selection by dragging either end of the border. Once you finish, click the + button or drag the selection into your project.

Figure 11-6. Top: To add a song to your project, drag it from the list into your storyboard, or click the + button (pictured). Bottom: To add just part of a song, drag in the waveform to select the section you want, and then click the + button; iMovie adds just that part to your project.

Once you have a song in the storyboard, you’re not stuck with it. In fact, the awesome editing-by-reference trick that iMovie does with video (The Concept of iMovie Projects) works on music, too.

To trim a song, move your mouse over the beginning or end of the clip. When you do, iMovie changes your cursor from an arrow to two arrows with a line between them. Drag to trim or extend that part of the song.

That approach isn’t nearly as versatile as the Clip Trimmer, which you can use to fine-tune your track edit, as explained in the sidebar here.

By default, iMovie starts your song at the beginning of your project, but you can drag it to whatever starting point you want.

You change the volume of background music the same way you change the volume of any other clip. Use one of the methods described on Volume Adjustments.

Figure 11-7. You can use the Clip Trimmer to trim audio clips just as you do video clips.

To delete background music, select the clip in your storyboard and then press Delete.

Start with a new project. Drop a background music track into your project, as described on Music.

“Wait a minute!” you may protest. “I don’t even have any video clips in place!” Your concern is justified—your song appears like a lonely green blob in your timeline. But there’s a good reason to put the song in first: You can resize the video clips and photos you place later to match the beat markers you’re about to add to the song. In addition, you can edit the song itself to make audio adjustments (Volume Adjustments) or change its start and end points using the Clip Trimmer (Use the Clip Trimmer).

You can mark beats in your song a couple of ways. As you skim through the song, you can hear and spot (using the song’s waveform) places where the beat would make a well-timed cut. As you line up your playhead on that spot, choose Mark→Add Marker (or press the letter M key on your keyboard).

In addition to tagging beats, mark any spot you want to get special attention as you edit, like a big musical swell or key bit in the lyrics.

The markers show up as tiny blue tags resting on top of your song (Figure 11-8).

Figure 11-8. iMovie’s markers let you identify beats in a song. The markers appear as small, blue tags in your storyboard. You can move them by dragging them around. To delete one, drag it above the clip and then release the mouse button, or right-click it and then choose Delete, or select it and then choose Shift-Control-M.

Alternatively, you might find it a lot simpler to just hit the letter M key as your song plays. That way, you can have all your markers in place by just going through the song.

Play the audio track from the beginning. As it plays, tap the M key on every beat where you want the video to cut to a new shot. (It’s OK to boogie in your chair; no one is watching.)

Once you tap out the whole song, take a moment to review your markers and fix mistakes. Beat markers are draggable, even after you place them. You can remove a marker by dragging it off the top of the clip, or by right-clicking it and selecting Delete from the shortcut menu. There’s no way to get rid of all the markers at once, however. If you want to start over, delete the entire song from your project. Then add the song back into your project and begin again.

Don’t group your markers too closely together unless you’re trying to get a very fast-paced effect. If the video cuts happen too quickly, your viewers won’t be able to absorb them.

Once you’re happy with the beat placements, it’s time to start adding video clips.

You should be back in your Event browser now, having a basically blank project awaiting some footage. Grab a video chunk from the browser and add it to your project.

Now you need to resize it to match the beat. Grab the end of the clip and drag it toward the closest marker. As you get close, the yellow line you’re dragging snaps to the closest marker as though it were magnetized.

Because of a quirk in the way iMovie works, it might look like trimming the video displaces your marker (the marker appears to jump to the right of the yellow border). But when you play back your project, you’ll find that the clip ends right on the beat. Try it with a photo now (Two Ways to Add Photos). Isn’t that cool? (If you don’t see any snapping, make sure you have View→Snapping turned on.)

You can use the Precision Editor (The Precision Editor) to make sure the right moments in your video line up with the right beats. Snapping works here, too.

After very little work, your project will look something like the one in Figure 11-9.

Figure 11-9. To edit to the beat of music, you often need to resize clips to create a cut on the beat.

Notice how the markers show up in your project? That reminds you that you cut to the beat there, in case you want to make an edit that would displace the cut.

With snapping turned on, your markers in place, and your footage added, you can start adding things like titles and sound effects. As you drag these elements around, they, too, snap into position against markers, as though magnetically attracted. (Turn off View→Snapping if this is getting in the way.) You can adjust their timing too, so they match the beats in your project.

What if you added beat markers after you added your footage? Or what if your video doesn’t display the exact image you want on the beat? That’s where the Precision Editor can help.

With your song at the bottom of the project window and all its beat markers in place, double-click any empty space between two video clips to launch the Precision Editor. The Precision Editor covers the basic operation of the editor, but you should know that it offers some handy extras when you work with beat markers (Figure 11-10).

Figure 11-10. With markers in your song and snapping turned on, the Precision Editor takes on a new twist. As you move the transition bubble toward a marker, it snaps to the marker.

To line up a transition with a beat, drag the gray transition bubble around. Each time it approaches a beat marker in the song, the bubble snaps to the marker.

Here’s a rundown of how you could use beat markers in the Precision Editor:

This is a great time to introduce iMovie sound effects, since you’ll almost always use them as connected audio. With a project open, you’ll see the Content Library in the bottom-right corner of the iMovie window. One of the sources listed is Sound Effects.

When you click it, iMovie opens the music browser you saw for iTunes, now full of premade sound effects (Figure 11-11). There are hundreds to choose from, so use the search box and/or the drop-down menu to narrow things down.

Figure 11-11. Apple offers hundreds of royalty-free sound effects, with everything from laugh tracks and canned applause to explosions, telephone rings, and cute little jingles.

To add all or part of an audio track as a connected clip, you have to drag it into your project. (Don’t use the white + button that appears in the waveform preview—that adds the track as background music.) Drop the audio onto your video clip where you want to connect it.

A few things about connected audio clips:

Figure 11-12. A connected audio clip looks a lot like a background music clip, but it has a green flag that shows you when the audio kicks in. If you drag the video clip to another part of your project, the connected audio clip comes with it.

iMovie’s audio effects are really cool and a ton of fun to play with. Want your dad to sound like a mouse? Piece of cake. Want your baby to sound like a robot? Easy-peasy. Want to be able to sing like T-Pain, the rapper who made autotuning famous? You get the idea.

You enhance the audio in your movie one of two ways. If you click the Enhance button in the Viewer toolbar, iMovie makes all the video enhancements it can, along with all the audio enhancements it can make, too.

To work on the audio portion of your movie only, click the Adjust button in the Viewer toolbar and then select the Volume tool (the speaker icon). Click the Auto button there, and iMovie adjusts just your audio track to produce what it thinks is the best sound possible.

Traditionally, an equalizer is a set of sliders that lets you increase or reduce the low, medium, and high tones in an audio track. They’ve been around for years, but most people don’t ever use them.

That’s because most people don’t need them. Usually they show up only in music-playback software like iTunes. If you have decent speakers and the song was recorded professionally, there’s little point in messing around with audio levels. The balancing work has been done for you.

Your camera’s audio, on the other hand, hasn’t been professionally adjusted. As a result, you might find that the bass guitar at the concert you’re (legally) recording sticks out like a sore thumb. That’s where the equalizer comes in handy. You can reduce the low-end sounds to make everything balance out.

iMovie doesn’t want to bother you with sliders, but it still helps you improve a clip’s sound the way an equalizer can. Figure 11-16 shows you the iMovie equalizer menu. You get to it by clicking Adjust, and then the bar graph icon, a.k.a. the “Noise reduction and equalizer” button.

Figure 11-16. To enhance the sound of a video or audio clip, choose one of iMovie’s equalizer presets.

If you’re not sure which Equalizer menu option to choose, try one. If you choose Bass Reduce, for example, the lower-tone sounds in your clip drop away. You can preview the result by clicking a spot in your audio and then pressing the space bar. Change your equalizer setting at any time; iMovie makes the change instantly, with no rendering.

File this feature under “Amazing power turned on with a mere checkbox.” Among iMovie’s many cool tricks, this is one of the coolest. All of us suffer from the problem this feature fixes.

Other than shaky video (Video Stabilization), the surest sign of amateur video is bad audio. Most people pay so much attention to what they’re filming that they tune out the sound they’re recording. So without your even noticing it, your camera’s microphone can pick up the hum of fluorescent lights, the drone of a clothes dryer, or even the whir of its own zoom lens. Professionals know all this, and that’s why they’re famous for shouting, “Quiet on the set!” They know that you can point a camera lens right where you want it, but microphones aren’t so discriminating.

As you’re out and about filming, unless you’ve brought professional audio equipment like a boom mike and a mixing board, you’re using the microphone in your camera. Unfortunately, built-in mics have a reputation for being undiscerning. That is, they generously record any and every sound that hits them. That’s no big deal if you’re recording an interview in a quiet room, but it really stinks if the air conditioner in the room kicks in. The drone in the background makes the whole clip sound like amateur hour.

So if you’re at the beach and just got a great little shot of your 4-year-old singing “Bob the Builder” over his sand castle, you want to hear the singing and not the wind or waves. Here’s where iMovie steps in to save the day. It magically scrubs your audio, removing sounds like waves, fan noise, traffic, and other messiness.

To use this feature, select the audio clip and then click the Adjust button. Choose the “Noise reduction and equalizer” tool (the bar graph) shown in Figure 11-17, and then turn on the checkbox labeled “Reduce background noise.”

Figure 11-17. You can minimize the interference of background noise by checking the “Reduce background noise” box and adjusting the effect with the slider. But don’t overdo it, or your actor will sound like a robot.

Your clip immediately sounds cleaner. If it’s not clean enough (or if it’s too clean to sound real for the surroundings), then move the slider left or right to change the amount of noise reduction.

GarageBand is a music composition program containing dozens of powerful tools. It lets you combine multiple audio tracks, giving you fine control over each track’s sound effects, volume, and even stereo panning.

But if you’re like most people, you’ve never even set foot in GarageBand. (Apple says GarageBand is the second least-used iLife program.) Here’s a crash course:

Because GarageBand is a music program, its greatest strength is its ability to help you create a custom score for your movie. You can actually record or compose music crafted to run in perfect harmony with your video, turning you into a regular John Williams. (Actual musical ability may vary.) GarageBand shows the movie in the timeline, frame by frame, so you know exactly where to add a cymbal crash or a guitar riff.

Here’s a super-condensed review of the different tools for scoring:

When you finish the soundtrack, export the results using the instructions given previously. With enough practice, you might eventually wind up on Steven Spielberg’s speed dial.