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As you rush to trim video clips, create transitions, and add some cool special effects to your movies, you can easily overlook the audio portion of the project. But the audio portion of a movie is nearly as important — or as important, depending on whom you ask — as the video portion.
Most movie-editing programs follow similar patterns. They all use storyboards and timelines for assembling the project, and most programs have similar windows for organizing and previewing clips. Many programs also have a lot in common when it comes to editing audio. For example, even the most affordable editing programs usually have separate audio tracks in the timeline for background music, narration (or sound effects), and the audio that accompanies the video clips that you have on the timeline.
Many movie-editing programs can also show audio waveforms. A waveform is a line that graphically represents the rising and falling level of sound in an audio clip. You may find waveforms useful because they let you edit your audio visually, often with pinpoint accuracy. By looking at the waveform, you can tell when loud sounds or extended periods of quiet occur.
Although many movie-editing programs use audio waveforms, Apple iMovie isn't one of them. Fortunately, plenty of other programs can display audio waveforms — including Apple Final Cut (both the Express and Pro HD versions), Adobe Premiere Pro, Pinnacle Studio, and Windows Movie Maker.
A movie program can play several sources of audio at once. For example, while you hear the audio that you recorded with a video clip, you may also hear a musical soundtrack and some narration that you recorded later. When you're working on a movie project in your editing software, each of these unique bits of audio 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 on 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, as Figure 1 shows. 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 (simply select the clip on the timeline and choose Advanced --> Extract Audio), but doing so causes the main audio to take up one of the other two audio tracks. Figure 2 shows iMovie's audio tracks. You can enable or disable audio tracks by using the check boxes on the right side of the timeline. You may find these check boxes helpful during editing when you want to hear just one or two audio tracks at a time.
Figure 1: Pinnacle Studio's timeline provides three separate audio tracks.
Figure 2: Apple iMovie provides three audio tracks.
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