iMovie Tutorial: Add Music

Video Transcript

"iMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I am in no way affiliated with Apple. Okay, in this clip, we're going to be adding some music to our project. Over here on the far right hand side where your Title tool and Transition tool is you have your musical symbol tool here, and this opens up your sound effects and music browser, so let's click on that. It opens up the music folder on your hard drive in iTunes, and we're going to use this little search box to type in the beginning of the song we want to use, which is called Acoustic Dreams. After we've put in a few letters it comes right up there. If we select this now and bring it to a blank area in our project and drop it you can see that this green area fills the entire project. Basically, that's a quick way to add music to the background of your projects, but we don't want to do that right now. We want to actually attach this music to a specific video clip, so let's hit Command Z to undo that, and what we want to do is take this music clip and put it right over the skyline, and have it stop after the skyline shot, when our vows and rings begin. So, let's grab that and bring it over to right before the skyline clip begins here and let's drop it there. Now, you can see on the bottom here it says Acoustic Dreams in this little green bar here, indicating where the music will appear in our project. Obviously it it's far too long right now. The song is longer than the clip that we want it attached to so we need to trim that, so let's select that, go up to Edit, Trim, or you can hit Command R. See, your little yellow handles for the end point of your clip and your beginning point. We want to drag the end point backwards until it's over the skyline clip. Now, you can hit the little Play button in this window to see how that looks. Stop that. This actually goes a little bit too fast, so let's bring it back a little bit more to right about there. Let's hit done. We want to make an audio adjustment to that now. It's a little bit too loud. So, we want to use our audio adjustment tool, which is this little speaker with the wav form coming out of it. Let's click on that. Now, you can adjust the volume here. You can also do a fade-in and fade-out here, and you can do what iMovie calls ducking, which basically means you can reduce the audio that's on the video clips so it balances more with the music if you want to have both playing at the same time. Okay, we're not going to use ducking right now. We're just going to make a volume adjustment, and we're going to bring this volume down to 45%, and we're also going to add a fade, a manual fade. We're going to have this song fade-up, one second fade and a two second fade-out. Now, you can alls, always use the Revert to original button if you are not happy with the changes you've made and you want to start over. So let's hit done. Let's bring our cursor to right before that clip; hit the space bar to play it. You can see how it fades in. It should also fade-out nice here with our two second fade. Now, you're not limited to just music here. You could add sound effects. Basically, any file that's on your hard drive; any sound file, you can attach to a specific video clip, and make the trimming adjustments as we just did. So, that's how you add music, or for that matter a sound effect to your video project."