Adding Background Music to a Video in iMovie Video Editor for Apple Mac | Tutorial
Adding Background Music to a Video in iMovie Video Editor for Apple Mac | Tutorial
Hi Guys, This is Brandon from Brandon Tech Talk. Today I shall try to answer one of the most frequently asked questions about iMovie. It is about how to add background music to a video in video editor iMovie.
Towards the end of the tutorial , I shall show you how not to allow the background music to drown your voiceover or narration. So, please do stick around till the end.
First things first, I would like to share with you my favorite place from where to download copyright free audio for my videos. It is the YouTube Audio Library. Copyright is a very serious issue when it is about loading content to the Internet. You can get into serious trouble if you violate this issue. I find Youtube audio library the safest place to get audio files for my projects.
Go to / audiolibrary
Here you'll see a list of mp3 audio files. You can see the name of the track, the mood, the artist, duration and also the date when the audio was added to the library.
You can check the licensing by hovering over this icon or clicking it. In this case it says " You can use this audio track in any of your videos, including videos that you monitize. No attribusion is required."
So, this audio track is all good. To listen to the sample of the audio track, you click on the triangle icon in the first column and it will play a short clip. You can hear the music.
Once you have chosen the track, click on the Download button to download the track.
I tend to keep my videos, pictures and audio tracks etc in one folder so that it is easy to drag and drop them into my iMovie project.
I already have a video track and a voiceover track in the timeline from my previous tutorial. I have a link to that video up here somewhere.
In this case I'll drag my downloaded music track to the timeline. We can place it in any of the tracks in the timeline, but it is the best, in my opinion, to drop it in the area meant for music track. It is here below the black line besides the Musical note symbol.
You can drag the track to left or right depending on where you want the music to start.
Once you have done that, make sure the music track is not too loud or too hot. If the track seems to be in the orange area or even yellow area, drag down the audio volume by dragging down this line with your mouse.
Sometimes, the music starts abruptly with the video and it can be quite jarring and doesn't sound good. You can gently fade the music in.
This is done by simply placing your mouse cursor over this round white dot on the left end of the audio track line and when it turns into a left and right arrow, just drag it to the right. The farther you drag, the longer and more gradual the fade in is.
listen to it now. It sounds better.
If your audio track is too long, you can split the audio track and get rid of the extra part. Or you can simply trim the audio.
At the end of the audio track, it is good to fade out the music in the same was way as we did the fade in.
If we listen to it it now, it sounds much better.
As I promised, I am going to give you a very important bonus tip.
Sometimes if you have a voiceover or narration in the video, your background music may drown the voice narration.
This is what I mean. You just saw the video and you noticed that the music has drowned the voiceover to some extent.
We have to reduce the volume of the background music whenever there is voice over. This is called audio ducking.
To apply audio ducking, you must first select your track which has the voiceover. This is very important step. You must see the yellow box around the selected track. Then you click on the speaker icon above the preview window and tick this place where it says "Lower Volume of the other tracks"
You notice that the height of the background music waveform has dropped. That means that the volume has been reduced. Now watch the video clip.
Now the voiceover is heard well and the background music is not a distraction anymore.
So here you have it. Hope this tutorial was useful. If you did find it helpful, please do click on the like button and don't forget to subscribe, if you haven't already.
Thanks, Till next time.. Cheers !
Brandon
Braandon Tech Talk