Information Echo

Since I switched to Macs one of the features I’ve always enjoyed was iMovie - over the years I’ve taken a great deal of video of family, vacations, events, and whatnot, and it’s nice to be able to take that raw video and occasionally make something semi-professional out of it.

I updated to iMovie 09 a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised to discover two things:

1/ The disaster that was iMovie 08 is behind us - iMovie 09 is vastly superior.
2/ My hard drive camcorder, a JVC Everio, is now supported and imports directly into iMovie seamlessly - no more tedious (and confusing, for many) manual imports and conversions are necessary.

However, today I was editing some video together of a motocross event that we were at last weekend and I found myself unable to do something seemingly simple - reduce the audio level of a soundtrack / music track at a set point. In iMovie 06 it was easy (lets not even talk about iMovie 08), but in iMovie 09 it seemed impossible. I thought it would be as simple as “Splitting” the audio track and then adjusting the audio volume of the resulting new track, but there seemed to be no way.

Sure enough, after quite a lot of Google-Fu, it seems like this is a common (and irritating) complaint with many iMovie 09 users. How Apple could remove such a seemingly important (and simple) feature that was part of iMovie 06 is beyond me, but it’s gone. You can adjust the levels of the primary video clips, but the underlying audio soundtrack is forced to a fixed volume for the entire duration of the track - you can adjust it overall, as well as the fades at the beginning and the end, but want to adjust it in the middle of a track to allow (for example) someone speaking? You’re out of luck.

A lot of further searching found some hack-ish methods that either didn’t work the way I wanted, or just didn’t work at all.

Eventually I discovered my own work around.

I opened up Quicktime and recorded 60 seconds of silence. I exported it as a .wav file, subsequently opened it with iTunes (which imported it, a step that’s necessary for it to show up in the iMovie audio list) and then dragged the clip into my project in iMovie. I lined it up with where I wanted the original soundtrack volume to decrease, and then opened the audio preference settings for the “Silence” clip and then told iMovie to “Reduce volume of other tracks” to 30%, as well as setting the volume level for the silence track to 0%. I suppose one could use any audio track and simply set the volume to 0%, but I had already created my “Silence.wav” audio file by the time I had the revelation.

The result did basically what I wanted to accomplish - the audio fades, albeit a bit fast, but the crossfade durations are not adjustable any longer, another sad omission versus iMovie 06.

Apple, please bring back mid-track audio editing in the next incarnation of iMovie, or at least let people split audio tracks so that volume levels can be adjusted at various points - the current method of doing it just plain stinks!

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