adding lots of sound effects in iMovie

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adding lots of sound effects in iMovie

I'm working on a short film in iMovie that calls for a ton of sound effects. The usual approach is to drag individual audio clips of these sounds from the media library into the workspace and align them with the appropriate moments on the timeline. The problem is the sheer number of sounds. For example, if I need to do a series of 25 footsteps as a cartoon character walks over broken glass, I have to pull that sound into the workspace 25 times, and it's even more complicated if I want to use a variety of footsteps. My dream is to use some app that lets you assign sound effect (audio) samples to keys on your keyboard, so that you can "play" them, live, as you watch the video unfold, recording them to a single track and then dragging that track (the effects track) onto the workspace and line them up with the video. Anyone know how I would do that?

MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Jan 19, 2020 3:09 PM

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Answer 1

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Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Jan 20, 2020 12:57 PM in response to greenmountainstu

Hi,

I am not aware of any software that allows audio effects to be assigned to keys. There may be some out there. I just don't know.

When working with complex video segments it sometimes helps to create auxiliary projects to help with the editing. So, for example, you would create your master project with all the video clips in it. Then create a new auxiliary project containing only your 25 footstep cartoon character footage, plus one of the footstep audio effect clips. You could then do a Select/Copy of the audio effect clip and do repetitive Edit/Paste to replicate it in the time line. After doing five repetitions you could shift-select all five of the audio clips as a batch, and then Edit/Copy all five at once, and Edit/Paste repetitively all five at once. After adjusting the position of the audio clips to match your video clip, you would have the option of sharing out the movie as a Video/Audio movie or sharing it out as an Audio Only movie (an option in the share box). An Audio Only movie share out would leave you with a sound track that you could import into your master project and adjust to the segment of video that comprised the 25 footsteps. If you instead shared out as a Video/Audio movie, you could drag it into your master project and substitute it for the soundless footsteps segment.

I'm sure that the may be other work flows that could be used.

-- Rich

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adding lots of sound effects in iMovie

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