8.3. Recording Narration If anyone ever belittles iMovie for being underpowered, point out an iMovie feature that isn't even available in most expensive video-editing programs: the ability to record narration while you watch your movie play. If your Mac has a microphone, you can easily create any of these effects: -
Create a reminiscence. As the footage shows children playing, we hear you saying, "It was the year 2005. It was a time of innocence. Of sunlight. Of children at play. In the years before the Great Asteroid, nobody imagined that one 6-year-old child would become a goddess to her people. This, then, is her story." This technique of superimposing an unseen narrator's voice over video is called a voice-over. It's incredibly popular in TV, commercials, and movies (such as Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty, and of course, the Look Who's Talking movies). -
Identify the scene. Even if your movie isn't one with a story line, iMovie's narration feature offers an extremely convenient method of identifying your home movies. Think about it: When you get photos back from the drugstore, the date is stamped across the back of each photo. In years to come, you'll know when the photos were taken. Video cameras offer an optional date-stamp feature, tooa crude, ugly, digital readout that permanently mars your footage. But otherwise , as they view their deteriorating VHS cassettes in 2025, most of the world's camcorder owners will never know where, why, or when their footage was shot. Few people are compulsive enough to film, before each new shot, somebody saying," It's Halloween 2003, and little Chrissie is going out for her very first trick-or- treating . Mommy made the costume out of some fishnet stockings and a melon," or whatever. Using iMovie, thought, it's easy to add a few words of shot-identification narration over your establishing shot. (To find out the time and date when the footage was shot, just double-click the clip.) -
Provide new information. For professional work, the narration feature is an excellent way to add another continuous information stream to whatever videos or still pictures are appearing on the screen. Doctors use iMovie to create narrated slideshows, having created a Movie Track filled with still images of scanned slides (see Chapter 9). Realtors feature camcorder footage of houses under consideration, while narrating the key features that can't be seen ("Built in 1869, this house was extensively renovated in 1880"). And it doesn't take much imagination to see how lawyers can exploit iMovie. 8.3.1. Preparing to Record Your Mac's microphone takes one of two forms: built-in or external. The built-in mike, a tiny hole in the facade of the iMac, eMac, or PowerBook, couldn't be more convenientit's always with you, and always turned on. If your Mac doesn't have a built-in microphone, you can plug in an external USB microphone (see the Apple Products Guide at www.guide.apple.com) or a standard microphone with the help of an adapter (like the iMic, www.griffintechnology.com). 8.3.2. Making the Recording Here's how you record narration: -
Click the clock icon so that you're looking at the Timeline Viewer. You'll do all your audio editing in Timeline view. -
Drag the Playhead to a spot just before you want the narration to begin. You can use all the usual navigational techniques to line up the Playhead: Press the Space bar to play the movie, press the right and left arrow keys to move the Playhead one frame at a time, press Shift-arrow keys to make the Playhead jump 10 frames at a time, and so on. -
Open the Audio panel, if it's not already open . You do so by clicking the Audio button, shown in Figure 8-3.  | Figure 1-3. To summon the narration controls, click the Audio button. If your microphone is correctly hooked up, the round, red Record Voice button is available. (Otherwise, it's dimmed.) Just beside the Record button is a live "VU" level meter. Test your setup by speaking into the microphone; if this meter twitches in response, you're ready to record. | | -
Click the round, red Record Voice button and begin to speak. You can watch the video play as you narrate.
Note: If the level meter isn't dancing as you speak, the problem may be that your Mac is paying attention to the wrong audio input. Choose   System Preferences, and click the Sound icon. Click the Input tab, then click the microphone input that you want to use. When youre done, quit System Preferences.
If the level meter bars are dancing, but not farther than halfway across the graph (see Figure 8-3), then your narration isn't loud enough. On playback, it'll probably be drowned out by the camcorder audio track. To increase the volume, open System Preferences, click Sound, and click the Input tab to make sure that your input volume slider is at maximum. If that's not the problem, your only options are to lean closer to the microphone, speak louder, or use an external microphone. (You can learn tricks for boosting the volume of audio tracks later in this chapter, but it's much better to get the level right the first time.) -
Click Stop to complete the recording. Now a new stripe appears in the upper soundtrack, already highlighted, bearing the name Voice 01, like the one shown in Figure 8-1. Drag the Playhead to the leftto the beginning of the new recordingand then press the Space bar to listen to your voice-over work. If the narration wasn't everything you hoped for, it's easy enough to record another "take." Just click the stripe representing your new recording and then press Delete to get rid of it. Then repeat the process. 8.3.3. Choosing from Separate Takes If you like what you recorded, but think that you might be able to do better, you don't have to delete the first one forever. You can record the new take and then compare the two. In fact, iMovie offers four different ways to do so: -
Use a temporary "shelf." Drag the newly recorded audio clip (the stripe) to another spot in the Timeline Viewer. For example, if you drag it far to the right, beyond any other existing sound clips, you've just stashed it on a makeshift "shelf." Now move the Playhead back to the correct spot and rerecord the narration. By dragging the two resulting sound clips around, or by using the Cut and Paste commands, you can try out one, then the other. -
Cut and paste. Alternatively, after recording the first take, click its clip and then choose Edit Cut. Record the new take. If you dont like it, you can always delete it and then paste the original onewhich has been on the invisible Clipboard all this timeback into place. -
Park it elsewhere. You can also drag the narration clip onto the other audio track, where you can mute it either by turning off the track's checkbox or by setting the clip's volume to zero. -
Use the Undo command. Finally, don't forget that you can always use the Edit Undo command several times in succession. If you delete the first take, rerecord, then decide that you preferred the original take, just choose Edit Undo Record from Microphone, and then choose Undo Clear. In fact, if you can keep your takes straight, you can utilize the unlimited Undo command to try several different takes. You can edit and adjust the resulting sound clip just as you can other sounds in iMovie. See "Editing Audio Clips" later in this chapter for details. |
