8.5. Scoring in GarageBand If you own iMovie, you also own GarageBand, which is a sophisticated program for creating your own polished-sounding musical compositions. Even if you can't carry a tune, you can still drag and drop bits of prerecorded snippets (GarageBand comes with thousands of them, played on all different instruments), guaranteed that they'll all sound good together. And if you know something about music, you can use GarageBand as a digital recorder that lets you record and edit live performances from musical instruments or MIDI instruments (like synthesizers). All of this has always been true of GarageBand. What a crime, then, that iLife included one program for editing movies, and another perfectly suited to creating movie soundtrackswith no way to use them together! In iLife '06, GarageBand can import your iMovie masterpiece and play it right on the screen while you build your composition. It's a junior version of the system used by composers of Hollywood soundtracks . Using this technique, you can tailor the background music precisely to the finished movie, making the volume swell at just the right moments, adding crescendos or cymbal crashes to match the visuals, building up to the punch line in the dialogue, and so on. Because the movie plays right on the screen, you're no longer shooting blind, hoping that the musical moments will line up with the visual ones. LOST TREASURE
Importing Music from a CD | | Until iMovie 6 came along, you could import songs from a CD directly into iMovie. You could just insert your favorite music CD (Carly Simon, Rolling Stones, the Cleveland Orchestra, or whatever), choose the track you want to swipe, and the deed was done. That feature has mysteriously disappeared from iMovie 6. Now you're supposed to switch into iTunes, import the CD into your music collection there , and then return to iMovie to import it. (You'll probably have to quit and reopen iMovie to make it "discover" the changes in the Tunes list.) |
Here's the drill. -
When your movie looks complete in iMovie, choose Share  GarageBand . The Share dialog box appears, explaining what's about to happen. (Here's where you can turn on "Share selected clips only," if you liketo score only part of the piece.)
Note: You can also begin this process from within GarageBand. Start with a music-only GarageBand project. Click the Media button (  ) to open the list of iMovie projects. (They show up here only if you've saved them into your Home Movies folder.) Drag the movie into the large gray tracks area of GarageBand.
Click Share . You arrive in GarageBand. As shown in Figure 8-5, a "filmstrip" view of your movie appears in the top track, the audio track appears just underneath, and a playback window appears at the upper-right corner of your screen. Figure 8-5. GarageBand 3 can import an entire iMovie project (slowly, and with some stuttering on slower Macs). Now it's easy to write a score that's precisely suited to the video.
One cool trick: You can slow down the tempo for ease in performing. The movie even slows down to match. (The Tempo control can't be adjusted, however, until you first close the information pane by clicking the  button.)  You navigate GarageBand pretty much the same way you navigate iMovie. Press the Space bar to start and stop playback, use the arrow keys to jump one measure at a time, press the Home key to rewind to the beginning, and so on. -
Build the music . GarageBand 3 could be a book in itself, but here's the supercondensed summary of the summary: Click the eyeball icon to see all the different categories of prerecorded loops (musical building blocks) that you can drag directly upward into new tracks beneath your video. Once installed, grab the upper-right corner of one of these loops to make it repeat over and over, for as long as you drag to the right. (This works well with drum parts .) If you have a MIDI instrument connected to your Mac (usually a musical keyboard or synthesizer), choose Track New Track, click Software Instrument, and click Create. Now you can choose an instrument sound from the list that appears at lower right, and then click the round red Record button to begin recording as you play. You can even use the Tempo control (hold your mouse down on the digits) to make the movie play back more slowly, so that you have a better chance at a perfect performance. After youre finished playing, you can crank the tempo back up to its original speed. Finally, you can record live sounds, like your own singing or saxophone playing. Choose Track New Track, click Real Instrument and then Create, and then choose a reverb preset from the list at lower right (like Female Basic or Male Rock Vocals). Click the round red Record button to begin recording. GEM IN THE ROUGH
The Podcast Studio You Didn't Know You Had | | Podcasting is the art of creating amateur radio shows that you post online for all the Internet world to hear. Podcasts are popular because they're free, they don't have ads, and they permit interesting but otherwise undiscovered amateurs to reach an audience. And ever since Apple got its mitts on podcasting, finding and subscribing to podcasts is incredibly easy: Open iTunes, listen to some podcast samples in the organized category lists of the Music Store, and click Subscribe when you find a good one. Thereafter, your iPod will always contain the latest version after every sync with your Mac. But now that iPods also display video, video podcasts are growing in popularity. These are amateur TV broadcasts, equally unpolished and uneven in quality, but equally likely to include some offbeat gems. And in iLife '06, iMovie and GarageBand make a terrific video-podcast studio. In fact, if you have a Mac with a built-in iSight camera, you even have the equipment list taken care of. You can record yourself talking right into the camera, as described in Section 4.4.3; add credits and a fade in/fade out; export to GarageBand to add sound effects and music; and finally send the whole thing to iWeb for publishing online. (Remember to visit GarageBand Preferences Export, before using the Share Send Podcast to iWeb command to set up the quality and compression options.) The tools are all before you. Now all you need is a good agent. | Any kind of live recording (as described in the preceding two paragraphs) produces audio clips that work exactly like audio clips in iMovie. You can drag them around, chop them up, copy and paste them, and so on. -
When the musical soundtrack is complete, export the result . There are all kinds of things you might want to do with your finished, scored movie. To send the audio back into the original iMovie project, choose Share Send Song to iTunes (while still in GarageBand). Return to iMovie, and bring the completed audio track back into the project exactly as described in Section 8.4. (Youll probably want to delete the audio bits that are already in your project, or at least turn off their track or mute them, so you don't get doubling.) Maybe your goal was to score a video podcast you've recorded. In that case, choose Share Send Podcast to iWeb. (iWeb, of course, is the new iLife program that lets you build Web pages, podcasts and blogs . It works best if you have a $100-per-year .Mac account, because then you can publish the result on the Web with a single click on the Publish buttonbut if you maintain your own Web site, you can also export iWeb's creations as traditional HTML documents and media files that you upload to your site manually.) Or you could burn the whole thing onto a DVD; in that case, choose Share Send Movie to iDVD. At that point, iDVD opens automatically and installs the movie as a button on the main menu screen; continue as described in Chapter 15. Finally, you can export the result as a QuickTime movie by choosing Share Export as QuickTime Movie. Before you do, however, pay a visit to the GarageBand Preferences dialog box; on its Export pane, you can specify how you want the movie compressed. Chapter 12 covers these options in detail. |
