17.6. Sound Effects There's more to a movie soundtrack than music, goodness knows . Fortunately, iMovie also comes with a juicy collection of sound effects, suitable for dropping into your movies. If you choose iMovie Sound Effects from the pop-up menu at the top of the Audio palette, you'll find two flippy triangles , each denoting a collection of professional sound effects. (You don't have to click the triangle to see its contents; you can click directly on the collection's name .) One, called Skywalker Sound Effects, is named for the Hollywood sound studio from which Apple licensed the effects (Birds, Cold Wind, Creek, and so on)a list that's been expanded in iMovie HD. The other, Standard Sound Effects, contains the sounds that began life in iMovie 3 (Alarm, Bark, Crickets, and so on). Across from each sound's name, you see its length, expressed in the minutes:seconds format. 17.6.1. Using a Sound Effect You add a sound to your audio tracks exactly the way you add an iTunes tuneeither by clicking the Place at Playhead button or by dragging the effect's name into either of the audio tracks in the Timeline Viewer. As your cursor moves over a track, the Playheadaccompanied by a cool, fading-out purple stripehelps you see precisely where the sound will begin. Once placed there, the sound effect appears as a horizontal purple bar, just like any other sound clip. (If the sound effect is very short, you may have to zoom in to see it as a bar, using the Zoom slider at the left edge of the screen.) A sound-effect clip behaves like any other sound clip. You can edit its volume in any of the ways described in "Editing Audio Clips," later in this chapter. You can slide it from side to side in the track to adjust where it begins, and even shorten, crop, or split it. 17.6.2. Adding or Removing Sound Effects The list of sound effects in the Sounds palette isn't magical . It's simply a listing of the sound files that came with iMovie. If you know the secret, you can open a special folder and delete, move out, or rename your sound effectsor even install new ones. -
Quit iMovie. In the Finder, open your Applications folder. Control-click the iMovie icon; from the contextual menu, choose Show Package Contents . The iMovie package window appears. You've just discovered , if you didn't already know, that many Mac OS X program icons are, in fact, thinly disguised folders (called packages ) that contain dozens or hundreds of individual support files. You've just opened up iMovie for inspection. -
Open the Contents  Resources folder . Welcome to the belly of the beast . Before you, sit hundreds of individual files, most of them the little graphics that make up the various iMovie buttons , controls, and so on. (If you're really feeling ambitious, you can actually open up these graphics and edit them, completely changing the look of iMovie.) The icon you want is the folder called Sound Effects. It's a folder full of individual sound filesin MP3 formatthat make up the list you see in the Audio palette (Figure 17-5).
Tip: MP3 files are extremely popular among music fans, since they're compact and sound great. Plus, all kinds of computers can read them.Looking for even more sound effects? The Internet is filled with downloadable MP3 files that you can use in your iMovie projects. You might start your search at www.google.com. Perform a search for free sound effects . Many are already in MP3 format; many others are in AIFF format, which you can convert to iMovie-friendly MP3 files using iTunes.
 | Figure 17-5. Left: Deep within the iMovie program itself lies a folder called Sound Effects. Any audio file that you download from the Internet, copy from a sound effects CD, create using a shareware sound-editing program, or save out of a QuickTime movie can become an iMovie "sound effect." Just drop it into this folder and relaunch iMovie.
Right: Whatever audio files you put into the Sound Effects folder (and whatever you call them) determine the list of sound effects you see within iMovie. | | Feel free to reorganize these files. For example, you can throw away the ones you never use. You can also create new folders in the Sound Effects window to create new categories of sound effects in the Audio palette. -
Open iMovie. Click the Audio button. From the pop-up menu above the list, choose iMovie Sound Effects . Each folder in the Sound Effects folder forms its own subcategory of effects here. |
