Get the most out of audio and sound in your iMovie projects

When shooting raw footage we tend to focus on what the location looks like and the behaviour of our subject, while paying little attention to the scene’s sound. This can result in slick looking videos that are let down by poor audio quality. Digital cameras are geared up to capture HD clips with rich colours and tones, but we’re often forced to rely on our camera’s less effective built-in microphone to record the dialog or ambient sound. If the subject is far away we can zoom in for a close-up, but the in-camera mic still remains at a distance. This can lead to inaudible speech that’s drowned out by camera-handling noise or wind blowing on the camera’s microphone.

In this tutorial we’ll focus on how to quickly boost a clip’s overall sound levels. You will also discover how to apply sound from one clip to another, smoothly bridging separate shots together. We’ll show you how to use iMovie’s Audio Inspector to tweak the quality of the sound and plunder the Music and Sound Effects browser to add some high-quality audio assets. You’ll also learn how to target particular sections of a clip and manually raise or dip sound levels accordingly so that quieter subjects can be as audible as louder ones in the same scene.