Digital Commons at Penn State

Editing audio in iMovie 08 consists of being able to trim background music that is pinned to a clip and trimming of sound effects.

To trim background music, you will need to click on the clock icon that apears in the top left of the music in your timeline.

This will then move you into an audio waveform trim mode where you are able to grab the yellow clip edge markers to adjust your start and stop points. Press Done when finished.

If you drag another piece of music to your timeline, it will default to playing immediately after the previous piece.

You can change this by dragging the clip to the right. This will pin the clip to a new starting location. A small pin icon will now appear in the music clip.

You can also re-arrange and unpin music clips in the arrange clips window.

Un-Pinning a clip will cause it to start immediately after the previous audio.

Here the start point has been moved later into the clip. You will also notice that because the video clips are shorter than the complete audio, that only a portion of the audio will actually play. This is represented by the light pink audio waveform. The black waveform area will not play unless you adjust the starting edit point.

Editing of sound effects or any audio that is spotted to a specific location is accomplished by clicking on the gear icon and selecting “Clip Trimmer” from the menu.

Drag the start or end points appropriately. Press Done when finished.

You can also layer effects and background music to make more complex soundtracks.