Adding Sound Effects in iMovie

You can easily add sound effects to your iMovie projects with the built-in effects that come with iMovie. You can also drop in any other sound, including ones you record on your own. By modifying sounds effects with iMovie's tools, you can make generic sound effects work in almost any situation.
Check out Adding Sound Effects in iMovie at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to add sound effects in iMovie.
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Now when you're creating videos in iMovie you want to add sound effects. Fortunately, iMovie has a built-in set of sound effects that you could use. But you could also use any sound effect that you get from another source. So let's start off with a simple iMovie project. I'm just going to drag a video in here of a beach and its got no sound. It's just a silent video. So I definitely want to add some sound effects here in the background. 
Now to get to the built-in sound effects library all you need to do is go to Audio and then look on the left here. You should see Music, Sound Effects and GarageBand.  Music will show you songs that you have in your Music Library. GarageBand will show you things that you've created in GarageBand. Sound Effects will show you these built-in sounds and you have to go here, Click here, and it gives you a list of all of the different things you have installed. So you should see Sound Effects, which are part of iMovie, they are actually built into the app. Also  highlight sound effects which used to be part of ilife, iMovie, Photos, and GarageBand, but they're now built into iMovie as well. You could see these various categories underneath them. You also see Theme Music, that's part of iMovie, and you may or may not see Final Cut Pro Sound Effects. I see it because I have Final Cut Pro installed. But if you don't have it installed you shouldn't see this last section here. 
Now to search all of these you can select the category Effects at the top and that give you everything. I'm going to stick with just ilife Sound Effects so I see mostly what you see when you look in iMovie if you don't have Final Cut Pro. Now you can search here for a sound effect. So let's search for ocean. You could see that there's one called Ocean Surf. It's in the section called Ambiance. If I want I could preview the sound by clicking the Play button here and then Drag and Drop is just bring it here underneath. You could bring it on top but it's going to actually snap to underneath here. So I can put this in there and now I've got this video instead of being silent it has some sound to it. 
Let's try something else. Let's try bringing this video of a dog barking. Now in the case of this video there's no sound or maybe you've recorded this yourself and you do have sound but the sound isn't very good. You hear all sorts of traffic and people are talking and things like that. So what you can do here is you can add your own dog barking sound. So go right to where the dog is starting to bark. So you position the playback head right there. Let's search for a bark, right there, and listen to that. Great. Let's bring that in and stick it right here. So now we can play it, and we can see the first bark matches but the others do not. That's okay because we can adjust things. Let's zoom in a little bit here by using this control. We can create a mark wherever we hear the dog bark. I can do that using the M key. So there's the first bark. So I'm going to select the video clip here by clicking on it. I'm going to press M to leave a mark there. There's the second bark, and there's kind of the third bark right there. Bark, bark, bark. Okay. So now we can go and cut this up here by simply positioning the playback head there, using Command B just like we would with a video. It works with sound as well. Now we cut that, we can click here and cut this again, there. So now we do take the three separate barks, I'm going to Delete this fourth part here and I'm going to move these around a little bit so that the barks happen at the right moment. Get this bark right here, this bark we'll get so it's positioned right there and see when it starts and then this one positioned right here. A little bit over more. We can take these dots here and actually fadeout the bark a little quicker since the dog is barking a little faster than what we currently have. So now let's listen (dog barking). Great. Let's lower the volume on this last bark. We have the volume control right here. This line here. I'm going to drag that down to lower the volume there with that bark. (dog barking). So you can keep playing around with that until you get your sound effects right.
Here's another example. Here's a car that's going to explode. Explodes right about there so we can position the playhead there. Let's look for an explosion. Now we don't find one. There isn't an explosion there. So let's look for something that's close. So under ilife sound effects here I'm going to look for all the different things and I can see there's one called Booms. We have a few things here. Here's some Slamming metal. That sounds pretty close to an explosion but not quite. But let's bring it in. Now if we play it, (boom sound), that's close but let's make it a little bit better. I'm going to select it here and I'm going to slow it down a little bit. So I'm going to go to the Speed Control here, this is the same Speed Control you would use it to slow down or speedup video but you can use it for sound as well. So I'm going to change it to Slow here to slow it down. (boom slowed) That already sounds better. I could also go here to Effects and there are Clip Filters for visual effects. But audio effects are right here and if I select something like pitch down I can hear a preview. So Pitch Down 2 is going to take it down two octaves, like that. So I like that sound and even though its metal slamming, (pitch down sound) it works well enough as an explosion. 
What about bringing in your own sound effects. You don't have to use the ones that are here in audio. Here's a video of somebody opening up a door and it will be nice to have a sound associated with that. I actually have an MP3 file of sound effects that I've downloaded online. You can find sound effects all over the internet. You'll find some sites where you can pay for sound effects. You can find other sites where you get them for free. So whatever you get and whatever format it is you can probably use it in iMovie. I'm going to Drag this sound right in. So it's just a MP3 filed and I just drag it right to this timeline in there. You don't have to do any special tricks to import anything. I'm going to bring it over here and try to match it up. So, here's what we have so far. (sound of click to open). So it sound right. I've got to move it over a bit. It helps if you zoom in like that so I can see exactly where the door should be opened right there and move over the sound effect. You can keep playing around with it until you get the sound just right.
Here's another example where we're going to overlay some sounds. So I have seagulls at the seashore. I'm going to look for ocean sounds again. You have to make sure you're in the right category. There's Ocean Surf so I'll bring that in. Let me have it come in right away instead of gradually coming in like that. I'm going to lower the volume a bunch like this so it's just some nice quiet ocean background sounds.Then I'm going to search here for gull and there are seagulls. So let's bring that in as well. I'll bring that over here, (gulls  and ocean)/ So this works really well. There are lots of other ways to modify the sounds to make them your own. So they don't sound exactly like everybody else's that's using these seagull sound built into iMovie. I've showed you where you can speed things up and you can certainly do a slight speedup. So I can do Custom and instead of going to like 50% or 10% or something like that, I can just do something subtle like 90%. Now it sounds just a little bit different. You can preserve pitch so instead of changing the pitch it will actually try to keep the pitch even though the speed is different. If you click here you get access to an equalizer. So you've got the ability to do various things here. So, for instance, let's do a treble boost. (gulls). That slightly changed the sound. We can go to Audio Effects here as well. We could try different things here. Now I'm going to use Muffled here and change it a bit. 
You could also do interesting things like under Speed you could reverse the sound effect to try to make things a little bit different. You could always use Volume Automations to change the volume at different points. To do that you go to this line and instead of dragging it up and down to change the volume completely you can Option Click and it creates points. You can create as many of these as you want and then you could Drag either the points or the space between points up and down to change the volume. So this could make things go up and down a little bit here and make the sound a little different. Then, of course, you could trim the ends of these here. I could grab the circle here at the end and have a fadeout. Both of these like that. 
There are several other ways to get sound effects for iMovie besides finding them online. One way to do it right here in iMovie is to go to Window, Record Voice Over. This gives you recording controls right here. You could use your microphone and record something. You've got to position the Playback heads somewhere in here but it doesn't matter exactly where because I can move it later. Then I can record my own voice, (beeps - hey) then I hit Stop and then you'll end up with this little voiceover here. If you can imitate sounds in nature or make your own explosion sounds, clap, make sounds using objects around the room. Like sound effects they would make in the movies using real objects. Then you could record them this way and then alter them as you like with all the techniques I showed to get the sound right in your video. Or you could go out into the world to record these using your iPhone. Just use the Voice Memos app that's already on your iPhone. Then if you're using iCloud it will sync with the Voice Memos on your Mac. Then to use these all you need to do is drag these into the Finder. You could put them, say, in the Desktop here. Once they are there you can drag them into iMovie and have a sound recording from your iPhone very easily put into iMovie.
So there you could see the basics of adding sound effects. It's pretty easy. But if you learn just a few more techniques you could go a lot further with just a simple set of sound effects or things you record on your own.
Comments: One Response to “Adding Sound Effects in iMovie”

Nicholas Manno
3 months ago
Awesome tutorial, Gary. iMovie audio has always been a pain…for me. You have made it so much easier just by watching you, rather than if I just read about how to do it. Thank you – Nick
Adding Sound Effects in iMovie

Comments: One Response to “Adding Sound Effects in iMovie”

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