How To Fade Out Music and Sound In iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can fade out audio in iMovie. 

So a common thing people want to do in iMovie is have music fade out at the end. Say you have a project like this where you've added several clips to the timeline. Now you want to add some music. You can do that in several different ways. 

For instance there's a music track here at the bottom and that's what we'll use first. You can go to Audio & Video here and then you can view tracks in your Music App Library and drag those in. Or you can go to Sound Effects here and you're going to see various sound effects that are built into iMovie and perhaps other apps you may have installed.  If you click here you can choose the category and you may find a category for Jingles. Then you just have this music here. You can drag from here or your Music Library into this special music track here at the bottom or you can drag a file from the Finder which is what I'm going to do. I've just got a regular audio file here and I'm going to drag that from the Finder into this music track at the bottom here. I can have it start halfway through the first clip or later if I want. But I'm going to have it all the way to the left there so it starts at the beginning. 

So now that it is there you can see the problem. You've got way more music than you have video. The clips end here but the music continues on. If you were to export this now you would just end up with a black screen and the music would just keep playing.  You want the music to stop when the video clips are done. 

What I want to do is trim off everything to the right. I could go all the way to the right here, just scroll all the way through, grab the right end here and drag all the way to the left and then leave it right here at the end. That works. Another way to do it that I like better when the music track is way longer than the videos is I simply click to select the music track like that. Make sure the line is where I want things to end and then use Modify and then Split Clip or Command B. That will split the clip in two pieces. I can now select the second piece, press the Delete Key, and now I've done the same thing. I've trimmed the clip so it is the same length as the video clips. 

Now that's great except I've got a new problem which is the audio cutout abruptly at the end. Just as the video does. So I'm going to play here and you'll hear that. (playing music). You can hear how it cuts right out. I would rather have it fade out towards the end of the video. The simplest way to do that is to move your pointer over the audio clip here and look for that circle there at the end. Right here. If I move my pointer over it I'll get little arrows pointing left or right indicating that I can drag this object to the left or right. I want to drag it to the left. When I do you can see this curve form underneath. This is the Fade Out. I see a time above. So I can, maybe, set it to 3 seconds there. At 3 second fadeout. Now when I play the video (video playing) you can hear a nice fadeout. That will work in most situations. It is as simple as that. 

It does get a little trickier though if you have a transition at the end here. To fade the video out you may have put a cross dissolve there at the end or fade to black. Either one is going to make it so that the video fades out. When that happens you want to make sure that your music ends after the transition. If you cut it so it goes here then the fadeout will happen and the music will be over before the video starts to fadeout. So make sure you've got it all the way to the end there. 

Another thing to note is there is another circle over here on the left. You can use that for Fade In, if you like. 

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Now another way to attach music or audio to your project is to not drag it to the music track at the bottom but just to add it below a video clip. For instance, I'll take this jingle here and I will attach it to this clip. Notice this little anchor here. This green line that attaches to the video. This means it is attached to the video at that point. If I move this video around it will stay attached so it starts right there. I can also drag the audio clip around and attach it to another clip or move it all the way to the beginning. This works just as well as putting it in the music track there and you see the same problem here. There's more music than there is video. So you want to go and split the clip. You want to do it after any transition if there is one. I'm going to click right there. I'm going to use Command B. It breaks it into two pieces. I'll take the second piece. Remove that and now I can use that same circle there to have it fade out. 

Note that when attaching audio like this you can have multiple pieces. So I can take this one here and also have this one here, maybe start a little later, and I can do the same thing here. I will break this. Delete the end part there. I'll have this fadeout. I can have a Fade In here as well. The advantage of doing this is that you can actually move this so they overlap. So as this one fades out, this one fades in. Which is really handy if you want to use multiple pieces of music. You don't have to have one completely end and start a new one like you would in the music track at the bottom. 

Now there's another way to have audio in your project. That's to simply have the clips have audio. You probably have audio in your clips especially if you recorded them yourself. It doesn't look like there's any audio here but that's because I went to the Audio Controls and muted them. But you can see if I unmute them again you can see there's audio here. If you ever want to fade that out you can simply drag that same circle here under the clip, like that. So now this audio will fade out before the clip transitions into the next one. Do note though that if you were to add a transition, like a cross dissolve, between these then not only would the video cross dissolve from one to the other but the audio would as well. 

Now I want to show you two additional techniques that have to do with fading. One is to create a J or L cut. This is when audio from one track continues into the next track. You will see it in TV shows and movies all the time. So you may want to do that as well. In order to get the audio to continue while the next track plays you need to detach it from the clip. So I'm going to select both of these clips here and go to Modify and then Detach Audio. This makes separate clips here for the audio removing them from the video. So you see there's no more audio in these videos here. They're separate but they are anchored to the beginning of each video. So, after you do that and you play it, it sounds exactly the same. Now what I need is some breathing room. I want to make this track shorter, like that, and you see what happens here is the audio from this track continues even though I've cut off the end of the video. 

Now let's grab the dot here and fade this out so it starts fading out here and it is still fading out even as the next track is playing. Now I'll have a fade in here as well. So now when I play it I'll still hear the waves a little bit as you start to see the park scene. 

One last technique I want to show you is how you can manually control the volume of audio or the audio in a clip anytime you want. So I'm going to drag in one of these music tracks again and let's say I put it here in the music track at the bottom. Notice there's a line throughout any audio track. You'll have seen it throughout everything I've shown so far. You can drag that up or down to lower or raise the volume of that track. So if the music is too loud you can simply lower it like that. But let's say you want the music to be at full volume but you want it to get lower for one point, maybe while somebody is talking. You can do that by adding key frames. So hover over this line here and use the Option Key and click. You can see how it adds a dot. You want to add a bunch of these dots, say 4 of them. Now you can click and drag any one of these dots and this is the volume going down and then going back up. I'll have the second dot here and now you can see it goes down, stays at a lower volume, and then goes up. So it fades out, doesn't completely go away, plays at this lower volume and the fades back up. You can do that as much as you want, anywhere you want, in the music track, in attached audio tracks, or if you've got audio in one of your video clips you can add these dots here and control them and have the volume change in all sorts of different ways while it plays. So you could use this say if one person talking is louder than another person talking you can really micromanage the volume throughout with a lot of these points to adjust things like you want. 

As you can see iMovie gives you a lot of control over audio. You can fadeout. You can fade in. You can control the volume throughout audio and video tracks. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.