We can do something with our videos that frontier photographers could not. We can make our pictures talk and make the trains rumble. With sounds, our videos can have mood and a speaking voice. We can make “talkies.”
Learning how to add sound to video can be done in under an hour using basic consumer-level movie software. Using this, we can control everything we hear in our movie. Natural sounds, sound effects, music, and voice-over tracks can be imported from the libraries on our computers. We can add background music, replace an audio track with a new one, and create our own commentary. Sound helps create the ambiance of the movie, advances the plot, and tells us about machinery and characters in the video.
Music. I store digital copies of music in the iTunes library. From this library, select a song, then click and drag it below the movie timeline. It is shown on screen as a green box below the video. Edit the box like editing video to control the length, volume, fade in and fade out.
Sound effects. Built-in sound effects include musical jingles of 30 seconds to a couple of minutes in length. They include animal sounds, busy-city sounds, and frogs from the countryside. Select a sound from the sound-effects library and drag it below the movie timeline. Edit the box for length and volume.
Recordings. Recorded sounds captured by a video camera, a smart phone, or a digital recorder in the field, can also be imported to the timeline, trimmed, and used to enhance video.
This month’s online video demonstrates three sound experiments:
• Swapping sound from a sound-equipped model to a video of a model engine that has no sound
• Adding prototype sound to video of a garden-railway locomotive
• Adding natural sound to still images and operations.
This video was fun to make. I hope you enjoy it and send me some talkies of your own. Next time we’ll add a musical background to our video.
Turn up your speakers as you watch this month’s “Talking Pictures” video.
