iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Sound Effects (Crickets, Etc.)

There’s more to a movie soundtrack than music, goodness knows. Fortunately, iMovie also comes with a juicy collection of sound effects, suitable for dropping into your movies. If you click an FX collection name (Standard or Skywalker Sound) at the top of the Audio pane, you’ll find a collection of professional sound effects.

Skywalker Sound Effects is named for the Hollywood sound studio from which Apple licensed the effects (Birds, Cold Wind, Creek, and so on). Standard Sound Effects contains the sounds that began life in iMovie 3 (Alarm, Bark, Crickets, and so on).

Across from each sound’s name, you see its length, expressed in the minutes:seconds format.

Using a Sound Effect

You add a sound to your audio tracks exactly the way you add an iTunes tune—either by clicking the Place at Playhead button or by dragging the effect’s name into either of the audio tracks in the Timeline Viewer. As your cursor moves over a track, the Playhead—accompanied by a cool, fading-out purple stripe—helps you see precisely where the sound will begin. Once placed there, the sound effect appears as a horizontal purple bar, just like any other sound clip. (If the sound effect is very short, you may have to zoom in to see it as a bar, using the Zoom slider at the left edge of the screen.)

A sound-effect clip behaves like any other sound clip. You can edit its volume in any of the ways described in “Editing Audio Clips,” later in this chapter. You can slide it from side to ...