Finally, I'm beginning to feel like I am getting somewhere.
I now know that when my background music track morphs from green to purple I have "pinned" the music to a series of clips. I also know that there are royalty-free tracks ripe for the picking already in the "jingles" that I find when clicking on the media browser. I feel like such a doofus for spending so much time at ccMixter (Creative Commons) trying to find royalty-free music when there was some right under my nose.
That is why Lynda.com in the morning is so wonderful; she has this lovely way of waking you up with a "duh" and hopefully a little laugh (at yourself.) It's a great way to start your day!
What I have yet to discover, and am quickly running out of time to do, is how to get the music at the end of a project to fade to black. Yes, I do know how to manually override the fades and yet the desired effect is still eluding me. Back to the drawing board. Tutorials await!
So I watched the last of the music related tutorials and am still just getting the same message that one has to use the manual override and change the fade transition. I've done that in a previous project and was not satisfied with the result. However, I endeavor to do something new and so I will insert my "jingle" to the project first then mannually add "beat markers" (Wow, I'm such a geek, who knew?) Guess what? I'm even going to use the SHORTCUT = m for marker. I mean how hard can it be?
I've chosen a piece of music that is exactly one minute in length so that I don't go over. This project, acording to the assignment, does not have to be professional nor finished but I needed to learn something new, which I'm doing. So here goes...I hope you like it.
It is now about ten hours later: Pesky little job that I have. Thankfully at some point earlier in the morning, I realized that this assignment was not due until Sunday. I spent some time on the beat markers and then dropped in photos and everything was wonderful until I started adding video. iMovie cuts the length of your clips down to match the beat markers and so the "story" gets muddled or lost. SO...although I did finally figure out how to exit the movie with a nice fade, I'm not convinced that sacrificing transitions for the beat is the way for me.
I tend to learn more from my mistakes than my successes. Today I learned that if you change some arbitrary clip at the beginning, middle or end of your production and then republish all the "ducking" will be lost. I discovered this in the most annoying way as I was showing the movie to my little stars and we could no longer hear their voices. Ducking, Ducking, GOOSE!
My advice to anyone wanting to try the beat marking thing...line up all your clips in the exact order that you want to drop them into your film in the event browser. Then manually mark the beats before you drop the clips into the project and iMovie will do the work for you. If you make any edits to your clips, the beats will be a bit off but not awful. My beat markers are true through the stills and one movie transition in my film, the others are still giving me trouble. Still, I'm happy with the project and my kids were thrilled.
For more on beat marking go to lynda.com and watch
Adding beat markers to music
chapter: 9. Editing to Music
course: iMovie '09 Essential Training
author: Damian Allen
It is now 2:30AM again...frustration. I awoke with my head-cold worse than before and the video had never uploaded. I'm trying again now but using the encode from the video. BTW, it only took 10 minutes to upload to Viddler. One day this all gets easier right?
Don't worry about the upload to Viddler, sometimes it takes longer depending upon where you are at in the queue line.
ReplyDeleteLOVED the video! It is amazing to see what children will accomplish when at play. This is true learning.