Syncing Sounds to Video With GarageBand

You can bring video into GarageBand as a track and then use that video to sync your music, recording or sound effects to the action in the video. The preview window lets you operate with precision. You can then export the result as audio to bring into your video editing software, or export both the video and audio as a finished product.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
Let's say you have a video and here's a very simple example. The video just has some things that happen in it and you want to put some music to it. But you want to have certain sounds effects occur at times like that when there's a transition. I just made this very simple video in Keynote. So you can see I want to have sound effects timed perfectly and the sound track fit the events happening there. So you can do this in GarageBand using a little known feature.

So in GarageBand we'll create an empty project here. I'll just use the software instrument as the basis there. I'm going to want to time the music and sound effects to the video. So one way I can do that is to bring the video into GarageBand. A lot of people don't know you can bring video into GarageBand. I'm going to drag the video file here into GarageBand and add it. Now I get this movie track here. It's a thin little track and it shows me little frames of what's going on here and I get this big viewer here. I can resize this viewer and make it any size I want. I can close the viewer. I can open it again by clicking here.

At any point in here I can see what's happening in the video. Now I can time my music and sound effects to it. So let's start off by adding a music loop, I'll just grab one here. We'll just do a simple little repeating loop. I'll get rid of this track here. I'm not going to use the default track that was created. I'll have that loop over it. So now I've got some music. Okay. So now I want to go and add sound effects. So I'm just going to use some sample sounds that are already included here. Let's get one here that's going to go and be exactly where the transition from the star to the mustache is. It's kind of a confetti effect there. So I'll create an airy one.

I will drag this one in here. It's a very short little effect so I'm going to increase the size so I can see and as I drag the timeline back and forth I can see exactly where the transition is. So it's all the way over here. Shrink this a little bit. I can move this back here. I can see exactly where it is. It starts right there. So that's where I want to start the sound effect. So now when I play I should get that sound effect right at that point. I'm going to lower the sound of the drums there and increase the sound effects there so you can hear them. So there you go. You heard it right there. So that's great. Let's look at the next one here.

The next one is the change from the mustache into the balloon. It's kind of this watery kind of thing. So I'm going to use a different one. Air pressure blast kind of sounds neat. Let's get it right there where it starts. Let's position the playback and hear it. Okay. So probably a little overkill for that. Let's do the last one. The last one is the transition from the balloon into the heart. That's a longer effect there so we want something a little longer. Start right around there. We use sci-fi texture here. There's that. Put that in and adjust it right there just at the very beginning. We can listen to that.

That goes on a little bit too long. The sound. So I'll go into Mix and Show Automation there and I get the line here for volume. I will click here. Command click there to create a point and I can see exactly where this kind of ends. There. So let me have a fadeout to about there. Command click there and I can lower this down so it will fadeout. Lower this line a bit in general. Great. Now we can raise this back up and we can see the entire thing here. We can watch the video as we go.

So a pretty simple example there. But you can imagine with real video and real things happening in the video you can put some music to it. You can put some sound effects. Maybe you can match the beat up to what is going on in the video all using this special video track here in GarageBand. Then when you're done you can export this out. You can Share it and you can Share the music back out. This is what I like to do. Share back out as just audio and then bring it into iMovie or Final Cut Pro or whatever it is that you're using and place it back with the video knowing that things will be perfectly timed.

In addition, if you're in a rush you can go to File, Movie, and you can go to Export Audio to Movie. This allows you to export. Choose some basic settings here and it will export it out there. I'll Save this out. Now I've got the original there and I've also got this which had the audio in it.

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