As you play back the timeline, colored bars will show you what's going on. This shows you how loud your overall audio is when all of your tracks are combined and playing back together. Assuming you're still using the standard interface layout, to the right of the timeline, you'll see the audio meters panel. HitFilm has various tools for adjusting your audio so that you can get projects sounding just right. Especially if you have people talking as well. If you have lots of audio clips at their original volumes, it's going to be hard to differentiate anything. As your sound track gets busier and more complex, you'll need to start thinking about the audio mix and how the different audio clips are going to work together. Just like we were talking about layering up videos in the previous chapter, you can use multiple audio tracks to create a layered sound track containing music, linked audio, voiceover, and anything else you might need. You can import common audio files like MP3s to the media panel just like you do videos, and from there you can then drag them onto audio tracks. The other type of audio will be music and possibly sound effects depending on what you're doing. They will no longer be linked, and you can work with them as completely separate clips. To do this, right click on a clip and choose unlink from the menu. Sometimes you might want to completely break the link between video and audio. The two are still linked, so if I drag the clip around they remain in sync.
Editing the video and audio separately like this means you can have a clipped audio begin before the video or vice versa. So if I hold the alt key and then drag on the in point of the video track, you can see that the audio endpoint remains exactly where it was. If you want to trim the in or out point of the video or the audio but not both together, all you need to do is hold down the alt key on your keyboard while using the normal editing tools. There are a couple of different ways to do this. Sometimes though, you might want to affect them individually. When you edit a clip on the timeline, the video and audio will be edited simultaneously. This makes it easier to identify particular sounds. HitFilm draws an undulating graph called a waveform onto the track which gives you a visual representation of the volume of your track. When you drag a video onto the timeline which has an audio clip attached, you'll see the audio automatically placed onto an audio track below. Most of the video clips that you work with are going to have audio already attached.
The good news is that working with audio uses all of those same skills and tools.
#HITFILM EXPRESS AUDIO FADE HOW TO#
If you've been following the course up until this point, you already know how to import media files and add them to the timeline, what each of the editing tools do, and how to use multiple tracks. The flashiest visuals in the world will not make up for poor audio. Audio is a critical of any good video, and it's important that it doesn't get overlooked.