There are two things that I'd like to do with imovie v.1 that I can't figure out how to do, so I was hoping you good folks could help me out. What I want to do is:

1) add a music track and control the volume throughout the movie i.e. lower the music sound down in certain parts so that the video sound can be heard better and then turn the music sound back up afterwards . I can only control the volume of the video clips individually or the music track as a whole.

2) copy the audio portion of a video clip to use elsewhere in the movie. Right now I am movign through the video tape to find the right part, then using the line out on the camera and the record function in the sound option to get the audio. Is there an easier way?

If it matters, I'm using an older iMac DVSE and a Sony PC100. TIA!

I'll start off tackling the first one. Of course, the main prob with iMovie 1 is its lack of audio manipulation. It probably doesn't help you to know that iMovie2 handles this question without a second thought. Oh, well, back to the point. What I used to do was take the audio track (from the media folder) using Snd Sampler. It is a cool piece of shareware (please pay the fee to encourage this guy as much as possible) that allows you to do simple and some not so simple editing of all kinds of sound files. You can highlight the part of the soundtrack you want to lower the volume and simply use the menu tool to lower the amplitude. The program is available many places, one of which is www.missingmanual.com. Best of luck. If nobody answers question 2 by the time I cruise by this site again, I'll answer that one too, I think.

[Aric]

You can use Quicktime Pro to select the portion of the video that you want to extract the sound from. Cut and paste it to a new movie and export it as an aiff file. Soundapp can also convert your movie to an aiff file.