___ S _ O _ U _ N _ D _T_ R_ A _C _ K _S_When you capture video you're often also capturing audio, so some ways to capture audio are very similar to video capture. If you have to play back your musical choice on a machine that isn't your computer (a tape deck or a turntable for example), you'll have to make sure you have the connections that were necessary for capturing video. If you have your chosen music on CD, however, and your computer has a CD-ROM drive, your task will be much easier. Once you put the CD into your computer, you can choose one of two methods to capture the tracks you want. One, you can use the same procedure you used to record your voiceover. Just make sure that, whatever you did to set the microphone as your sound source, you now set the CD as the source. Two, some software programs are specialized to capture audio from CDs. They may give you more flexibility to start and stop your audio clip where you desire or improve the sound level of the final clip. MoviePlayer (Apple's player that comes with QuickTime) is a quick and efficient tool for capturing audio from CDs. We'll use it as an example of what these specialty programs can do: |
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| 1. Open MoviePlayer.
2. With your CD in the drive, choose Open, then find your CD on the desktop (called here Audio CD 1). |
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| 3. Choose the track you want to record from and hit Convert… | |||||||||
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| 4. Before you save anything, choose Options… This box will give you an opportunity to change how the audio is captured. The highest rate, 44.1 kHz, will give the highest fidelity, but it will also be a very big final file. Half that rate is just fine for a digital story, where the music is playing low in the background. Likewise, stereo is an effect that would be overkill for your needs. Finally, choose 16-bit sound, which will sound noticeably better in Premiere than 8-bit sound. | |||||||||
| 5. You can also choose to convert only part of the track. If you know you only want a snippet, make that selection now to decrease your audio file size. Use the Play button to monitor what you're selecting. The sliders on each end of the bar at the bottom of the box can be moved in one-second increments.That might not be fine enough for your needs, but that's okay. Later, in Premiere, we'll show you how to start and stop your audio clips with greater precision. Take as much or as little audio as you need, then hit OK. | |||||||||
| 6. Save your audio clip in your Soundtrack folder. It will be a QuickTime movie, so give it an .mov extension if you choose. | |||||||||
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| Finished recording your soundtrack? Perhaps you still have haven't covered these steps:
Done all these steps? |
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