How to effectively use audio in your video

We all know how important it is to add audio to your video. It helps you convey a much stronger message and it improves the overall quality of your content. In this post we will go through a few simple ways to use audio more effectively while editing video. 

Importing Audio

We will start with the methods you can use to import audio into your video editor. Most of the time this is very similar to adding any other media to your project. You use the Import button, or you drag files over to the Library area on the left side of the screen.

Being an online video editor, Flixier also offers some cloud integrations to help you import audio. You can bring files over from Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and even YouTube or Soundcloud. You also have the option of recording your own audio using your computer microphone. If you need a voice over but are a little camera shy, you can use our neural-powered technology to generate a natural sounding one based on your script!

If you want to learn more about the best ways to get amazing audio for your video check out our blog-post on the topic. 

Once your sound is in your video editor just drag and drop it on your timeline at the position you want it to start. You can move it around, cut it or trim it to make it fit your video perfectly. 

Detaching audio

With the basics covered let’s get to the interesting bits. 

In Flixier you can detach or separate a sound from a video. This becomes very handy if you want to mix different footage with the sound from another footage.

Check out the example below, the voice starts before the actual video it belongs to, which sends a message to the viewer to think about all those videos as a united whole. 

In the video world this is called an L cut or a J cut depending on which videos and sounds overlap. We will write an entire post on this topic too so stay tuned. 

Detaching audio is also very helpful if you have an entire video with voice that you want to use in combination with B-roll. B-roll is usually footage that you show while you talk about a topic. Let’s see how that could work. First you record yourself talking about a specific topic to the camera, next you film some footage about that topic and want to show it from time to time instead of the recording with your face. To do that just detach the audio from the main video, cut the part that you want to replace and drag and drop the other footage in place. If the new footage has some sound you might want to mute it, scroll to the next section to learn more about that.

Audio Volume

The flexible audio system in Flixier allows you to to change the audio volume for each individual audio you have on your timeline. This is very useful if you have multiple audio tracks playing at the same time and you would like to emphasis on one or another. 

To use this feature just click on any audio in the timeline and check the audio property on the top right panel. 

If you want to mute a sound just drag the volume all the way down to zero.

Audio Fade

Another very used feature when working with audio in a video project is the fade in/out. This feature gradually increases the volume of your sound when it begins playing and gradually decreases it when it stops playing. 

To add this effect in Flixier all you have to do is click on the audio in the timeline, next click on Add Fade In or on Add Fade Out, a blue outline overlay will appear on the track 

and you can grab from it’s side and move it towards the center of the track or towards its sides to make the fade effect more abrupt or more gradual. 

Audio background

We noticed that we are getting a lot of questions on how to add a background music to a video and I think this is the right place to mention this too. 

In Flixier all you have to do to add a background sound is to drag it on a track in the timeline. You can move the sound along that track and you can even copy and paste it to make it loop. That’s it! If you have other sounds that you want to de-emphasize just lower their volume or mute them as shown above. This will help bring your background audio in focus. 

As a general tip we would advise you to use a background sound with care and maybe limit it if possible. In many cases it can detract from the overall message and put off viewers. It all depends on the type of video you are making. 

If you have any other tips on how to work with audio while editing to dramatically improve the quality of your content we are more than happy to hear them. You can reach out via the chat in the app and someone from the team will get back asap.