Sound effects, music, and other audio elements have a tremendous effect on the impact of a show—far more than most people realize. To punctuate the importance of audio, first year film students are often shown an intense, scary movie such as The Exorcist with only the dialogue track or with no audio audio at all. Without the sound, the movie goes from scary to almost funny. Try this experiment at home by muting your TV and you'll see what a huge difference it makes.
Vlog It! gives you considerable control over the audio in your shows. In addition to the audio that you record through the program or that's part of a video clip, you can add stand-alone audio clips. The program even comes with a variety of music, which you'll find in the Audio library, which you can supplement with your own audio files. Vlog It! supports .WAV, .WMA and .MP3 formats. If you have a choice among these formats, we recommend using .WAV files because they're uncompressed; with the other two formats, the decompression/recompression cycle can degrade the quality of the sound.
Though you add an audio clip by the same drag-and-drop procedure as any effect or media file, there's special significance to the exact location where you drop the file. That's because an audio clip can either share a tray with a graphical media input or occupy its very own tray. We refer to the former as dependent clips and to the latter as stand-alone clips.
The difference is that a dependent clip will stop playing when the next transition effect runs whereas a stand-alone clip continues playing to its end regardless of any other trays in the show. A dependent clip naturally starts playing at the same time that the effect in the associated tray runs.
To add a stand-alone clip, drop the file on a blank spot in the Action Area. A tray will be created with the audio file in the media bin. The speaker icon in the effects bin is not actually an effect and has no options associated with it.
To add a dependent audio clip, drop the file on top of the tray with which you want it to be linked. A speaker icon will appear on the bridge between the effect bin and the media input bin.
Vlog It! lets you set the volume for each audio clip, trim content from the beginning and end, and set
a variable length fade at both ends. To view and adjust these settings, click the audio clip's icon in
its action tray. This
will bring up the Actions Tab (unless you had already selected that clip and subsequently gone to a different tab,
in which case you'll have to click the Actions Tab).
If the Trim controls are shown on the Actions panel and you want to adjust the volume or fade settings, click the Basic button to switch back to the main panel of the Actions tab.
The trim controls on the Action Tab allow you to set in and out points either through a scrub bar or by directly entering the desired time values. To switch the Action Tab to these controls, click the Trim button.
If you happen to know the time code where you want a clip to start or end, you can trim the clip by typing the desired values in the In Point or Out Point field. To apply the entered value, press Enter; do not click the Mark In or Mark Out button as that will overwrite the time you entered with the current slider position.
Vlog It! gives you the option of reviewing a trimmed clip either from the In Point or from the current position of the Trim slider.
While the Play button allows you to listen to content before the In Point, both it and the Preview
button stop at the Out Point. If you want to hear content after that spot, you will have to move
the Out Point to the right.
To stop playback, click either the Pause button
or the Preview button, which toggles to become a Pause button during playback. You can also stop playback and
scrub to a new position by clicking and dragging the Trim slider.
To revert to the last saved In Point or Out Point for a clip, click the appropriate Revert button.
If you want to roll back recent changes to a clip's Trim settings, then the Undo feature (CTRL+Z) is just the ticket.