- Of this webinar,
along with this keynote will be posted in the comments
and also in the Commons Facebook group.
And so the main thing is not to worry.
If things feel like they've gone by fast today,
you'll have resources to turn to
and you'll be able to review those
at your leisure and watch and rewatch.
But my idea today is to make you feel really comfortable
about using editing audio.
Sort of, you know,
if maybe some of you are here for Steven Zucker talking
about Photoshop a couple of weeks ago,
but even a little bit of Photoshop work on an image
can do a lot, the same thing with an audio.
If you've recorded an audio lecture or a, you know,
a part of a lecture or whatever,
even just a little cleaning up of the audio
can make it so much more enjoyable for people to listen to.
And there's really only, you know,
a few things that I'm gonna teach you today
that are very straightforward.
And the idea of this next 20 minutes
is just to make you feel like,
oh, that doesn't seem so hard, I can do that.
And then you can go back and review the resources
and do it yourself.
So four reasons to use audio.
Audio and still images can do a lot.
You can, you know, just like in audio guide
or you know, dark classroom, you can focus on the image,
you can, you know,
have your students look at the image
while you're talking and listening and they're listening,
and so it's just a really effective way to learn
and communicate.
Editing audio, so much easier than editing a video.
You know, when you edit a video,
and you've got some ums you wanna edit out,
you've got problems with the video
and you have to add B-roll to cover that up,
none of that is necessary with editing audio.
And I should say before we go on
that if you have questions, use the Q&A,
and we'll be monitoring those and we can answer at the end.
The other really good thing about audio,
which I especially appreciate
and don't appreciate about Zoom is not being on the camera.
And you know, there's something really relaxing about that
that makes it easier to deal with.
So we're gonna do these four things
to know about editing audio.
One is making cuts.
So being able to cut out an um, cutting out some silence,
cutting out something
that you no longer wanna keep into the audio,
moving the pieces, the existing pieces together.
So you've removed something that you've deleted
and you're gonna move the pieces
that continue to be there together.
Then you're gonna join.
I'm gonna show you how to join those pieces
back into a seamless whole and then export the video.
So we're gonna sort of really GarageBand basics
but in a way, this is really all you need to know.
So let's just start with the most obvious thing.
This is what GarageBand looks like when you open it.
It can look a little intimidating
but we're gonna focus on, you know,
really just the basics and not a lot of functionality
because you don't need a lot of functionality
to do what we're gonna do today.
So the wiggly lines, you see, those are all the sounds.
That's the sound signature.
And really that's just a visual representation
of the recorded sounds.
The flat lines are essentially silence
or the sound of the room,
smaller little bumps like you see here
are likely a breath or a quiet sound,
and then the bigger wiggles are, or bumps are words.
And that's (chirping) for the basics of the sound signature.
So let's talk about setting, getting set up.
So the way that we structure these conversations
is I'm gonna walk through this keynote
which we're gonna make available
and then I'm gonna do a live demo.
So you'll actually get to see this twice.
All right.
So let's just focus on getting set up in opening GarageBand.
So once you open GarageBand it looks like this
and you're gonna just choose from the New Project menu,
you're gonna choose Empty Project.
Then you'll see this screen and you wanna choose the icon,
that's the microphone and that you can use
for actually just recording in GarageBand
or dragging in an audio file
that you've recorded on a microphone or from somewhere else.
Then the next thing to do is because,
most people use GarageBand for music
is that we have to sort of turn off that music functionality
that we don't need.
And the two purple icons one that seems to reflect beats,
one, two, three, four,
and the other that looks like a metronome,
you're just gonna turn those off
just click those buttons and they'll turn gray.
And then we don't wanna measure beats we wanna measure time
because we wanna keep track of how long our audio file is.
So use that little pull-down menu here and choose time.
All right, then you're getting, you're close to all set,
you wanna open your finder window and drag in an audio file
unless you've recorded an audio file
already here in GarageBand.
And when you do that,
you'll see you've brought in the sound signature,
it's that brown bar.
This is called the track here.
And you'll see here that one,
almost a quarter of the GarageBand screen
is taken up with this thing called the library.
We're not gonna use the library
and we wanna really use the whole screen here to edit.
So you're just gonna click that and close the library
and then you'll have a nice full screen to work with.
Now with with GarageBand,
you actually get two views of the audio
and we'll talk about in a minute about why.
But you wanna go from seeing on the bottom here
this equalizer, these equalizer controls,
you actually wanna use the bottom area to edit.
So in order to make this track appear down here
in the editor,
you just double-click on the sound signature
and it will appear down here at the bottom.
And this is really the main area you'll be using.
So we learn our way around GarageBand a little bit more,
we have this macro view and that's a sort of big view,
that's sort of, you wanna move big pieces around,
really what we're gonna be doing today,
all you need to focus on is this bottom panel
which is where you actually do the editing.
And, you know,
here it's looking really tiny and narrow and hard to see,
so you can actually grab this bar here and move it up.
And so you've enlarged the area
where you're doing the editing,
making things easier to see.
Okay.
Couple of more things to know on both the top
and the bottom,
you'll see sliders in the upper right corner.
These allow you to zoom in and zoom out.
So if we're just thinking about the bottom editing area
you'll wanna zoom in when you are doing kind of fine editing
zoom out a little bit when you're doing less fine editing.
So it's a very important tool to use.
I use it pretty constantly when I'm doing editing.
The easiest thing to do to play the audio
is to just press the space bar.
If you press the space bar once on your computer
it'll start to play,
and if you hit the space bar again, it'll pause,
so it's pretty easy.
Where is it playing from?
It's playing from where your play head is.
The play head is this vertical bar here
and your audio will always play from that location.
You can also use buttons that you might be more comfortable
with up here to play, to go back to the beginning,
to go to the end and things like that.
So I made a little video here of moving,
how to move the play head.
'Cause there's only one little tricky piece to this
which is that you have to move the play head
along this beige top area, not in the bottom brown area.
So put your cursor along the beige colored bar at the top
and you can slide the play head or you can jump around.
So there I am sliding the play head back and forth,
and here I am jumping around with the play head.
As long as your cursor is in that top area you're fine.
We're gonna also use the play head
to mark where we wanna edit.
All right.
So now let's actually edit
or walk through the steps of editing
and then I'll do an actual demo
where you can see me editing.
So the first thing to do is to make sure
you've actually clicked on,
you've selected the area that you're gonna work on.
So let me play this little short video
and I'll narrate through it.
So you see when I selected it
that top bar turned to that light brown
and let's edit out this piece of silence here
between the words.
What you do is you put your play head
at the beginning and the end.
First, I did it here at the end
and I clicked command T to make a cut,
and then I did it at the beginning
and clicked command T to make a cut,
and then in order to get rid of that part that I wanna cut
I went up to the Edit menu and selected Delete and Move.
Now that all happened really fast
so I did it again in slow motion so you can see.
And I'll demonstrate it.
So basically we put the play head at the beginning
of where I wanted to cut, the end of where I wanted to cut,
and in the Edit menu, Delete and Move,
and it joined those two pieces and got rid
of that middle piece that I wanted to get rid of.
And again, I'll demonstrate this.
So really, really important,
this is a very common beginner mistake.
Before you move on,
once you've made the edit,
move your play head back a little bit
and listen to the edit that you've made.
It's really easy for beginners to like, you know,
miss a little bit of a word
or cut into a little bit of a word.
So you can always undo your edit
but it's much harder to undo, you know,
something that you've done, you know, 20 steps before.
So always listen and then you can fix it immediately.
And you know, it's just command Z, edit, undo command Z
and there it is.
Edit, undo.
Okay, then you wanna join...
So you've made all these edits,
you've removed ums and all these other things
that you don't want and you end up with,
and you can see it on the top and bottom here,
lots of pieces of audio where in between those pieces,
you've removed some audio.
So if you wanted to go back through this
and sort of do a finer edit,
just make sure there's nothing that you wanna edit out more.
You don't wanna go and deal with these pieces
it just makes it very hard to work with
so you'll wanna join these pieces into one seamless audio.
And so to do that,
you click on the track up in the lower upper left here,
it selects everything
and then you go to the Edit menu,
you click, choose Join,
say OK and then it joins it and those little pieces are gone
and you can edit the audio easily again.
Then exporting.
Again, very straightforward,
go up to the Share menu at the top,
choose Export Song To Disk
and you can export it as a WAV file or an MP3 file.
And really, you know, that's it.
It's sort of just like copying and pasting, you know,
in Microsoft Word, you're just deleting and joining.
So a really common thing that happens
is that you accidentally shoot,
click this little loop functionality here.
It's really easy to click by accident.
The first five times I did it,
took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to turn it off.
So that's the loop button in case you click it
just click it again to unclick it.
So editing principles.
When you're, you know,
these are sort of things that we've learned over the years,
it's Smarthistory.
My dog just walked into the room.
One is to, this is the main thing.
Be ruthless, edit out ums, pauses, breaths.
There goes an um.
It's just so much nicer to listen to
and when learners are listening,
you're competing against a lot of other things
that are on their laptops
that they wanna pay attention to
and so the more snappy, the, you know,
the tighter you can make it the better.
If it's not relevant to telling the story, just delete it.
Sometimes I'll be editing audio
and there'll be this passage where I feel like I was,
oh, I just said that so well
and I just really wanna keep it in, but it's not helpful.
It doesn't help me tell the story
that if I'm telling about the work of art
and you just have to bite the bullet and delete it.
(chuckling)
I think of audio video length
is four to six minutes is ideal.
Of course you can do more,
but if you can break things up into four to six minutes,
that always works.
That always works best.
And so that's my talk, my keynote,
but now I wanna go into,
and just to remind you to visit the Smarthistory Commons,
I'm actually going to open up GarageBand now
and actually do a real demo for you.
A live demo.
And I should say
that editing audio is one of my favorite things to do.
It's just incredibly, incredibly fun, I think.
And I'm gonna just make a new audio file.
So it looks exactly like the steps
that we followed in my keynote.
So here's GarageBand.
When you open it, Empty Project,
in the New Project menu, I'm gonna hit Choose.
I'm gonna make sure the microphone is checked here
and I'm gonna click Create.
Okay.
Now you notice that all those things that we talked about
I'm gonna turn off the metronome,
turn off the beat counter
and go up here and set this to time.
And now you can see I've got a little time bar up here
that's showing seconds
so I can see how much time has passed
when I'm working on my audio.
And I wanna get rid of this big library pane here as well,
you see library here,
I'm just gonna click this box
that looks like a little cabinet or something that's gone.
Then I want to make this area at the bottom bigger,
'cause I know I'm gonna be editing down there
and now I'm gonna go into my finder
and I'm going to go to my desktop and grab the audio file
that I wanna edit,
and I'm just gonna drag it in here.
If you wanted to,
you could also just press the record button here
and record right in GarageBand and skip this step.
Now, in order to make this appear down here,
I'm going to double-click here,
oop, made it small again so let's make it bigger.
I can see the sound signature really clearly.
Let's show you what happens with the zooms here.
So, oop, that's volume, sorry.
Here's the zoom bar.
It's hiding behind the zoom, the other zoom photos.
So here, so I've,
zooming all the way in and then I'm zooming out.
Same thing here, zooming in really tight, zooming out.
I tend to keep it about half way down here
so I can see the sound signature
and you can see I'm gonna zoom in here too.
You can see I'm looking
at the same thing on the bottom as on the top.
So here's this group of words, same thing over here.
Okay, so let's actually listen and you can,
I'll do some editing.
I'm gonna press the space bar to start
(audio rolling)
- [Narrator] We're in one of the first galleries
in the Uffizi in Florence looking at,
in a room filled with enormous images
of the Madonna and child.
- All right.
So a couple of things immediately
that I know I wanna edit out.
You could see the play head moved as I was listening.
I'm gonna go back to the beginning.
So I'm actually going to hit this button up here at the top
or I could drag my play head.
So obviously I wanna get rid of this whole beginning area
of just room sound at the Uffizi.
So to do that, I'm going to put my play head,
remember the play head
when you wanna move the play head
to be in this beige area at the top,
make sure it's selected.
Here it is, unselect it.
I've just clicked and selected it with the play head here,
that's where I wanna pick up.
I'm gonna hit command T and that made a cut.
If I move the play head, you can see the cut there,
made the cut right where the play head is.
And I'm actually in this case just going to drag it
to the left because there's nothing before
that I wanna keep.
Now to drag,
just make sure your cursor is in the form of an arrow.
One of the tricky things about GarageBand
is when you're up here the cursor is an arrow
When you're down here it's a cross hairs.
Make sure it's an arrow, click and drag.
All right, let's go back to the beginning again.
I'm gonna click this button up here
to take my play head back to the beginning
and hit the space bar.
- [Narrator] We're in one of the first galleries
in the Uffizi in Florence looking at
in a room filled.
- Okay, so I wanna get rid of looking at
so that the audio says we're here at the Uffizi in Florence
in a room filled with.
So let's see where I'm gonna zoom in a little bit.
I'm gonna use my little slider here,
zoom in a little bit more,
go back to the beginning
and try to locate where I wanna make the cut,
where I say looking at.
- [Narrator] We're in one of the first galleries
in the Uffizi in Florence looking at.
- Okay. So looking at is right here.
And in case I'm not sure I can just hit the space bar
'cause it always plays from the space bar.
And indeed that's where,
- [Narrator] Looking at.
- That's where looking at is.
So now I'm gonna hit command T
and I wanna pick up here with,
- [Narrator] In a room fill.
- In a room filled,
so I'm gonna put the cursor here.
Remember make sure that the area you're working on
is selected with the beige top.
I'm gonna hit command T
and let me move that with me.
Play head out of the way
and you could see I've cut this section.
There's a cut at the beginning and the end of it.
I'm gonna select it by clicking on it,
and then I'm gonna go up here,
this is what I showed you in the keynote twice.
This happens really fast.
Where you go up to Edit and click, choose, Delete and Move
it's gonna really quickly delete that central area
and bring the other two pieces together.
So watch closely.
(barking) there, it happens really fast.
So I want to undo it command Z would undo it.
I could do it again, delete and move.
So now my audio is two pieces.
So if I continued working,
I would end up with an audio in lots and lots of pieces
and just quickly to show you how to really join them.
So you have a seamless audio file again
in case you wanna go back through it
make sure the track is chosen.
So do that up here.
(dog barking)
Sorry.
Do that up here.
Like the tracks so it's all beige like this
in the Edit menu, it's Join Regions, command J,
create a new audio file,
and you'll notice when you look at the audio
when you look at the sound signature
there are two sound parallel sound signatures
that's because the recording is in stereo.
And our joining is done,
and now we've got one seamless file.
So that's audio editing, really straightforward.
And when you're done share,
export song to disk and you can save it as an MP3
or as a WAV file and MP3 is condensed the WAV file is raw.
So those are the basics
and just doing a little bit of that
will help your audios a lot.
And now I'm happy to take any questions
if anybody has any.
Any questions today?
Stop the audio, stop the recording.
- Let's see it.
I'm popping into to help with the Q and A.
- Yeah, thank you.
- For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank.
And it looks like we just got a couple of questions
in these last few minutes.
And it's looks like it says,
is it possible to clean up the audio speaking part
from the echoing noise?
It's a good question.
- Ah, really good question.
So this was not something I mentioned,
but there is,
there is a noise reducer and an echo reducer in GarageBand.
I have found them
over the years to be very difficult to use,
and also I find that they add,
they add a kind of distortion to the audio.
So with Smarthistory,
actually I use a plugin in GarageBand called CrumplePop
and it's I think it's pretty inexpensive.
CrumplePop has,
there are two CrumplePops,
one to reduce noise that works really well
and another that reduces echo really well.
And so I would recommend using CrumplePop
but there is that same functionality in GarageBand
also if you wanna give that a try.
- It looks like we have another question about PC users.
- Okay.
- Is there other options and do we have any experience
or do you have any experience with them?
- Yeah. Yes.
So actually I started editing audio with a
on a PC and I used Audacity.
So Audacity is a free program that you can use.
It looks and works very similarly to GarageBand
and some people prefer it.
So, and there are tutorials online
but it's basically the same idea cutting and then joining.
Any other questions? - It seems.
It looks like those are all the questions for now.
- Let me just show CrumplePop quickly.
Maybe I can do that just so you can see where it is.
- [Lauren] That's a good idea.
- So I clicked on this thing
that looks like a little time clock maybe
I never know what these icons are
and down here under plugins,
I'm gonna add a plugin.
Let's see if CrumplePop is showing.
So here it is.
So I've installed CrumplePop in GarageBand
and I can de-noise or I can remove echo.
So if I do audio de-noise,
it defaults to 80% which is generally too much.
So you can hear it now.
- [Narrator] Ahead of us when you enter the room,
is by the great artist.
A great Florentine artist Chateau.
This is called the Earlier Santi Madonna.
- So you can kind of turn it on and off and play with it.
- [Narrator] And on your Santi an-
- And you can also,
I generally keep it about 20% when I need it
or else it also starts to,
to distort the audio.
And other plugins for, you know,
for GarageBand like reducing noise can be found down here
in this menu here.
Any other questions?
- We do.
We have a great question
and it'll be very easy to answer it.
And it's,
can you cut a section of the audio
and paste it into another area of the audio?
- Yes. Yes.
I didn't demonstrate that today
but I can do it really fast now if you want.
I'm gonna cut, close that, double-click up here,
so we're looking at it again.
- [Narrator] We're in one of the first galleries
in the Uffizi in Florence.
- Okay. So say I wanna put that later somewhere.
I've got my play head here,
the track is selected right now I'm not brown anymore
I'm blue and light blue
but I know it's selected when that light blue comes up here.
I can do command T.
Now what I usually do is I go up to track
and do new track with duplicate settings
and click up here.
So we're here again, and then I'll take this piece.
I'm gonna zoom in up here.
This is where you, it's good to use the macro view,
and I'll take this piece
and I'll just hide it down here briefly.
And then I'll scoot this over, back to the beginning,
and because I don't wanna listen to this
I'm gonna actually turn off the audio.
Then I'm gonna go back to the beginning
to the piece I'm listening to
which is blue and select it.
- [Narrator] In a room filled with enormous images
of the Madonna and child.
- So say I wanna put it right there,
command T,
and here's where it's good to use this top,
macro view, I bring it, just drag it and bring it up,
join it and bring those pieces together.
- [Narrator] In a room filled with enormous images
of the Madonna and child.
We're in one of the first galleries in Uffizi in-
- So yeah, that's sort of like,
that would be lesson two
if we were gonna proceed on to lesson two.
- Well, we have one final question
I think is a great way to cap today's webinar and that is,
will we address adding the audio
to images in our next seminar?
- Yes.
And that's you Lauren, you're-
- That is me.
- Yeah.
So the next step in making a Smarthistory style video
is to take this audio, export it,
and bring it into a program called ScreenFlow
and add images and annotations and zoom and pan
and Lauren will show you how to do that next week.
(chuckling)
We're good?
- Yeah. Thank you everyone.
And if you have questions
please post them to Facebook or shoot us an email.
- Yep.
Well, I'm happy to answer any questions about audio editing.
Thanks everybody.