Sound

A sound is an audio of your own that a video plays, each on a row of its own under the picture. The Audio tile in Add adds your newest audio as a sound, at the playhead.

A video with no sound has no audio row at all. A silent clip is never treated as broken: the video simply plays without sound until you add some, and the audio rows appear the moment the first sound lands. Every sound is its own row on the video's timeline. However many you add — a voiceover, a music bed, a clip's own sound, effects — each gets its own row under the video, always visible rather than folded away. Drag a row sideways to move that sound in time, and drag either end to trim where it starts and where it stops, so two sounds can begin and end wherever you want them to — except a clip's own sound, which always plays exactly the part of the clip you kept. Click a sound's row to select it: its Audio menu opens along the bottom, and its row shows its chain button: the chain links that sound to a clip or a group, and a linked sound then travels with what it is linked to; press the chain again to unlink it and it stays exactly where it is. To delete a sound, press the bin on its card in the Audio menu, or press the Delete key. To work on the sound itself — its tracks, effects and levels — press the audio editor button on its Audio tab, which opens that sound in the audio editor. The star beside it stars the sound whole — its audio and its settings — so you can place it again in any video from Add → Browse → Starred and community. A sound that runs past the end of the picture makes the video longer: the video lasts until its last sound ends, and past the last clip the picture shows the video's background. The Audio tile always adds another sound — your newest audio, at the playhead — and never replaces one you already have; to change what a sound plays, pick another of your audio on its Audio tab.

A clip's own sound stays in sync with its picture by itself, as long as it stays linked to that clip, which it is when it arrives. Move the clip, change its speed or give it a speed ramp, and the sound that came with the footage follows — the words stay on the lips. Trimming the clip trims its sound with it, so the two always start and end together. Linked to a group instead, a sound simply follows the group's start. Drag a linked sound's row yourself and it stays linked, at its new distance from what it follows — for a clip's own sound, that nudges it earlier or later against the picture. Deleting a clip deletes the sounds linked to it, and deleting a group together with what it holds deletes the sounds linked to that group. The one thing sound cannot follow is a clip played backwards, held on one frame, or run faster than four times or slower than a quarter of normal speed; its row then says Can’t follow the clip’s speed, and the sound keeps its own timing, starting where the clip starts.

Each sound plays at the level you set with the speaker on its own row on the timeline — the speaker on the play bar sets the whole video's level — and sounds never duck one another. For music that softens under a voice, make both parts one audio in the audio editor, put a duck effect on the music listening to the voice, and add that audio to your video as one sound: the music then softens whenever the voice speaks and comes back up when it stops.

Selected by clicking its row, a sound gives you one tab, Audio, the audio it plays: the strip of your own audio, and at the right end the sound's waveform with a button over its corner that opens it in the audio editor. Pick another of yours, or open the strip's search, whose choices are Artifacts (your audio), Voiceover and Music — the two generate forms, shown beside the search in the strip's place. How loud the sound plays is the speaker on its own row, not this menu. To make anything move with a sound, select that thing, open its Animate menu, press Automate, pick a setting and press Follow sound.

A sound opens in the audio editor from its Audio tab, where everything about the sound itself is edited, and closing that editor brings you back to your video. A sound belongs to the video: what you change there is what the video plays, and it is deleted along with the video. It stays out of your Gallery unless you press Promote to a primary artifact in that sound's File menu in the audio editor, which lists it in your Gallery alongside your other artifacts while leaving it the video's sound — so it never becomes a second, separate copy, and it keeps no version history of its own either way. If you then delete that promoted sound from your Gallery, it simply leaves the video, and the rest of your sounds keep playing; the video does not end up pointing at something that is no longer there.

Where you can use a sound

• Video — Groups

What you can do with a sound you made

Star · Copy

Audio

• Volume — How loud the video plays this sound: 100% plays it as it sounds on its own.