I was thinking about the 'adopt a highway' program, where people volunteer to keep a mile of it clean. It reminded me of my 'adopt a web page' program, something you probably don't know about and an item I haven't mentioned lately. I only have one adopted page... the Importing Source Files > Prelinger Movies page, maintained by someone who goes by the handle of "The Criticians", and who I'm sworn to secrecy about his real name. His particular interest is in using Prelinger Archives movies in MM2 projects. When his personal website is up and running, we'll drop the page and point to his site. Until then, as far as I'm concerned, the page is his.

I'd like to see more pages like that.

Pick any of my current website pages and there's lots of people who know much more about the topic than I do. Not all of them have an interest in sharing their knowledge or in maintaining info on a website. But, if you are interested, pick a page and let me know. If you don't have a website, but have a strong interest in any aspect of MM2, it might be a good place to practice... adopt a page. Or if there's no page you want to adopt, but have an idea for another one, I'll roll that one out with you. I'm easy to work with, especially if you offer to do most of the work.

I picked an unsplit clip from my library, from camcorder footage of a recent trip to Seattle. I added a tune I ripped from an iTunes preview using the narration feature of MM2 (getting it directly from the music playing in iTunes with the Stereo Mix option in the narration window). Then I filled the first part of it with a voice narration which I did by talking at my laptop from about 1-1/2 feet away, while previewing this sample project.

With the clips on the timeline, I like to look at the audio close-up. Zoom into the timeline and make the timeline tracks high enough so you can see the audio wave patterns well. The other thing I do is listen to it.... earbuds work for me for editing. I don't use an expensive headset.

Here's what the audio patterns look like before I make any changes. The video clip is a view out the window of the airplane's wing as it's flying toward Chicago. The heavy (read heavy as louder) steady noise is from the engine right outside my window. It sure is overpowering the narration clip playing with it in the Audio/Music track... I can hear the engine well during preview, but hardly the voice narration. You can see that in the patterns even before pressing the play button.

The sudden drop in level in the audio at the 16+ second point is when the video changes to an internal shot of the airport terminal in Chicago with normal background noise. The next drop in that clip's audio is a 3rd scene that starts at 28+ seconds, a snow scene taken from inside my car, with no desired audio to record during it. Note that my video clip hadn't been split into scenes before putting it on the timeline for this sample project.

My goal is to adjust the audio of the airplane engine and the narration files so I can hear the voice over the engine, and to get rid of the audio (even though it's at a low level) during the snow scene, as there wasn't supposed to be any meaningful ambient noise (but there always is.... even if it's just the motors of the camcorder).

I split the video clip on the timeline so I could handle the audio of each sub-clip. Then I made a couple adjustments. You can see how much I lowered the volume of the engine. And by splitting the clip you can now see the O'Hare airport terminal and the snowscene thumbnails in the video track. For the snow scene clip, I muted the audio totally. You don't see much change in the track because it was so low to start with. And whatever there was isn't standing up at all to the level of Billy Joel. But it's easy to mute it and appropriate.