Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
~Babe Ruth
The best way for me to come across tips for ScreenFlow is to delve into the program for a project. Invariably, something comes up that I don’t know the answer to, and thus a tip is born! This time, it has to do with boosting audio levels.
I recently used ScreenFlow to create and edit a 5-minute video for my son’s high school baseball team, which included video, pictures, music and some typical sayings that would remind them of their 2010 season.
During the video, I transition from background music to a segment filmed in the dugout, with the boys’ voices providing commentary. One of the challenges I had was that when I brought that section of the video into ScreenFlow, the level of sound that my little Canon camcorder provided was very low. I was able to boost the level up to 170% using the audio levels in ScreenFlow, but it still wasn’t quite as loud as I wanted it to be.
I promptly went to the ScreenFlow forum, and found a “trick” suggested by PCG (aka Prescott Computer Guy). He says, “My “trick” here is to copy and paste the audio track [again]… when “stacked” they have more volume.”
Voila! It worked. I detached my audio from my video, then I copied the audio track and pasted it just below the original audio track on the timeline. I lined them up perfectly, and when combined, the audio levels were much more acceptable.
For my purposes though – a fun, non-professional video- it worked perfectly!
If anyone’s interested, I uploaded a version of the video that you can see here. I’m still working on some quality issues with the video – namely the dropped frames in the video clips, which I suspect have to do with the way I encoded the original .mod files before bringing them into ScreenFlow… perhaps that will provide fodder for the next ScreenGenius tip!