iMovie posted on Youtube - Can barely hear audio!
 

Greetings:

My friends and I like to post some videos on Youtube but we've always used a PC to do it. I just got this Macbook Pro so we fired up iMovie and recorded a song. In iMovie, it sounds just like it should and the volume is good. However, when I hit Share from the menubar and then Youtube, the video uploads fine but there isn't sound or it is just VERY quiet. Last night we tried everything! We even tried exporting it using quicktime and playing with various sound codecs but we can't find the right mix that makes our youtube video end up just like the iMovie video.

Here's a link to the YouTube video to show you what we mean. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqXZM7g0D_Q

Can someone please help us with this? We need to know how to get an iMovie that sounds normal up to Youtube with the same sound. As an aside, I've posted this question now on 3 forums and the official Apple support discussions and have not received even one answer. I'm hoping macosxhints can help!

Thanks in advance for any help you may provide!

what if you upload it manually?

Same thing. Actually, I did Export using Quicktime from the share menu and saved a .mov to my desktop. Opening it up in quicktime has the normal volume level and it sounds fine. When I upload that exact file to Youtube, you can barely hear that it is playing audio when the speakers are all the way up. It is very strange!

I also tried exporting it with all sorts of other export settings under audio and no luck.

One other thing to mention. A lot of googling on this led me to a number of posts on exporting in the older version of iMovie and they all said to choose mp3 audio when exporting. Unfortunately, I don't have an mp3 audio choice in iMovie 08. Perhaps an easier way of solving this would be for someone to help me get the mp3 audio choice in my iMovie export options?

i dont know how to do that, but what options do you have to export as, also can you export it to something like avi or divx see if thats the same

I have all sorts of audio options such as Apple Lossless, AAC, etc. I'm not on the mac at the moment so I can't list them all. I've tried them each but none work. I have the Divx codec installed but I don't have a choice to export as DivX

I'm not sure what would be causing this with iMovie... but here is an option. Export to a QTmovie.. anything that plays fine in Quicktime should be alright. Download Mpeg Streamclip and drag your QT movie into the app. Choose File>export to mpeg 4. And choose H.264 or mpeg 4 and AAC as your audio. You can also adjust your size to 320x240 if you want. I know these files will work with youtube.. I put videos there for clients to preview their spots for approval. Beats trying to walk folks through FTP server access.

yeah that should work, just make sure you crank up the quality settings for the video and the audio

btw just watched your jt cover really liked it, you know at like the first 10 seconds did your friend on the piano start playing roses? lol

THat's me on the piano actually :)

I just tried the Mpeg Streamclip and it still doesn't work unfortunately. I have uploaded the video just so you can see what it sounds like before youtube. It is at http://www.chrisfarrugia.com/temp/ and is zipped up. Small download. You can hear that it is really loud. Then youtube just about mutes it.

It is up on Youtube as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH5o3h2pFrY so you can hear the difference. It isn't audible hardly at all!

This is absolutely driving me crazy now. We do this for fun and to have to go through all this is pretty frustrating. Please help!

Seems like it may be getting a little louder.. What bit rate are you using for your audio. I think youtube recommends 64kb. And I think they prefer CBR...not sure on that one though. Strange indeed.

Did you listen to the source file at http://www.chrisfarrugia.com/temp/ ?

That one is really loud.

YouTube is actually pretty good when it comes to uploading a variety media files and formats. Depending on the version of iMovie, you could stick with the default CD quality preset, which is usually pretty good for web quality. The web quality preset actually isn't that good for web.

And bitrate does not affect volume, it only affects the quality of the sound.

I don't have iMovie '08, so I can't help with the specific functions it has. I'm going to try and do something something with the source file, if that's ok with you.

Please do! I just took a 3 second video of myself and published it and the audio was fine. Perhaps that file is just too large and iMovie is having trouble exporting it? I'm on a Macbook Pro 2.4GHz machine if that matters.

That is just plain strange. I downloaded that zip file of your movie.. encoded it just like I do all my stuff.. and sent it up to youtube. The volume is still really low. Have you tried this.. Export your movie to Quicktime move using DV/DVCPro..Audio uncompressed. Put that file into streamclip and make an mp4 like int the above post. That should work.

My god this is annoying. I just did what you said HazyJMac and it had audio when I exported from iMovie. I could play it in Streamclip and it sounded fine. When I exported it (I tried avi and mpeg-4), neither had audio. It was like it was on mute.

Has anyone tried any other clips today. I took your clip. Converted it to a DV/DVCpro qt movie with uncompressed audio.. Sounded fine. Then converted it to Mp4 via streamclip like I do all my other stuff... Still super low audio. I'm beginning to think its a youtube problem. Hmmmmm

I will try doing his zip file as i do my uploads, which tend to be in mpg format, i'll post my results

ok i put it on, same problem, but when i listened to the mp4, it sounded a bit quiet anyway. Err is the mic on your mac turned up to the highest setting and try again?

The mic was turned up loud and in iMovie it is really loud. I'm having all sorts of weird issues. Last night I even tried going in and exporting it using Streamclip to flash so hopefully youtube wouldn't change it. When the flash export was done, there wasn't sound!

Also, in iMovie when I choose export to quicktime, if I choose AVI and go into the divx settings, where it says "Audio:" there is just a -- there. Very strange stuff going on.

not just an iMovie problem
 

Today i uploaded a 9+ min clip in .wmv format that was made in Movie maker... the sound output while editing was perfect... but somehow after the upload.. the sound went south

in essence... i dont think its an iMovie issue :confused:

I don't know that it is a Youtube problem. I think it is an iMovie problem actually. If I take a video with my PC and a Logitech quickcam, I can upload it straight to YouTube without an issue.

I was about to post this message when Safari oddly crashed. I had retyped it again.

Anyway, I doubt it's a iMovie problem, as I made a test movie about a month ago with iMovie and uploaded it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEdj2YNi4oo

I took a look at the source file. There is definitely audio, but there is also this odd high-pitched noise with it. I managed to convert it to mono, but had a hard time doing that for some reason. Whenever I tried, it would result in only the high-pitched noise remaining. I tried filtering it out with a low pass filter, which kind of helped.

The sound files below are in mono, but it shouldn't matter much, the video wasn't really stereo to begin with.

Just for practice, I also tried making a warmer 'enhanced' version of the song, which removed some echoey background noise and harsh spikes that the mic might have made. Tell me how you think it came out.

You can add this to your video by muting your video's sound and adding the new music instead.

Regular Mono

Mono enhanced


I tried re-encoding the video with the new music. I added a simple fade in and fade out to it. It lost a bit of quality, because it was already encoded before. (think of making a photocopy of a photocopied paper: it gets worse each time)

I'm currently uploading it to YouTube now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0E4zJM2eOM
It works!
I think that high-pitched tone was messing with YouTube or something. Who knows? I'll remove my copy from YouTube as soon as you put yours up. Just tell me when.

Thanks so much for the help! I have about 5 videos to do so can you tell me the steps you went through when getting rid of that high pitched sound so I can do it with the rest of my videos?

What settings did you use when exporting to Youtube? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It's kind of a complicated process.

I used AudioHijack Pro. It's a handy tool to take audio from any program and record and add effects to it in real time. I recorded the music from the video by "hijacking" QuickTime Player, added a few filters and effects, saved it as an Apple Lossless file, converted it to high-quality MP3 (so I could easily upload it on the internet), and got those files as a result.

You can use the demo version to make recordings up to 10 mins long (after that it adds static noise to the sound), or pay $32 to unlock the full version.

AHP already comes bundled with a bunch of audio plugins, but I used a custom LADSPA audio filter written by some guy named Steve Harris. You can download a large bundle of effects (including the one I used) here: http://ardour.org/files/releases/swh-plugins-0.4.15.dmg

While some of the effects are pretty cool (DJ flanger, pan, karaoke), I have no clue what many of the other obscurely named ones do (SC2, AM frequency transmuter [or whatever it's named]).

After installing them, they should be available in AudioHijack's effects panel. If not, be sure to restart AudioHijack and try again.

Telling you the numbers for every option of every effect in each preset would take a while to explain, so I exported the presets, placed them in a zip file, and uploaded it online. Download the file below, unzip it, and then just follow the screenshot to import the preset. The "mono" uses a workaround to force the audio to mono, and the "enhancer" is the one I used to try and enhance your song:
http://bigpixel.macintoshdevelopers....ahppresets.zip

in Audio Hijack:
http://i19.tinypic.com/4xl0o5s.png
and select the preset file.


I used iMovie '06 (free download for '08 users), but '08 should give the same encoding results.

You can use the CD-ROM preset, which is already pretty good, or try going "Expert" or whatever it's called, and select to export as a Quicktime Movie, and match up these settings:
http://i3.tinypic.com/4trlh21.png
(increasing the bitrate will make the quality better, but will also make the file size bigger. Something in the range of 512-1024 is good for online streaming)

As for size, I'm pretty sure that YouTube downsizes everything to 320x240 and then scales it up again to fix the player box, so you that's what you should select for the size.
http://i5.tinypic.com/66xn038.png

Here's the audio. Have QuickTime automatically choose the "Recommended" sample rate. Because the audio is mono, select AAC, and select Mono. A good choice for bitrate here is 64kbps. If the audio is in stereo, select 128kbps. Higher bitrates give better quality audio, but 64kbps mono/128kbps stereo is a good choice for most uses. Despite what people might say, AAC has a higher quality than MP3's with the same bitrate.
http://i14.tinypic.com/4pewav6.png

Then upload your new video to YouTube!

That's awesome help! I was able to create an MP3 using Quicktime and the hijack program but I have no idea what I'm doing. The problem is that once I've made my mp3, I go into iMovie and try to "sync" it up but it just doesn't work. I can't get the audio lined up with the video at all. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

When you use the hijack program, do you usually click "Hijack" and "Record" and THEN start the video playing or the other way around? What's the easiest way for me to make it so that it syncs up perfectly? I don't want this looking like a kung fu movie :)

With the Hijack program, you can actually take audio directly from iMovie.

There's an option somewhere to remove silence parts longer than 'x-amount' of seconds, which will keep removing the silent parts until something starts playing. I think it's in the "Recording" tab. I'm not sure how to describe it. I think

Also, I'm not sure how to line up audio in iMovie '08. I only have '06, because '08 doesn't work on my old Mac G4. Sorry.

This is unreal. I just followed your instructions with iMovie 08 and this is the **** I get. http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ueo-usRt99I

Thanks so much for trying but I think this is now a lost cause.