Premiere Elements 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Import Sound, Still Pictures, and Animation

Say you’ve been charged with producing the official video for your upcoming family reunion. Depending on how “Hollywood” you want to go, your movie may include background music, a few sound effects, cutaways to old family photos, and baby pictures of everyone who’s coming. And you might want to jazz up the closing credits with a narrated animation of a harried you pulling all this together. None of these elements are video clips, of course, but so long as you can get them into your computer, you can use them in your Premiere project.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to add music and other sound files to your video and how to create and record sound effects and narration. You’ll also learn how to add still images and animation and how to avoid some of the common pitfalls of mixing and matching media.

Add Sound Clips

When you hit the Record button on your camcorder, you capture both images and sound. The camera picks up conversations, rumbling trucks, and the wind as it rushes by the mic. But let’s face it, camcorder audio doesn’t always make the perfect soundtrack. So borrow a trick from Tinseltown and make your movie sound as good as it looks: Use the audio from your camcorder where appropriate, but don’t stop there. Add background music to convey the mood of your video (and to mask unwanted background noise the camcorder picks up). And what about sound events you didn’t capture, such as closing doors, thunderclaps, laughter, ...