The problem: my digital camera records video in the MP4 format. Because of that, I can’t split the audio from the video in most video editing programs. I use Windows Live Movie Maker most of the time and this free program doesn’t offer splitting audio from video anyway. The video is in high definition and looks great but today I had to shoot a scene where only the audio could be used.

The solution: This is a multi-step process. Here’s how I edited the whole thing to create a movie using only the audio from the original shoot.

1. Edit the video (sound and all) in Windows Live Movie Maker, removing all the extra sections. Make sure you remove everything you don’t need. WLMM will edit MP4s but it outputs the file as a WMV file, which isn’t a problem.

2. Take the completed WMV file and convert it to a WMA audio file in Format Factory. Format Factory is available here: http://www.formatoz.com/ (you can use any converter you want, obviously, but I like Format Factory.)

3. Open WLMM again and put in the visuals that you want to use, could be video or photographs.   Try to make sure it is the same length as the audio track you have created in the previous step. I used a series of photos to create the video portion.

4. Add the ‘music’ (the WMA file that you created with Format Factory)  that you created in step 2. It could be music or spoken word, doesn’t matter. Your timeline will have to be adjusted to make the audio match the photos/video but that’s easy.

5. Save your video as normal and WLMM will put the two together in the final WMV that it creates.

That’s it! It took me a few hours to figure this out but now I know how to do it. So do you!

Thanks for reading.