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.
I didn’t find this much help. Why can’t ANY video editor simply load the video on one timeline and the video’s audio on another timelime and allow you to do whatever you want with either??? As far as I know, Imovie does that, so why not all others?? I mean, suppose I have a 60sec video, and say, 30sec into the video, I want to remove the following 10sec of video and replace it with 10sec of a different video, BUT keep the audio of the original video….how am I supposed to do that??? It could be so simple if they’d simply let you work on the video, and it’s audio, seperately!!
Regards,
Stephen.
Download the older version of WMM from Microsoft. URL is: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=34 You want version 2.6 instead of WLMM. Import the video you want. Add the same video as the Audio/Music track at the bottom then cut the video and insert the photo. Make sure the part you cut from the video is of the same duration as you want for the photo. Since the audio track on the bottom is left untouched, it will carry on as normal, no matter what the video line is playing. Good luck! Thanks for commenting.