Working With Audio And Video Files In The Timeline

Audio Transcription

In this tutorial, I have covered importing, editing and exporting of media files (audio and video) from the timeline within the storyline.

Hello and welcome back to the fourth section of Articulate Storyline training series.

In the last video, we have seen how to use Play head and cue points to sync the audio with animations. In this video, we will take a look at adding and editing the media files from the timeline.

So let’s begin by adding audio to our slide. We can insert audio tracks by clicking the audio button under insert tab. Then browse to the audio file and click open. Once the audio file is imported in the slide, we can select the audio track in the timeline and right click on it. Here we can see 2 options related to audio Edit audio and export audio.

Selecting edit audio opens up this audio editor.

This allows us to edit the audio with-in storyline, eliminating the need for a third party audio editing software in order to make changes to the audio file. This audio editor offers us the ability to cut, copy and paste the chunks of audio anywhere within this track.

For instance, we can click and drag to select any portion of the audio and then cut or copy it using these buttons on the top. Then reposition the play head where you need to add it and then click paste. We can also add external audios inside this audio track by either, clicking anywhere on the track and click import to browse for an external audio file. You can also click this record button to add your own voice.

To delete a part of the audio, simply select the portion of the audio and click delete. You can also click the crop button to keep the selected portion and delete the rest of the audio track. We can select a portion of audio and click silence in-order to mute the selected portions,

To increase or decrease the volume of the selected audio, click the volume button and then drag this slider. Move left to decrease and right to increase. Then click ok. In order to make these edits with precision, we can use this slider to take a closer look at the audio or we can select a portion and then click zoom option. To reset the zoom view, click this show all option.

To preview the edited audio, use the play, pause, and stop buttons. Once done we can finally click save and close to save the changes we just made. We can now go back to the timeline and right click on the audio track. Then select export audio to save the edited version of the audio track on the local machine for later use.

Next, let’s see how to add and edit video files from the timeline. Let me quickly create a blank slide so that I can add a video file. Now, to insert a video file, go to the insert tab and click video button. Then browse to the video file on your machine and click open.

Once imported you can see it here in the timeline. Now, select the video file and right click on it. Then select edit video. This will open storyline’s built-in video editor. Here we can trim the video using these markers. We can delete parts of video in the beginning and at the end of the video.

We can also crop the video size by clicking on crop, and then adjust it using these handles.

Next, we can also change the volume as we did with audio track. To do so, click the volume button and move the slider left to decrease and right to increase. We can also adjust the brightness and contrast by changing the percentages from here.

We can add logo to the video by clicking this logo button and then browse to the image file. We can add transparency to the logo using this feature. And to delete the logo, use remove logo option. We can also replace the entire video by clicking change video and then select another video.

If you want to remove all the changes applied to the video, simply click reset video. Once we are happy with the edits, we can click save and close to save the updated video in our slide.

In this way we can edit audio and video files in the timeline. With this we have come to the end of this video.

In the next video we will see “what States are in Storyline”.