Guides/Captions and voices
Record a voiceover
Talk over the edit while it plays. The take lands on the timeline where you started.
Record Voiceover is the microphone button on the timeline tray, beside Text to Speech.
In 0.2.7
- Put the playhead where the voiceover should start.
- Click Record Voiceover. The timeline’s own sound is muted, playback starts from the playhead, the button turns red and reads Stop Recording, and a level meter runs beside it.
- Talk.
- Click Stop Recording.
The take is saved as a WAV in your project’s audio folder, added to the Library, and placed as
a clip on the first free lane at the point where recording began, nudged by the microphone’s
latency so it lines up. A toast says “Voiceover added to the timeline”.
There is no device picker in 0.2.7: Concat records from the system’s default input. Change that in your operating system’s sound settings before you press the button. On an iPhone, 0.2.7 records silence; the fix is in the next release.
The Voiceover panel
Record Voiceover opens a Voiceover panel that floats over the editor without dimming it, so the picture, the lanes and the clips stay usable between takes. Drag it by its header. On a phone it is a sheet at the foot of the screen, opened from Voiceover on the bottom strip.
The panel opens the microphone straight away, so its meter shows the room before you say a word: the bar is the level, a tick marks the peak, and CLIP lights when the input reaches full scale (“Clipping: turn the input gain down”).
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Microphone | Picks the input from the system’s list |
| Input gain | How loud the microphone is recorded |
| Count in 3 seconds | Three seconds before the take starts |
| Mute timeline while recording | Keeps the timeline’s sound out of your headphones and the take |
| Record | Rolls the picture from the playhead and records |
| Pause, Resume | Holds the picture and the take together, then carries both on, so the take stays in step |
| Stop | Lands the take on the lane the last take went on when it is free, otherwise the first free lane |
| Retake | Throws away the take that is running, or the one just landed, and goes again from where it began |
| Teleprompter | A script box that scrolls while you record, at Slow, Steady or Fast, and holds on a pause |
The microphone, the gain, the count-in and the mute switch are remembered between runs. A Retake of a landed take is one undo step, so ⌘Z brings it back.
While a take runs it owns the transport: Space and the monitor’s Play pause and resume the take and the picture together, and the playhead stays with the take until you stop it. Closing the panel mid-take stops the take and keeps it.
The take is written to disk as it goes, so a crash leaves a file that plays. A microphone that only hands over silence gets a note: allow Concat under Privacy & Security › Microphone in the system settings. On Android the panel asks for the microphone permission and offers Try again once it is granted.
After the take
- Too quiet, or a noisy room: select the clip, open the Inspector’s Audio tab and turn on Normalize loudness, Reduce noise or Enhance voice. See clean up a voice.
- Want captions for it: select the clip and click Generate Captions.
- A flubbed line: put the playhead on it, press ⌘B to split, delete the piece, record again. Or, from 0.2.8, press Retake in the panel.