It really shouldn't be this hard. I wanted to have my daughters describe some photos, which I would overlay as a narration to a slideshow of those photos. I have a Mac, so that should be easy. Indeed, you can add an audio track directly in iMovie, but you can do that only against an existing video track, and I don't know in advance how long the girls will talk about each photo.
What would be great is to have iPhoto (or iMovie) record the audio narration along with the timings of when I advance to each picture, so this information can be used to generate a slideshow that is synched-up with the narration. Alas, despite much Googling, I was not able to find an easy way to do this.
But being stubborn, I did get it to work, although in a rather laborius fashion:
- Collect the photos you want to use in an iPhoto slideshow
- Set the slideshow settings to show the title, manual controls, and transitions between slides to 60 seconds (this sets the maximum amount of narration per slide to 1 minute)
- Open up a sound recording program (e.g. Audacity) and start recording a new file
- Go into iPhoto and start the slideshow
- Record your narration, advancing to the next photo as you wish
- When finished with the slideshow, stop the audio recording
- Edit the audio recording as needed (remove any unecessary silence, technical glicthes, or daughters bickering)
- Create a new iMovie project, importing both the pictures you used (from iPhoto) and the audio file with your narration
- Manually change the duration of each photo in iMovie to match the narration
- Export the iMovie project to iDVD and burn to a DVD
Although this is a lot of steps, it's really only the next-to-last step that annoys me. Since I already used the computer to advance to each slide, it should be able to store and transfer those timings to iMovie.
It's not all bad, though. This long method does allow me to edit the audio to take out the bits I don't want to be there. And having the stream-of-conciousness narration from 2 six-year-olds is pretty neat, regardless of how I had to get there. I especially like the part we recorded before the slideshow starts of them asking me what they're supposed to do (I'll have this playing over a black screen) and the time when we had to stop the slideshow so we could snuggle.
I think it will be one of those things that will be fun to listen to 10 years from now. Assuming old-fashioned DVDs are still playable then.