Remove the Audio Track from a Video with iMovie
Aug 15, 2012 - 3 Comments
We’ve shown you a few ways to extract the audio from a video file, but what if you want to remove the audio track from a movie completely? Although it can’t be done right in the Finder like extracting, it is very easy to ditch the background audio do with the help of iMovie:
- Open iMovie and pull down the File menu, selecting “Import” followed by “Movies” and locate the movie you want to strip audio from
- Drag the video from the Event viewer into the Project library
- Right-click on the video and choose “Detach Audio” to split the video from the audio track, the audio attack will appear in purple below the video track
- Click the purple audio track and hit the Delete key to remove the audio
- Now you can either record a new voiceover, add a new audio track, or just export the video with no audio at all
There are other methods to do this using third party tools, but iMovie is bundled with most Macs these days and it makes quick work of the process.
Thanks so much for the tip. Finally I can get rid of that awful wind noise in my race car videos and replace it with some music. I knew there had to be a way and you made it so easy for me!
Isn’t it easier to use QuickTime?
Fortunately, I preserved QuickTime 7 (which works perfectly well in Mountain Lion) and because of it’s versatility, it is still my default video player.
In QT7, cmd-J opens the Movie Properties and the movie is listed and underneath is the video track and audio track both with their respective encodings. All you have to do is select the track (vid or aud) and then click on either the extract or delete buttons at the top left of the window.
Good tip, and yes it could be easier to use QuickTime 7 if you still have it installed, but most who upgrade between OS X versions don’t. It’d be nice if they had kept some of the editing features like that in the newest versions though!