A narrator can set the context for your scene. Narrators can describe a location, introduce the people in the scene, and even give your audience additional information that you didn’t capture on video.

With iMovie, however, you don’t have to narrate your movie as you’re filming it; you can add narration later. This way, you can position the narration exactly where you want it, adjust volume levels without affecting the main audio, and rerecord if you make a mistake.

Steps

Add narration to your iMovie project

1. Make sure your Mac has a built-in microphone, an iSight camera, or an external microphone connected.
2. In iMovie, click the timeline viewer button to display the audio tracks.
3. Move the timeline playhead to where you want your narration, or voiceover, to begin.
4. In the Audio pane, click the Record button and then speak clearly into the microphone. As you speak, try to speak loudly enough so that the input meters appear green or yellow, but not so loudly that the meters appear red.
5. Click the Record button again to stop recording. You’ll see your audio was added to the timeline as you were recording.
6. Move the timeline playhead to the beginning of your recording and click Play to review your narration.
7. To isolate your narration, use the audio checkboxes at the far right to deselect the audio from the other tracks. After reviewing your isolated audio, enable audio for all three tracks.
8. Save your project.