Publishing a course on Udemy has been a great learning experience. I’ve already gotten some feedback for my course, How to Create Beautiful E-Books. One of the suggestions was to increase the volume of my video lectures, so I spent some time researching how to do that without having to reshoot all the videos. Turns out it’s pretty easy and straight forward, so I wanted to share what I did in case other people might find it useful.
Equipment/Software
There are ways to do this on a PC, but since I use a Mac, the steps I took will be specific to Mac. Here are the three things I used to increase the volume on my videos:
- Mac
- Audacity (free)
- Quicktime Pro 7 ($30)
Just a note on why I purchased Quicktime Pro 7. I do have Final Cut Pro, but have found it difficult to edit my screencasts and export the edited versions without the images getting too grainy. However, I had a lot more luck with Quicktime, and was able to successfully shoot, trim, and string together my edited videos and then export them and upload them to Udemy. However, to do something like upload only the audio track, I decided to purchase Quicktime Pro 7 because it promised to make it easy to add and remove audio tracks, and I figured it helped that I had already used Quicktime.
Increasing Volume on Video
Step 1: Open the video file in Audacity. When you do, Audacity will pull just the audio file.
Step 2: (On a Mac) press Cmd A to select all the audio. Then click on Effect, at the top of the tool bar, and choose Amplify. You will see something like this:
Step 3: Either use the slider or type in a number in the top box to choose how much to amplify the sound. Check allow clipping and then preview to test out how it sounds, and make sure there’s not too much feedback. For my videos, I found 15 was the best amplification amount.
Step 4: Export as a .wav file.
Step 5: Open your video and your new .wav file in Quicktime Pro 7. Select the .wav file, and on a Mac press Cmd A to select all. Then press Cmd C to copy the audio.
Step 6: Next, press Cmd J to see this:
Step 7: Select the sound track and delete it. This will ensure you only have one audio file playing along with the video.
Step 8: Select the video file and press Cmd A to select the whole video. Scroll to Edit and click on Add to Selection & Scale (see below).
Step 9: Click on File and then Save As… and save the video with the new audio track. This will keep both the video and new audio files together, so you can easily upload them.
Step 10: (Optional). Test! Try opening your video in Quicktime Player or some other program that plays video, and make sure your audio and video is properly synced. Congrats! You now have a louder video, without having to do much extra work!