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Equalize Your iLife
Audio is a big focus of iMovie ’11, with most of the spotlight on the slick new audio waveform mode to adjust levels and see color-coded warnings where the sound might be too overpowering. But Apple has also beefed up audio options in the Inspector as well, including a new Equalizer.
Open the clip in question, select the Audio tab on the Inspector and you’ll see the new Equalizer function, which you can customize entirely on your own or pick from one of nine presets, including Voice Enhance, Music Enhance and Hum Reduction, which should help tame less than dynamic audio recordings and keep annoying electrical line hums at bay.
Apple’s engineers didn’t stop there, also adding an audio Enhance mode -- click on “Reduce background noise by” and adjust the slider, then listen to the results. We tried it on some clips recorded near a busy highway and it worked quite well, bringing down the unwanted background noise and making people speaking in the foreground that much more audible.
Audio Effects
While iMovie ’09 had some very capable video effects, this year’s release adds an equal number of audio effects to spice up most any production.
To get to the audio effects, select a clip. Click on the Inspector button or go to Window>Clip Adjustment in the Menu Bar.
Click on Audio Effect in the Clip tab.
In addition to specialized effects such as Robot, Cosmic and Telephone, you also have the ability to add Echo, four sizes of Room Echo and four variations of Pitch Down or Pitch Up.
Integrate with Facebook
Thanks to the updated iPhoto, the whole iLife ’11 benefits from deeper integration with the social network everyone loves to hate, Facebook. That integration also carries over to iMovie, where you can now choose from your online Facebook photos to import into a project, as well as the traditional iPhoto and PhotoBooth options.
Keep in mind that you’ll first need to open iPhoto ’11 and let the program sync with Facebook, which will then carry those photo albums into your iLife Media Browser and make them available to all supported programs.
Contextual Menus
Apple hasn’t forgotten about the ever-handy contextual menus in iMovie ’11; functions such as Loop Selection and the ability to both Analyze and Optimize clips have been added to adjust clips within a Project, as well as the aforementioned new Duplicate Last Title and options to Arrange Music Tracks and select your Project Theme.
Event browser clips can also now be looped or have their video analyzed -- for Stabilization and People, Stabilization only, People only to to Mark Camera Pans. There is also the ability to Split Event Before Clip as well as the same shortcut to make adjustments to your Project Theme.
In addition to the contextual menus we've all come to love and depend on, you can launch the Inspector directly from a clip and put iMovie '11 in Precision editor Mode by clicking on the gear that appears when you hover over a clip.
Storyboard Like a Pro
iMovie ’11 is touting a Movie Trailers mode, giving you the ability to create short, Hollywood-style previews with just a few clicks. But you can also use the animatics provided by the Movie Trailers feature to rough out your own project, and then swap them out for footage you shoot later.
Go to Window > Maps, Backgrounds and Animatics (which used to be called just Maps & Backgrounds) and scroll down to find 16 animatics, which are essentially motion-enabled dummy clips for various camera angles, such as Closeup, Medium, Wide, Landscape and Animal.
iMovie ’11 provides a mix of clips for males or females -- simply drag & drop one of them to your timeline and you’ll have a filler clip that can later be replaced with a real clip by dragging the new clip onto the animatic. Release your mouse button and click Replace, and the job is done. Animatics are a great way to organize your thoughts and plan for footage you haven’t had time to shoot, but still be able to see if your concept fits into your work-in-progress.
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With an even lower price of entry at only $49 for the iLife ’11 bundle ($79 Family Pack), there’s no excuse to fire it up on your computer and get busy turning those bland home movies into mini-Hollywood epics -- and share them with the world.
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