iMovie’s interface is simple to use, but contains some hidden power.
iMOVIE - GET ADVANCED
Unlock iMovie’s advanced tools for more precise control over your video masterpiece.
iMovie ’08 (4 of 5 stars) is all about easy editing, but it’s still got some hidden tricks aimed at more advanced editors. Our collection of three video tips and four audio tips will help you go past the more obvious basics and squeeze a little more professionalism out of your iMovie projects. Try them out, and maybe you won’t want to upgrade to a more difficult (and more expensive) editor like Final Cut Express.
Video Tips
1. Make Frame-Accurate Selections. Normally, when you click and drag your mouse to select video in iMovie’s Project window or its Library Browser, iMovie makes a selection using multiple-frame intervals. That’s fine for making many cuts, but won’t do if you’re trying to select a single particular frame for your video’s start or end point.
To make a frame-accurate selection, first click and drag your mouse to select the video as precisely as you can. Position your mouse pointer over either the start or end point of your selection, and then hold Shift and press the Left or Right arrow keys to trim or expand the selection by a single frame. Now you can move your selection to the Project window. Or, if it’s already there, choose Edit > Trim Selection to trim the video to your frame-accurate selection.
To add a single frame to the end of your selection, hold Shift and press the Left arrow key.
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2. Make Quick Edits to the Project Window. The standard way to edit video in iMovie is to select a video segment in the Library Browser and then drag it into your Project window. But if you’re making a quick series of edits, you can work much faster by using iMovie’s Advanced Editing mode. First, choose iMovie > Preferences and check the Show Advanced Tools option. iMovie will make advanced tool icons available on its tool palette. Then click the Edit button to turn on iMovie’s Quick Edit mode. Remember, to preview footage in the Library window, just skim your mouse across it without clicking.
When you see a video segment to edit into your project, just click and drag your mouse across that segment. Release the mouse button, and iMovie instantly edits that selection at the end of your project. Keep clicking and dragging other video selections to quickly edit clips into your movie.
Conversely, you can click (but don’t release) your mouse (but don’t drag) on a video clip in the Library Browser, and iMovie will automatically select 4 seconds of that video starting from the point where you clicked. When you’ve made a good selection, just release the mouse button, and iMovie will instantly edit that selection at the end of your project. You can change iMovie’s default 4-second duration by choosing iMovie > Preferences and adjusting the Click In Events Browser Selects setting.
When you want to get back to iMovie’s Standard Editing mode, just click the Arrow button.
The Edit button (circled in red) shows up in the tool palette after you check the Show Advanced Tools box in iMovie > Preferences.
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Turning on Advanced Editing mode (right) adds Gain sliders for red, green, and blue to the default Video Adjustments panel (left).
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Audio Tips
1. Pin Music to a Frame of Video. You can “pin” a piece of music so that it always plays at a particular point in your video, no matter what kind of edits you make down the road. This lets you time your music to play perfectly with events in your video, and also lets you create empty gaps between different music tracks in your movie.
In the Project window, position your pointer at the beginning of the music clip over its title header. Your mouse pointer will turn into a hand cursor. Click and drag the clip to a new position in your project wherever you want your music to start.
iMovie displays a small pin icon in the upper left corner of the music clip, telling you that it’s now pinned to that particular frame of video. It also changes the color of the music clip from green to purple. If you ever want to unpin the music, click the music clip to select it, and then choose Edit > Un-Pin Music Track.
The little pin (circled) means that the purple track means is pinned to the corresponding clip. Notice how the green track isn’t pinned to anything.
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2. Extract Audio From a Video Clip. iMovie ’08 lets you take just the audio from a piece of video and edit it into your movie as an independent audio clip. For instance, you might want to grab the sound of a crowd cheering someone’s name and place it over their close-up.
Starting in iMovie’s Library Browser, click and drag your mouse over the video that carries the audio you want to extract. Hold the Command and Shift keys and drag this selection into your Project window, positioning it wherever the audio should play. Release the mouse, and iMovie will add the extracted audio to your project as an independent clip.
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First, choose Edit > Arrange Music Tracks. Then, in the dialog, click and drag your unpinned music tracks to change their order. If you want to reorder a pinned music track, just select it and click the Un-Pin Track button first.
The Arrange Music Tracks dialog lets you drag and drop to change the order.
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4. Trimming Music Tracks. You can easily trim the length of sound effects by clicking and dragging their start and end points, but trimming unwieldy music tracks is handled through a custom Trim mode that’s easy for iMovie newcomers to miss. To get to the Trim tools, click the little stopwatch icon that appears at the beginning of a music track that you’ve already edited into the Project window. iMovie opens up its Trim window, which shows you the track’s entire audio waveform.
Position your cursor anywhere on the waveform and press the spacebar to preview the audio at that point. Click and drag the yellow in and out markers to select the portion of the song you want to play in your movie. You can click the Play Selection button to hear your precise selection. Click Done when you’ve made your edits, and iMovie will trim your movie’s music track to your specifications.
The Trim dialog lets you edit your music right in iMovie, so you don’t have to edit in GarageBand.
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iMOVIE '08: WHAT'S UP IN VERSION 7.1?
A couple of months after launching iMovie ’08 (which is technically - and confusingly - known as version 7.0), Apple followed it up with a .1 upgrade. Normally these kind of updates stick to bug fixes, but Apple surprised us by adding some small but handy new features to the mix.
For instance, you can now create a still image from any video frame you’ve captured, and then easily set its play duration in your movie. When you want to copy and paste video effects from one clip to another, you can speed things up by pasting to multiple clips in one fell swoop, instead of one clip at a time.
Version 7.1 has some notable audio enhancements too. You can now manually set how long audio fade-ins and -outs last, up to 2 seconds. You also get more control when mixing different audio tracks together (for instance, balancing dialog over music). Just select any video clip, and set iMovie to reduce the volume of all other tracks by a percentage you choose. Being able to set a precise percentage is definitely helpful, but we still want more control over the time iMovie takes to raise and lower track volumes. Right now, the quick transition between loud and soft levels can still feel a little jarring.
Nonetheless, iMovie’s improvements are real. If you’re a former iMovie power-user who’s held off on upgrading to iMovie ’08, now may be the time to take a second look.
The interface may look the same, but Apple quietly added some new features to iMovie 7.1.
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Links:
[1] http://www.maclife.com/article/create_share_enjoy
[2] http://www.maclife.com/article/better_your_ilife_part_1
[3] http://www.maclife.com/article/better_your_ilife_part_2
[4] http://www.maclife.com/article/create_share_enjoy_part_2