iMovie 3

With iMovie 3 and a compatible digital camcorder, you can create digital video at least the equal of many B-movies and approaching some substantial films in quality. We can’t give a full course on the use of iMovie 3 in the space available here, but we show you the basics.

Getting started with iMovie 3

When you launch iMovie 3, its window takes over your whole screen. If your Dock isn’t hidden, we recommend that you turn on Dock hiding by choosing Apple Dock Turn Hiding On (z-Option-D). Click the New Project button, name your project in the Create New Project dialog, and you are ready to start, as shown in Figure 20-27.

Figure 20-27: The iMovie 3 interface as it looks when you start a new project with a camera connected.

iMovie’s three main panes are the following:

• Monitor: Where you watch and edit clips

• Shelf: Where you store clips and apply effects to them

• Clip and timeline viewers: Where you arrange clips and construct your movie

The monitor

You use the monitor to view clips or the entire movie, edit clips, and switch between camera and view modes. When a camera is connected, iMovie tells you your location within the tape.

Note

Time in iMovie is measured in hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. If you are using NTSC video (the standard within the United States and Canada), there are 30 frames (really 29.97) per second of video. If your video format is PAL (Europe and most of Asia), there are 25 frames per second.

The buttons along the bottom of the monitor vary depending upon whether the toggle switch to the left of the buttons is in the camera or editing position. In camera mode, the buttons are Reverse, Pause, Play, Stop, and Fast Forward. The Import button tells iMovie to start the camera playing and to import the video coming over the FireWire cable.

When you’re in editing mode, the buttons are go to beginning, play/pause, and present full screen.

The shelf

When you import clips from your camera, each individual clip first appears on the shelf, shown in Figure 20-28. New clips start at scene breaks (where your camera stopped and restarted recording), where you stop and then restart importing, and when the clip gets to 2GB in length (a little over nine minutes).

When you click one of the buttons at the bottom of the shelf, its appearance changes to show controls for adding transitions, titles, special effects, and working with audio.

Figure 20-28: iMovie’s shelf, populated with auto-separated clips.

The Transitions panel

When you click the Transitions button at the bottom of the shelf, the Transitions panel appears, as shown in Figure 20-29. In it, you see a list of possible transitions. In addition to the transitions and effects included with iMovie, you can obtain more from Apple’s iMovie Web pages (www.apple.com/imovie) or by purchasing collections from a third party such as GeeThree (www.geethree.com).

Figure 20-29: You select a transition here, and it will preview in the small pane at the upper right.

These transitions affect the clips selected in the clip viewer. In most cases, you can also control the speed (duration) of the transition, as well as the direction in which it moves.

After you have created the transition you want in the Transitions panel, make the clip viewer (covered later) active and drag the icon for the desired transition from the Transitions panel to the clip it affects (or between the two clips) in the clip viewer. When the appropriate spacing appears in the clip viewer, release the mouse button. This will apply the transition you created. Until you do this, you’re just experimenting.

The Titles panel

Similar to the Transitions panel, the Titles panel lets you create titles and credits to show in your iMovie. If you find the little Preview pane in the Titles panel too small, you can click the Preview button and watch your credits in the monitor, as shown in Figure 20-30.

Figure 20-30: You can preview your credits or titles in the monitor if you wish.

The Title panel gives you control over direction, duration (speed), text color, font, and font size. The Over Black checkbox lets you specify that the text appears over a black background. iMovie creates a clip with a black background for you to insert in your clip viewer rather than overlaying it on a selected clip. The QT Margins checkbox tells iMovie to keep the text within a TV set’s viewable area so that nothing gets cropped if you play it on a television set. TV sets operate in an overscan mode, in that there is more of the picture than is displayed on the screen.

The Effects panel

Special effects can be applied to clips. You can select from included effects (more are available for download or purchase, as described earlier), each of which has its own set of parameters and controls. With effects, you can change the colors, contrast, and brightness of your clips. You can also create interesting effects, such as a fade from sepia to the normal coloration of your video to give that old-photograph-to-real-life effect so often seen in movies and on television. The Effects panel is shown in Figure 20-31.

Figure 20-31: Set effects options, preview the effects, and apply effects in the Effects panel. Note the Mirror effect shown in the Preview screen.

If you want the effect to apply to the entire clip, both the Effect In and Effect Out sliders should be set to 0:00. If, however, you want the effect to gradually take place, set the sliders appropriately — remember that Effect Out is measured backwards from the end of the clip.

One example of using these staged effects is to go from a sepia-toned still frame to full-color live action (as was done so well in the classic movie, The Sting), as follows:

1. Place a sepia-toned still image of the first frame of your clip just before the clip.

2. Select the Sepia Tone effect.

3. Move the Effect Out slider to the left to mark the point where you want the effect to end (almost to the beginning of the clip). By putting the still clip at the end and using the Effect In slider, you can also dissolve to a sepia-tone still.

The Audio panel

The Audio panel is where you add sound effects to your movie. You can simply drag one of the sounds from the list (shown in Figure 20-32) to one of the audio tracks in the timeline viewer.

Figure 20-32: Add sound effects, narrative, or a background score using the Audio panel.

You can use the Record Voice button (and your Mac’s microphone) to create narrative to do voice-overs during your movie. Similarly, the Record Music button enables you to capture music from a CD. When an audio CD is inserted in your CD or DVD drive, a list of tracks appears in this section’s list box. Select the one you want to import, click the Record Music button, and iMovie converts the track to an AIFF file and imports it onto the lower audio track of your timeline viewer.

The clip and timeline viewer

The wide pane at the bottom of your iMovie screen houses the clip viewer or the timeline viewer, depending on the selection you make with the Clip Viewer button: The film frame icon selects the clip viewer, and the clock icon selects the timeline.

You can drag clips and transitions from the shelf to either the clip viewer or timeline viewer, but much of your editing (particularly cut and paste) will probably be easier in the clip viewer. The timeline viewer is handy for editing individual tracks of your movie — you have a video track and two audio tracks, as shown in Figure 20-33.

Figure 20-33: You can edit individual tracks in the timeline viewer.

Tip

You can extract the audio portion of your video clip onto one of the timeline viewer’s audio tracks by choosing Advanced Extract Audio (z-J). Then, you can turn the volume for the original video track off or down low using the volume control at the bottom of the viewer and move the audio tracks around to give effects similar to those of a television news broadcast where you continue to hear the newscaster speak while you’re being shown footage taken in the field.

Editing your movie clips

The monitor provides a playhead and two selection triangles, identical in function to those described earlier in the discussion of QuickTime Pro. iMovie shows you a lot more, though, when you drag the playhead — the video in the monitor fast-forwards and reverses so that you can see exactly where you are at any time. This technique of dragging the playhead is called scrubbing. You can also position the playhead to any point by clicking on that point in the timeline viewer. Just as in QuickTime Player Pro, you can advance or reverse a frame at a time by using the arrow keys — to go back a frame and to go forward a frame. Holding down the Shift key when pressing the Left- or Right-Arrow keys moves you 10 frames at a time.

The selection triangles are called crop markers in iMovie. Just as with the playhead, you can move the crop markers by clicking on them and then using the arrow keys. You can then choose Edit Clear to remove the selected portion of the clip or Edit Crop (z-K) to remove everything but the selected portion from the clip.

Note

If you want to remove crop markers, just click on the clip’s icon on the shelf. This immediately clears all crop markers. Additionally, until you empty iMovie’s Trash, you can recover deleted material by repeatedly choosing Edit Undo until you get back to where you wanted to be.

Saving your iMovie

Generally, you want to save your iMovie either back to the camera to play on a TV or to QuickTime so that you can put it on the Web, send it in an e-mail, or burn it to a CD. If your Mac has the Apple SuperDrive DVD drive or a compatible product, you can also include your iMovie on a DVD that you create with iDVD. All these actions are initiated by choosing File Export Movie (z-E) and then choosing from the Export pop-up menu shown in Figure 20-34. In iMovie 3, it is no longer necessary to save your project for iDVD, as this is done automatically every time your project is saved. The selection “For iDVD” brings up a notice to this effect.

Figure 20-34: Choose how you want to save your movie in the Export Movie dialog.