11.7. Burning a QuickTime Movie CD

11.6. Editing Digital-Camera Movies

To edit your camera-captured movies, open iMovie (the video-editing component of your iLife suite). Click the Photos button so that you can see all your iPhoto pictures ”and all your iPhoto movie clips. Drag the clips you want right into your timeline. (Or, if iPhoto is running, drag the movies' thumbnails right out of iPhoto's window and into iMovie's timeline or Clips panel. )

The end.

All right, there's a little more to it ”like learning how to use iMovie ”but that's a different book. The point here is that you can incorporate movies from iPhoto's library in whatever iMovie project you have open, ready to edit as you would any other clips.

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Tip: Want a great way to organize your camera's movies all at once? Create a new smart album as described in Chapter 5. Set it up so that the pop-up menus and text boxes in the New Smart Album dialog box say "Title" "ends with" ".mov" (or ".avi," depending on how your digital camera names its movie files). You'll always find all your movies safely collected in this self-updating smart album.

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11.6.1. Editing Digital-Camera Movies in QuickTime Player Pro

If learning iMovie seems like overkill for some little project ”if all you want to do is combine a few into one longer flick, for example ”you can get by with nothing more than QuickTime Player Pro.

Suppose, for example, that you want to combine two movies called Clip A and Clip B. Open both of them by double-clicking their thumbnails in iPhoto.

Then follow along with this quick refresher that covers the basic editing techniques for this project:

• Trim. You can use this command to trim unwanted footage from the beginning or end of a movie clip. First, move the bottom triangles on the scrubber bar to the in and out points of the footage you want to keep, as shown in Figure 11-7. When you choose Edit Trim, QuickTime Player eliminates the white area on the scrubber bar, retaining the gray area.

• Select, Copy, Add. Many digital cameras allow you to shoot only 30 seconds or a couple minutes of video at a time. So to construct your movie, you can use these commands to combine short clips into a longer presentation.

  The procedure is a lot like copying and pasting text. In the first movie ”the one that will become the master, fully assembled version ”click the far right triangle to move the scrubber head to the end.

  Now open the second movie. Choose Edit Select All to highlight the whole clip, and then choose Edit Copy. The selected video and audio is now on the clipboard.

  Return to the first movie; choose Edit Add. (Dont choose Edit Paste, or youll replace the video in the first movie.) The copied video now appears at the end of the movie. You'll see that its duration indicator changes to reflect the added length.

• Save As. Choose File Save As. Give your combined movie a new name , click "Make movie self-contained, "and then click Save. (As noted earlier, dont use the regular Save command unless you intend to replace the original movie clip in iPhoto 5 with your edited one.) Once you've stored the new version on your hard drive, you can drag it back into iPhoto.

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Tip: If you're lucky enough to have a digital camera that captures video at 640 x 480 pixels (that's full-screen TV size ), you can add video to your exported slideshows. To do so, export an instant slideshow as described on page 283, taking care to save the result at 640 x 480 pixels. Open the exported slideshow in QuickTime Player Pro, along the desired movie clip. Using the Select, Copy, and Add commands described above, you can now create presentations beyond anything you ever expected possible from iPhoto.

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