Section 13.3. Getting into iMovie


13.3. Getting into iMovie

After you've connected and turned on your camcorder, open iMovie by double-clicking its icon, or single-clicking it on the Dock. But before you're treated to the main iMovie screen (shown in Figure 13-3), iMovie may ask you to take care of a few housekeeping details.

13.3.1. Monitor Resolution

All modern Mac monitors let you adjust the resolution, which is a measurement of how much it can show as measured in pixels (the tiny dots that make up the screen picture). If you choose System Preferences Displays, youll see the available choices.

Why is it important to understand monitor resolution when you're about to edit video? Because iMovie likes a very big screena high -resolution monitor. If your monitor is set to one of the lower resolution settings when you launch iMovie, you'll be greeted with an error message prompting you to visit System Preferences to reset the resolution. The bottom line: Choose a setting that's 1024 x 768 or larger. Poor iMovie can't even run at any lower setting.


Caution: If you switch your resolution to a resolution lower than 1024 x 768 while iMovie is open, the program has no choice but to quit. (At least it does you the courtesy of offering to save the changes to the project file you've been working on.)The program is more graceful when you switch between two higher resolutions ; it instantly adjusts its various windows and controls to fit the resized screen. In other words, whenever you switch resolutions while the program is open, be extra careful not to choose, for example, 800 x 600 by mistake.

13.3.2. The Create Project Dialog Box

If everything has gone well, and iMovie approves of your monitor setting, your next stop is the window shown in Figure 13-2.

You've reached a decision point: You must now tell the program whether you want to begin a new movie (called a project in iMovie lingo), open one you've already started, use the new Magic iMovie feature (Section 13.7.1.1), or quit the program.

After the first time you run iMovie, you may not see the dialog box shown in Figure 13-2 very often. After that, each time you launch iMovie, it automatically opens up the movie you were working on most recently. If you ever want to see the Project dialog box again, in fact, you'll have to do one of the following:

  • Instead of quitting iMovie when you're finished working, just close its window, so that the Create Project screen reappears. If you quit iMovie now , it won't open any project the next time you fire up the program; it will show the Create Project dialog box instead.

  • Discard the last movie you were working on (by trashing it from your hard drive), or move it to a different folder.

  • Throw away the iMovie Preferences file (which is where iMovie records which movie you were editing most recently). It bears the uncatchy name com.apple. iMovie. plist , and it's inside your Home Library Preferences folder.

13.3.3. Saving a New Project File

If you click Create a New Project (Figure 13-2), you're now asked to select a name and location for the movie you're about to makeor, as iMovie would say, the project you're about to make.

Figure 13-2. Click Create Project to begin working on a new movie, Open Existing Project to open an existing movie, Magic iMovie to let the program assemble a movie unattended, or Quit to back out of the whole thing. The little ? button opens up the iMovie HD Help system.
You'll see a similar box when you first open iDVD and GarageBand.


This is a critical moment. Starting a new iMovie project isn't as casual an affair as starting a new word processing file. For one thing, iMovie requires that you save and name your file before you've actually done any work. For another, you can't bring in footage from your camcorder without first naming and saving a project file.

13.3.3.1. Where to save

Above all, the location of your saved project fileyour choice of hard drive to save it onis important. Digital video files are enormous . Standard DV footage consumes about 3.6 MB of your hard drive per second . Therefore:

Table 13-2.

This much video

Needs about this much disk space

1 minute

228 MB

15 minutes

3.5 GB

30 minutes

7 GB

60 minutes

13 GB

2 hours

28 GB

4 hours

53 GB


As you could probably guess, high-definition footage is even more massive; each minute of it takes between three and four times as much disk space as standard DV footage.

When you save and name your project, you're also telling iMovie where to put these enormous, disk-guzzling files. If, like most people, you have only one hard drive, the one built into your Mac, fine. Make as much empty room as you can, and proceed with your video-editing career.

But many iMovie fans have more than one hard drive. They may have decided to invest in a larger hard drive, as described in the box below, so that they can make longer movies. If you're among them, save your new project onto the larger hard drive if you want to take advantage of its extra space.


Tip: People who have used other space- intensive software, such as Photoshop and Premiere, are frequently confused by iMovie. They expect the program to have a Scratch Disk command that lets them specify where (on which hard drive) they want their work files stored while they're working.As you now know, iMovie has no such command. You choose your scratch disk (the hard drive onto which you save your project) on a movie-by-movie basis.

Note, by the way, that digital video requires a fast hard drive. Therefore, make no attempt to save your project file onto a floppy disk, Zip disk, Jaz disk, SuperDisk, iDisk, CD-R, DVD-R, or another disk on the network. It won't be fast enough, and you'll get nothing but error messages.

13.3.3.2. Video format

iMovie HD offers a new pop-up menu in the Create Project dialog box called "Video format." The most important lesson to learn about this pop-up menu is that, in general, you should ignore it .

Here, you can specify what kind of incoming video iMovie should expect, but you don't have to. iMovie detects what kind of camcorder you've attached automatically , and it creates the right kind of project no matter what this pop-up menu says.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Saving to External FireWire Drives

I need more hard drive space. What should I do? Can I save a project onto an external FireWire drive ?

It's a natural question; most Macs have two FireWire jacks . What better way to capitalize on them than by hooking up the camcorder and an external FireWire hard drive simultaneously ?

For example, at the time of this writing, you can get an 80 GB FireWire hard drive for under $160 (from www.promax.com, for example), which is enough to hold over six hours of footage. And the prices are falling rapidly .

Like most FireWire gear, these hard drives have several advantages over hard drives you may have known in the past. They're smaller and faster, can be plugged and unplugged from the computer without turning anything off, and don't require power cords of their own.


13.3.4. iMovie Controls

Once you've saved your file, you finally arrive at the main iMovie window. Figure 13-3 is a cheat sheet for what all of iMovie's various screen elements do. Spend no time memorizing their functions now; the rest of this book covers each of these tools in context and in depth.

  • Monitor . You watch your footage in this window.

  • Clips pane . These little cubbyholes store the clips pieces of footage, individual shotsthat you'll rearrange into a masterpiece of modern storytelling.

    This pane won't always be the Clips pane, incidentally. It becomes the Photos pane, the Audio pane, and so on, when you click one of the buttons beneath it. The one thing all of these incarnations have in common is that they offer you lists of materials you can incorporate into your movie.

  • Pane buttons . Each of these buttonsClips, Photos, Audio, Titles, Trans (Transitions), Effects, iDVDfills the Clips pane area with tools that add professional touches to your movie, like crossfade styles, credit sequences, footage effects (like brightness and color shifting), still photos, sound effects, and music. The following chapters cover these video flourishes in detail.

    Figure 13-3. iMovie HD doesn't look much like any program you've used beforeexcept perhaps earlier versions of iMovie.
    iMovie appears in its own window, which you can resize, send to the background, drag to a second monitor, and otherwise manipulate like any other program's window.


  • Clip Viewer/Timeline Viewer . You'll spend most of your editing time down here. Each of these tools offers a master map that shows which scenes will play in which order, but there's a crucial difference in the way they do it.

    When you click the Clip Viewer button ( marked by a piece of filmstrip), you see your movie represented as slides . Each clip appears to be the same size , even if some are long and some are short. The Clip Viewer offers no clue as to what's going on with the audio, but it's a supremely efficient overview of your clips' sequence.

    When you click the Timeline Viewer button (marked by the clock), on the other hand, you can see the relative lengths of your clips, because each shows up as a colored band of the appropriate length. Parallel bands (complete with visual "sound waves," if you like), underneath indicate blocks of sound that play simultaneously.

  • Camera Mode/Edit Mode switch . In Camera Mode, the playback controls operate your camcorder, rather than the iMovie film you're editing. In Camera Mode, the Monitor window shows you what's on the tape, not what's in iMovie, so that you can choose which shots you want to transfer to iMovie for editing.

    In Edit Mode, however, iMovie ignores your camcorder. Now the playback controls govern your captured clips instead of the camcorder. Edit Mode is where you start piecing your movie together.


    Tip: You can drag the blue dot between the Camera Mode and Edit Mode positions , if you like, but doing so requires sharp hand-eye coordination and an unnecessary mouse drag. It's much faster to click on one of the icons, ignoring the little switch entirely. Click directly on the little camera symbol for Camera Mode, for example, or on the scissors for Edit Mode.
  • Home . Means "rewind to the beginning." Keyboard equivalent : the Home key on your keyboard. (On laptops, you must hold down both the Fn key and the left-arrow key to trigger the Home function.)


    Note: In Camera Mode, the Home, Play/Stop, and Full Screen buttons described here are replaced by the Rewind, Stop, Play, Pause, and Fast Forward buttons, as described later in this chapter.
  • Play/Stop . Plays the tape, movie, or clip. When the playback is going on, the button turns blue; that's your cue that clicking it again stops the playback.

  • Play Full Screen . Clicking this button makes the movie you're editing fill the entire Mac screen as it plays back, instead of playing just in the small Monitor window. (It still doesn't look nearly as good as it will on your TV, however, as described on Section 13.4.1. Unless, of course, you have an Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display, in which case you see every juicy drop of the full, spectacular resolution.)


    Tip: The Full Screen button doesn't play your movie back from the beginning. Instead, it plays back from the location of the Playhead. If you do want to play in full-screen mode from the beginning, press the Home key (or click the Home button just to the left of the Play button) before clicking the Play Full Screen button.
  • Scrubber bar . It's like a scroll bar for one piece of footage, or the entire movie.

  • Playhead . The Playhead shows exactly where you are in the footage.

  • Volume slider . To adjust your speaker volume as you work, click anywhere in the slider's "track" to make the knob jump there. (You can also boost the Mac's overall speaker volume, of course.)

  • Project Trash . You can drag any clip onto this icon to get rid of it. (Or just highlight a clip and press the Delete key.)

  • Free space . This indicator lets you know how full your hard drive is.

UP TO SPEED
Special Cases: Recording from iSight, USB, and Hi-Def Camcorders

Recorded footage from a MiniDV tape is by far the most popular source of iMovie video, but it's not the only one. Here are some of the latest new sources.

iSight . The iSight camea (about $150) doesn't take tapes, so you can't prerecord something. But it's an excellent tool for recording live events directly into iMovie. Just connect the iSight's FireWire cable to the Mac. Choose iSight from the little pop-up menu below the Monitor window, and then click Record with iSight.

USB Camcorders . Panasonic, Fisher, Gateway, and other companies sell a new breed of super-tiny microcorders that can capture video directly onto memory cards.

iMovie lets you work with many of these "camcorders," or at least the ones that record in MPEG-4 Simple Profile format. When you connect one of these 'corders to your Mac's USB jack, the memory card shows up on your screen as though it's a disk. Double-click it to reveal its contents, which include a folder with all your video recordings in it. Bring them into iMovie by simply dragging their Finder icons into the iMovie Track or Clips pane.

HDV Camcorders . The high-definition video format offers a stunning, high-resolution picture, clear enough to make you feel like you're looking out a window and wide enough to show you, in a single camera shot, the pitcher, the batter, and the runner on first.

To see high definition, you need a high-def TV set (an HDTV). And to film HDTV, you need an HDV camcorder like Sony's HDR-FX1 or HDR-HC1. (HDV isn't a typo. That's the format these camcorders use to store high-def video on ordinary MiniDV tapes.)

Importing and editing high-def video is almost exactly like working with regular video. One difference: Your Mac probably isn't fast enough to capture this massive amount of data in real time. That's why you'll see the tiny notation "Capturing HD at 1/4 speed," as shown here. (The fraction fluctuates as the importing goes on.)

In other words, importing high-def footage isn't a real-time operation. Even after the camera is finished playing the tape, iMovie takes a few more minutes to catch up.

Fortunately, it's worth the wait. Once the HDTV footage is inside iMovie, you can work with it with all the speed and fluidity of standard footage. And when the work is finished, you can export the result to iDVD to burn onto a DVD. No, the result won't be a high-definition disc; it will, however, be a widescreen disc (at your option), which will look absolutely spectacular on a widescreen TV.





iLife 05. The Missing Manual
iLife 05: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100361
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 314
Authors: David Pogue

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