Section 14.1. Navigating Your Clips | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

14.1. Navigating Your Clips

As you're building your movie, you can store your clips in either of two places: the Clips pane or the strip at the bottom of the window. You put clips on the Clips pane before deciding what to do with them, and drag them down to the storyboard area once you've decided where they fit into your movie.

This clip-assembly area at the bottom of the iMovie screen can appear in either of two ways:

Clip Viewer . In this view, each clip appears as an icon, as though it's a slide on a slide viewer. Each is sized identically, even if one is 8 minutes long and the next is only 2 seconds.
Timeline Viewer . This view also shows a linear map of your movie. But in this case, each clip is represented by a horizontal bar that's as wide as the clip is long. Short clips have short bars; long clips stretch across your screen. Parallel bars below the clips indicate the soundtracks playing simultaneously .

Grizzled iMovie veterans are used to switching between these two viewers by clicking the corresponding icon just above them (either the film strip or the clock) or by pressing the viewer-switching keystroke: -E.

But they might want to consider a different tactic in iMovie HD: not using the Clip Viewer at all . In iMovie HD, Apple gave the Timeline Viewer all of the drag-and-droppy talents once reserved for the Clip Viewer. Now, for example, you can drag clips to rearrange them in the Timeline Viewer, drag them back and forth to the Clips pane, drag them to the Finder or programs like iDVD, and so on. In short, there's very little reason left to use the Clip Viewer at all .

Note: You can read much more about these two views of your work at the end of this chapter. It's important now, however, to note that Apple hasn't given a name to this bottom-of-your-screen area as a whole . To prevent you from having to read about the "Clip Viewer/Timeline Viewer area" 47 times per chapter, this book uses the made-up term Movie Track to refer to this editing track, regardless of which view it's showing.

You can do several things to a clip, whether it's in the Clips pane or the Movie Track.

14.1.1. Select a Clip

When you click a clipthe picture, not the nameiMovie highlights it by making its border (the "cardboard" portion of the "slide") or its bar (in the Timeline) blue. The first frame of the selected clip appears in the Monitor window. (If you're in Camera Mode at the time, busily controlling your camcorder by clicking the playback controls, iMovie immediately switches back into Edit Mode. The camcorder stops automatically.)

Figure 14-1. iMovie HD no longer reveals, at the bottom of the window, the date and time a highlighted clip was originally recorded. You can still see those details, though, if you double-click the clip.

Once you've highlighted a clip, its name and duration appear at the bottom edge of the Movie Track, as shown in Figure 14-1.

To deselect a clip (all clips, in fact), choose Edit Select None, or press Shift- -A, or Control-click any clip and choose Select None from the shortcut menu. If you're menu-phobic, just click anywhere except on a clip (on the metallic-looking iMovie background, say), or Shift-click the first or last in a series of highlighted clips.

Knowing these five ways to deselect your clips will save you frustration. Just after you create an effect or title, for example, iMovie leaves only that clip highlighted. You'll usually want to deselect itand to play back what comes before and after the effectto see your handiwork in context.

14.1.2. Select Several Clips

You can use a number of techniques to highlight several clips simultaneously. For example:

In the Movie Track, click one clip, and then Shift-click the last one. All consecutive clips between them get selected.
You can also select several clips that aren't next to each other using the same techniques you'd use to select nonadjacent icons in a Finder list view. To do so, click the first clip, then -click each additional clip. You can also -click a selected clip to deselect it.
In the Clips pane, you can either Shift-click or -click several clips, one at a time. (You may as well learn to -click, though, so you can use the same shortcut in both the Clips pane and the Movie Track.)
You can also choose a bunch of clips, either in the Clips pane or in the Movie Track, by drag-selecting them. This technique involves positioning the cursor in the gray area outside clips and dragging diagonally over the clips you want to select. As you drag, you create a faint gray selection rectangle. Any clips touched by, or inside, this rectangle become highlighted.
In either the Clips pane or the Movie Track, you can select all of the clips by choosing Edit Select All ( -A). Or Control-click any clip and choose Select All from the shortcut menu.

Tip: Once you've selected several clips, you can

-click a clip to remove it from the selection, if you like. Also, like the corresponding trick in the Finder, you

-click a stray clip to add it to a Shift-clicked group .

So why would you want to select several clips at once? Let us count the tricks:

Delete them all by pressing the Delete key, or drag them all to the project Trash.
Use the Cut, Copy, or Clear commands in the Edit menu to affect all of them at once. You can paste copied clips either to another spot in the same movie, or even into a different iMovie HD project.
Move them around the Movie Track or the Clips paneor drag them from one of those locations to the otherby dragging any one of them. The remaining clips slide leftward to close the gaps.
Drag them all to the Finder, where they appear as individual movie-clip icons, or into another program, like iDVD.
Apply the same transition, special effect, or Ken Burns photo setting to all of them using the Apply button on the Trans, Effects, and Photo panes. Similarly, you can update them all using the Update button. (Details in Chapters 15, 16 through 17.)
Consolidate a batch of nonadjacent clips. For example, suppose you -click clips number 1, 3, 5, and 7. Now you can use Edit Cut, click a different clip in the movie to pinpoint a landing site, and then choose Edit Paste. The clips that you cut, which were once scattered , now appear adjacent to each other and in sequence.

Tip: Here's a secret little command that very few iMovie fans even know about: Select Similar Clips.Here's how it works: Click a clip in the Movie Track, and then choose Edit

Select Similar Clips. (Alternatively, Control-click a clip and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Select Similar Clips.) iMovie thoughtfully selects all clips in the Movie Track that match: all black clips, all photos, all transition effects, all clips that were chopped out of the same original piece of footage, and so on. This command can be a quick, efficient way to delete, move, consolidate, or modify a lot of similar material en masse.

14.1.3. Play a Clip

You can play a highlighted clip in the Monitor window by pressing the Space bar (or clicking the Play triangle button underneath the Monitor window).

You can stop the playback very easily: Press the Space bar a second time, or click anywhere else on the screenon another clip, another control, the Monitor window, the metallic iMovie background, and so on.

14.1.4. Jump Around in a Clip

Whether the clip is playing or not, you can jump instantly to any other part of the clip in one of two ways:

Drag the Playhead handle to any other part of the Scrubber bar (see Figure 14-2).
Click directly in the Scrubber bar to jump to a particular spot in the footage. Doing so while the movie is playing saves you the difficulty of trying to grab the tiny Playhead as it moves across the screen.

Tip: To play back a section repeatedly for analysis, just keep clicking at the same spot in the Scrubber bar while the clip plays.

Figure 14-2. While a clip plays, the Playhead (the down-pointing triangle) slides across the Scrubber bar. If you can catch it, you can drag the Playhead using the mouse, thus jumping around in the movie. Or you can simply click anywhere in the Scrubber bar. Either way, the playback continues at the new spot in the clip.

14.1.5. Step Through a Clip

By pressing the right and left arrow keys, you can view your clip one frame at a time, as though you're watching the world's least interesting slideshow. Hold down these arrow keys steadily to make the frame-by-frame parade go by faster.

Adding the Shift key to your arrow-key presses is often more usefulit lets you jump 10 frames at a time. In time, you can get extremely good at finding an exact frame in a particular piece of footage just by mastering the arrow-key and Shift-arrow-key shortcuts. (These shortcuts work only when the clip isn't playing.)

14.1.6. Scan Through a Clip

The Rewind and Fast Forward keystrokes (left bracket and right bracketthat is, the [ and ] keys) let you zoom through your footage faster. Press once to start playback, a second time to stop. In iMovie HD, you even hear the audio as you rewind or fast forward (sped up, chipmunk-style).

You don't have to click Play first. The Rewind and Fast Forward keystrokes start your clip playing at double speed even from a dead stop.

14.1.7. Rename a Clip

When iMovie imports your clips, it gives them such creative names as Clip 01, Clip 02 , and so on. Fortunately, renaming a clip on the Clips pane or Clip Viewer is very easy: Just click directly on its name ("Clip 11") to open the renaming rectangle, and then type the new name. All the usual Macintosh editing techniques work inside this little highlighted renaming rectangle, including the Delete key and the Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All commands in the Edit menu.

You can also rename a clip in its Clip Info dialog box (see Figure 14-8), which is the only way to change a clip's name in the Timeline Viewer. To open this box, just double-click the clip. (Or, if you're billing by the hour , Control-click the clip and, from the shortcut menu, choose Show Info.)

An iMovie clip's name can be 127 letters and spaces long. Be aware, however, that only about the first eleven letters of it actually show up under the clip icon. (The easiest way to see the whole clip name is to double-click the clip icon and then drag your cursor through the Name field in the resulting dialog box.)

The clip renaming you do in iMovie doesn't affect the names of the files in your project's Media folder on the hard drive (see Section 13.7.1.1). Files there remain forever with their original names: Clip 01, Clip 02, and so on. That's why, in times of troubleshooting or file administration, the Clip Info box that appears when you double-click a clip can be especially useful. It's the only way to find out how a clip that you've renamed in iMovie corresponds to a matching clip on your hard drive.

Tip: Because you can only see the first few letters of a clip's name when it's on the Clips pane, adopt clever naming conventions to help you remember what's in each clip. Use prefix codes like CU (for "closeup"), ES ("establishing shot"), MS ("medium shot"), WS ("wide shot"), and so on, followed by useful keywords ("wild laughter ," "sad melon," and so on). If the clip contains recorded speech, clue yourself in by including a quotation as part of the clip's name.

14.1.8. Reorganize Your Clips

You can drag clips from cubbyhole to cubbyhole on the Clips pane. In fact, you can even drag a clip (or even a mass of highlighted clips) onto an occupied cubbyhole. iMovie automatically creates enough new cubbyholes to hold them all, and shuffles existing clips out of the way if necessary.

The freedom to drag clips around in the Clips pane offers you a miniature storyboard feature. That is, you can construct a sequence by arranging several clips in the Clips pane. When they seem to be in a good order for your finished scene, drag the whole batch to the Movie Track at once.

UP TO SPEED
Secrets of the Save Command

As you work in almost any program, you're usually encouraged to choose File Save (or press -S) frequently, thus preserving your latest efforts and protecting them against power-failure disaster.

Saving in iMovie is fairly quick; it doesn't require the long, disk- intensive wait that you might expect from a video-editing program. (You're saving only your Project file, not making any changes to the large, underlying DV files in your Media folder.) Better yet, in iMovie HD, saving makes iMovie release unused memory and disk space, making the whole works run slightly faster.

Saving your document does, however, have a few downsides. Each time you save, you wipe out your entire Undo and Redo trail; you can no longer work backward to correct a mistake using the Undo command.

Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away.

Tip: See the little tiny icon next to the name of your project (top of the window)? If you drag that icon to any visible swatch of your Desktop, you create an alias of your project therea handy, double-clickable launch pad to get you back into this project tomorrow.