Section 18.6. Importing QuickTime Movies

18.6. Importing QuickTime Movies

iMovie can import more than still images. It can also import existing digital movies, which you can then incorporate into your footage.

Maybe you've created such QuickTime movies yourself, using other Macs or other software. Maybe you've grabbed a QuickTime movie from a CD-ROM or Web site. Or maybe you've used a digital still camera's Movie mode to grab some short scenes.

In any case, here are three ways to get digital movies into an iMovie project:

• If they're lying on your hard drive, choose File Import (Shift- -I). In the Open File dialog box, navigate to and open the QuickTime movie you want to import.

• If you used iPhoto 5 to import the movies, you'll find them nestled among the still photos in iMovie's Photos pane.

• With movies stored in iPhoto, you can also drag the thumbnails out of that program's window and into the Clips pane or Movie Track of iMovie. (Of course, you have to first position the windows so that you can see both at once.)

It may take iMovie some time to process the incoming movie. Behind the scenes, it's converting the QuickTime movie into DV format, just like the clips that come from your camcorder. A progress bar keeps you posted.

When it's complete, a new clip appears in your Clips pane, which you can manipulate just as you would any movie clip.

18.6.1. Using the Imported QuickTime Clip

It's worth noting that most of the world's QuickTime movies aren't big enough, in terms of frame size , to fill your entire monitor. In fact, most of the world's QuickTime movieslike all the ones on the Webplay in a window only a couple of inches square.

Therefore, when you play back an imported QuickTime movie, iMovie does what it hopes is the right thing: It blows up the QuickTime movie until the footage fills the entire iMovie playback screen (640 x 480 pixels).

As you probably know by now, however, enlarging any graphic on the computer usually winds up degrading its quality, because each pixel that composes the image must be enlarged. The bottom line: QuickTime movies you import into iMovie may look coarse and blotchy unless they were at least 640 x 480 to begin with.

18.6.2. Grabbing Clips from Other Projects

It's worth a reminder: You can also grab clips from one iMovie project and use them in another. Forget all the workarounds you once knew; in iMovie HD, reusing a clip is as simple as highlighting it in Project A, choosing Edit Copy, opening Project B, choosing Edit Paste, and then waiting patiently as iMovie, behind the scenes, duplicates the massive video file. (See Section 32.3.2 for more caveats regarding the Copy command and disk space.)