4.3. 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 4-4), iMovie may ask you to take care of a few housekeeping details.

4.3.1. 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 get an error message like the one shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2. If your monitor is set to 800 x 600 or lower resolution, iMovie won't run.

UP TO SPEED The iMovie Tutorial

iMovie no longer comes with a sample project that you're supposed to build as you learn the ropes ; the kids -washing- a-dog movie is long gone. In its place, Apple now offers a choice of two very helpful learning kits. First, your copy of iMovie came with an 83-page PDF file (Acrobat Reader file) that can serve as a starting point for your iMovie education. To open it, choose Help iMovie HD Help from within iMovie, click Learn About iMovie HD, and then click the Getting Started link. After a moment, the PDF document opens up on the screen, so that you can print it or read it electronically . Second, Apple has provided a series of basic but helpfully narrated videos that walk you through the entire core of iMovie. They're online, but the quickest way to find them is to choose Help iMovie HD Support from within iMovie. Youre taken to the main iMovie help page online, which contains links to the tutorials like the one shown here.

The bottom line: Choose a setting that's 1024 x 768 or larger. Poor iMovie can't even run at any lower setting.

4.3.2. The Create Project Dialog Box

If everything has gone well, and iMovie approves of your monitor setting, your next stop is the window (Figure 4-3).

Figure 4-3. 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'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 (page 105), or quit the program.

After the first time you run iMovie, you may not see the dialog box shown in Figure 4-3 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.

4.3.3. Saving a New Project File

If you click Create a New Project (Figure 4-3), 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 4-4).

Figure 4-4. Top: In the Create Project dialog box, you name your new movie and specify where you want to save it. Bottom: You can also tell iMovie what format to expect for the incoming video. In most cases, though, you don't need to bother; iMovie will automatically accommodate whatever camera you attach.

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.

4.3.3.1 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 4-1.

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 on page 95, 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.

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.

4.3.3.2 Video format

Unlike previous versions, 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.

So why did Apple provide this pop-up menu? Primarily for situations in which you're not going to use a video camera to provide the footage. For example, you might want to use iMovie HD to create a spectacular slideshow from your digital photos in high-definition, or at least in widescreen . (No, there's no such thing as a Mac that burns high-definition DVDs. But there will be one day soon. If you create your slideshows in high-def format today, you'll be ready.)

In such cases, you'll be happy to have this pop-up menu so that you can choose a format manually.

Your choices are:

• DV stands for digital videothe usual signal from standard MiniDV camcorders.

• DV Widescreen is also for MiniDV camcorders, but specifically the ones that offer a so-called 16:9 shooting mode. That is, these camcorders can film a widescreen, rectangular image, shaped like an HDTV picture but without the high resolution. You'd choose this option when importing footage filmed in 16:9 mode.(For your reference, the traditional, squarish video picture is known as 4:3. Both ratios refer to the width: height proportions of the picture.)

• HDV 1080i, HDV 720p refer to the new, high-definition camcorders that inspired the creation of iMovie HD.1080i and 720p are two different flavors of high-def TV; Sony's HDR-FX1 camcorder uses 1080i, and JVC's GR-HD1 records in 720p.Both of them are HDV camcorders, a reference to the format they use to store a high-definition picture on ordinary MiniDV cassettes.

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  Note: If you're scoring at home: 1080i creates the picture on your screen by blasting 1,080 fine horizontal lines onto the screen in two alternating, interlaced sets of 540. A 720p picture is painted progressively down the screen in a single pass, but using "only" 720 lines of resolution.Online, people argue about which format is superior until they're blue in the keyboard, but let's just put it this way: both pictures look absolutely spectacular compared with 480i (the interlaced picture of regular TV) or even 480p (what you get from standard DVDs).

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• MPEG-4 is the video format used by many "flash-based" video devices like the Fisher FVDC1 CameraCorder, which are extremely compact handheld camcorders that store video on a memory card instead of tape. (See page 102.)

• iSight is Apple's pocket- sized , 0 video-chat camera. For instructions on capturing video from an iSight, see page 101.

Once you've set up your Create Project dialog box, click the Create button.

4.3.4. iMovie Controls

Once you've saved your file, you finally arrive at the main iMovie window. Figure 4-5 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.

Figure 4-5. 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.

• 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. Chapters 6,7, 8, and 16 cover these video flourishes in detail.

• 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.

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  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.

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• 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.)

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  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.

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• 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 page 97. Unless, of course, you have an Apple 23-inch Cinema HD Display, in which case you see every juicy drop of the full, spectacular resolution.)

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  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.

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• Scrubber bar. This special scroll bar lets you jump anywhere in one piece of footage, or the entire movie.

• Playhead. The Playhead is like the little box handle, or thumb, of a normal scroll bar. It 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. (Keep in mind that you can also boost the Mac's overall speaker volume by pressing the volume keys on the keyboard, using the volume slider in your menu bar, or using the Sound panel in System Preferences.)

• Project Trash. You can drag any clip on to 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. In the world of video editing, that's a very important statistic, as described on page 101.