Section 6.7. Effects: The iMovie Catalog | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

6.7. Effects: The iMovie Catalog

iMovie HD comes with 23 built-in effects, including five new ones. The following list describes them all.

6.7.1. Adjust Colors

This powerful effect adjusts the actual color palette used in your clip footage. If your footage has an unfortunate greenish tint, you can color -correct it; if you're hoping for a sunset look, you can bring out the oranges and reds; if it's a sci-fi flick taking place on Uranus, you can make it look blue and spooky.

The special sliders for this effect affect the hue, saturation, and brightness of your footage. Hue, saturation, and brightness are cornerstones of color theory; you can read much more about them on the Web, or in books and articles about photo editing. In the meantime, here's a brief summary:

Hue Shift (Left Right). Adjusts the overall color tint of the clip. What iMovie is actually doing is rotating the hue around the hue circle, either to the left or the right. In practice, this effect doesn't do anything predictable to an image; you're meant to play with it until you find something you like.
Color (B&W Vivid). This slider lets you control the intensity of a color, or its saturation . If it's blue, you control how blue it is: increasing toward Vivid makes the blue more intense .
Lightness (Dark Bright). Use this slider to adjust the overall brightness or darkness of the colors in your clip. There's only a subtle difference between these effects and the Brightness/Contrast effect described below; this slider adjusts the brightness of the colors, rather than the overall brightness.

6.7.2. Aged Film

Here you've just spent $500 on a camcorder and a couple thou on a Macintosh, all in the name of attaining perfect purity of videoand then this effect comes along. It's designed to make a clip look like an old, flickering , dusty film, complete with horrible scratches along the celluloid.

Using the Exposure, Jitter, and Scratches sliders, you can control just how faded, shaky-in-the-projector, and scratched up the footage looks (Figure 6-9, top).

Combine this one with Black & White, described next , and you've got yourself something that looks authentically like a horribly preserved reel you dug up from somebody's attic.

6.7.3. Black & White

This effect does one thing very well: It turns your clip into a black-and-white piece of footage, suitable for simulating security-camera footage or TV from the 1950s.

6.7.4. Brightness & Contrast

Footage that's too dark is one of the most common hallmarks of amateur camcorder work. If you're filming indoors without extra lights, you may as well accept the fact that your clip will be too dark.

The Brightness & Contrast controls can help, but they're no substitute for good lighting in the original footage. When you drag the Brightness and Contrast sliders in very small amounts, you may be able to rescue footage that's slightly murky or washed out. Dragging the sliders a lot, however, may make the too-dark footage grainy and weird-looking.

Tip: Using the Effect In and Out sliders, you can control which parts of the clip are affected by the Adjust Colors and Brightness & Contrast effects. If you need the colors or brightness to shift several times over the course of a clip, consider chopping up the clip into several smaller clips, each of which is an opportunity to reset the effect settings and timings.

Figure 6-9. Top: Modern museum? No thanks to the Aged Film effect, it's ancient edifice circa 1938.
Middle: Georges Seurat's take on a coffeehouse: a pointillistic mosaic, courtesy of the Crystallize effect.
Bottom: Earthquake! (For a better simulation of what iMovie really does, shake this book rapidly in front of your face.) This effect looks really great when you adjust the Effect In and Effect Out sliders so that the shaking begins gradually and intensifies. (Better yet, apply the effect several times, to make the intensity of the shaking appear to fluctuate.)

6.7.5. Crystallize

This effect makes your footage look like you shot it through a stained-glass window, or perhaps a translucent honeycomb (Figure 6-9, middle). As you drag the Size slider toward Max, the size of the individual "crystal" facets gets so large, it's more like you're looking at a living stained-glass window. At the Max end, you can't even identify what you're looking at; it's as though you've got an abstract painting that's come to life. This is not, ahem, an effect you'll use often.

6.7.6. Earthquake

Talk about an effect you'll use only rarely!

This one (Figure 6-9, bottom) is designed to simulate camera shake , the jittery, shuddering, handheld, no-tripod, stabilizer-off look that you'd get if you felt the earth move under your feet, and felt the sky come tumblin' down. You can use the two sliders to specify how the earthquake is tossing your camera around: sideways or vertically, and to what degrees.

6.7.7. Edge Work

Here's another effect that's new in iMovie HD. Its peculiar mission: to reduce the scene to black-and-white moving blobs, as though the entire clip had been constructed of bad Xerox copies.

iMovie creates this effect by setting every edge that it detectsborders between light and dark areasin fat "boldface." The Max slider governs the chunkiness of the rendered black and white blobs. You could easily imagine Edge Work finding a home in music videos , homemade animated movies, or courtroom scenes where you want to mask a witness 's identity.

6.7.8. Edges

Again, think "music-video weirdness." This new, amazing-looking iMovie HD effect reduces the entire scene to an inverted photocopy. That is, the scene goes black except for the moving edges of things, which are white (Figure 6-10, top). You can still tell what you're looking at, especially if you move the Intensity slider to the right, but the whole thing has a weird, ghostly, "erased" look to it.

6.7.9. Electricity

Unlike most of the other effects, which apply equally everywhere in the video frame, this one (Figure 6-10, middle) actually superimposes an imagein this case, a purplish, flickering bolt of lightningonto any spot of the footage you want. You can use this one to great comic effect; when attached to the end of somebody's wand or walking stick, the electricity looks like it's shooting out. When attached to somebody's head or rear end, the electricity looks like it's zapping that hapless person.

You can probably figure out that the Rotate slider lets you change the lightning bolt's angle (CW = Clockwise, CCW = Counter-Clockwise). But what you may not realize is that you can click inside the Preview window to specify the landing (or starting) point of the sparkler. By using the rotation and position controls in combination, you have complete freedom in designing the placement of the zap within the frame. (Alas, you can't make the bolt move during a clip. It stays put, crackling away right in place, so it's primarily useful for adding to a tripod shot that you filmed expressly for the purpose of doctoring later in iMovie.)

6.7.10. Fairy Dust

Like Electricity, this effect (Figure 6-10, bottom) is designed to superimpose a professional-looking sparkler effect on your footage. In this case, you get a shooting firework that follows a specified arc across the frame; the net effect is something like a burning fuse, except that the path , although visible in the Preview window for your reference, doesn't actually appear once you apply the effect.

Here again, you can click within the Preview frame to position the arc, thereby adjusting the sparkler's trajectory. Use the Direction slider to specify whether the fire flies left to right across the frame, or right to left. (It really has no business being a slider. It has only two positions : left or right. Dragging the handle to an intermediate point does nothing.)

Figure 6-10. Top: The Edges effect, which might be better named "Bad drug trip," "Hangover," or "After the surgery."
Middle: Lightning strikes as often as you feel like making it strike, thanks to the Electricity effect.
Bottom: The Fairy Dust effect might be better named Fireworks Sparkler, or perhaps Burning Fuse on an Invisible String. The trajectory and angle are up to you.

The Trail slider, meanwhile, governs the size of the sparkler.

6.7.11. Fast/Slow/Reverse

If you're a veteran of iMovie, you may remember that the Fast, Slow, and Reverse controls used to be at the bottom edge of the Timeline Viewer. It occurred to somebody at Apple that this placement really made very little sense; those are, after all, special effects. Why should they work differently from all the other effects? So Fast/Slow/Reverse is now a card-carrying occupant of the Effects listand each component has been improved and upgraded in the process.

6.7.11.1 Reverse Direction

When you hear that iMovie can play clips backward, you might assume that this feature is a gimmick that's primarily useful for applying to footage of people jumping into swimming pools or jumping off of walls. To be sure, iMovie does a great job at creating these comic effects, even if their novelty does wear off quickly.

But reverse motion can be useful in much less obvious situationscases where your original footage needs some help. For example, you can use this feature to create a zoom out when all you filmed was a zoom in, or a pan to the right when you shot a pan to the left. You can make your star's head turn away from the camera instead of toward it. Even reversing the playback of a slow-motion eye blink can make all the difference in the emotional impact of a certain shot.

To make a clip play backwards , click its icon, click the Effects button, click Fast/Slow/ Reverse, and then turn on Reverse Direction.

The video in a reverse-motion clip plays back beautifully; even the audio gets reversed , offering hours of fun to the kind of people who look for secret messages in Beatles albums. (Of course, you can always turn off the clip's sound, if that backward-audio effect isn't what you want.)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
The Time-Lapse Trick

I want to speed up my banana -slug footage beyond the scope of the speed slider really fast. How can I do it?

The following technique involves a bit more effort than most iMovie projects. But as long as the camcorder was on a tripod during the initial filming, here's a great way to create true time-lapse movies:

Crank up the clip speed to its highest setting, and then export the clip to tape on your camera (see Chapter 11).

Then reimport the same clip into iMovie, which considers the reimported clip to be at "normal" speed. Use the speed slider againand repeat the whole procedure as necessary until you get the extreme speed changes you want.

6.7.11.2 Slow Motion, Fast Motion

Slow motion is extremely effective when you're going for an emotional, nostalgic, warm feeling, especially when you delete the original soundtrack and replace it with music (see Chapter 8). On the more pragmatic side, it's also useful when analyzing your tennis swing, golf stroke, or sleight-of-hand technique.

Fast motion is generally useful only for comic effectskids wrasslin' on the living-room floor is a sure winnerbut can also help with time-lapse effects, as described on the facing page.

To produce one of these effects, use the Speed slider at the bottom of the Fast/Slow/ Reverse effect panel. You can drag this slider to the left or right to make the clip play faster or slower.

This slider has been enhanced in one very important way since its iMovie 4 incarnation: you're no longer limited to positioning the slider handle directly on the slider notches. That is, you're no longer obligated to make your footage play exactly two, three, four, or five times faster or slower. Now you can make a clip play just slightly faster by parking the little blue handle between the slider notches.

When you adjust this slider and click Apply, the clip's blue bar grows or shrinks in the timeline to indicate its new duration. iMovie also speeds up and slows down the sound to match the video. Dialogue in sped-up clips takes on an "Alvin and the Chipmunks" quality, as though you're fast-forwarding through a tape; slowed-down clips sound like the dying computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tip: If the distortion of slow- or fast-motion audio bothers you, you may find it wise to split the audio from the video before applying a slow- or fast-motion effect, so that the sound will be unaffected (see page 239). Of course, the sound will no longer match the length of the video clip, but you may be able to solve this by cropping some of the audio or video.

6.7.12. Flash

This effect simulates flash bulbs going off. You won't have much call for this effect in everyday filmmaking ; but when that day arrives that you're trying to depict a movie star arriving at opening nightor somebody getting electrocutediMovie stands ready.

Count (OneMax). This slider controls how many flashes will go off in the scene. (The maximum number depends on your Speed slider setting and the length of the clip, but the most you'll get is about one every seven frames , or about four per second.)
Brightness (MinMax). Controls the intensity of each flash. For true flashbulb effects, you'll want the slider at, or close to, its Max. For storm lightning or nuclear -bomb-watching effects, use lower settings.
Speed (FastSlow). Governs how far apart the flashes appear.

Tip: You can use this effect to create a convincing newsreel (or school science film) look. First, turn your clip into black-and-white using the Black & White effect. Now apply the Flash effect with the sliders set to Max, Min, and Fast, respectively.

6.7.13. Fog

You already knew that by letting you edit and add music to your movies, iMovie lets you fiddle with the emotional overtones of your own memories. What you may not have realized is that it also lets you retroactively change the weather.

The Fog effect (Figure 6-11, top) creates a mist that seems to float in front of the camera lens. It's suitable for atmospheric effects, simulated fire or crash footage, comical hangover clips, and so on.

The Amount slider controls the opacity of the fog, the Wind slider governs how quickly it drifts, and the Color slider lets you specify the color.

Tip: Don't be fooled by the Color slider's Black and White labels. The various positions along the slider actually proceed through all the colors of the rainbow.

6.7.14. Ghost Trails

This effect makes moving portions of the video leave behind "visual echoes." In addition to blurry-vision effects, it can also be handy when you're trying to depict a runner as a superhero with blinding speed.

On clips without much motion, this effect does nothing at all.

The sliders let you control the intensity of the effect:

Trail (ShortLong). Governs the length of the ghost images that follow a rapidly moving object in your scene.
Steps (SmallLarge). Controls how closely the ghost image follows the object.
Opacity (ClearOpaque). Lets you specify the transparency of the ghost image.

6.7.15. Glass Distortion

Those nutty Apple programmers must start to go a little stir-crazy after too many long days and sleepless nights. Why else would they introduce, in iMovie HD, a new effect that makes it look like you shot the scene through, ahem, the textured glass of a bathroom window?

Anyway, that's exactly what Glass Distortion does (Figure 6-11, middle). It's incredibly realisticas long as you are, in fact, going for that public-restroom-window look. (The Scale slider affects the size of the " wrinkles " in the "glass" of the "window.")

6.7.16. Lens Flare

When you aim the camera toward the sun, sunshine can strike the anti-reflective coating on the inside of each lens, resulting in a reflectiona bright spot, or (on complex lens systems) a trail of bright spotscalled lens flare.

Ordinarily, photographers try to avoid lens flare. But hey, as long as Apple is on a quest to let you deliberately make your footage look damaged (see Aged Film and Earthquake), why not?

Click within the Preview window to set the rotation point for the lens flare. Then use the Sweep slider to control how broadly the flare line sweeps across the frame, as happens when the camera moved during the shot. (If it did not, in fact, move, do your best to position the Sweep slider handle squarely in the middle of the slider to prevent the flare from moving at all.)

The Intensity slider adjusts the size of the primary sunshine blob. (You'll get it as soon as you try it.) Figure 6-11, bottom, shows the result.

Figure 6-11. Top: Weather not cooperating? Now you're the weatherman! Make it as foggy as you like, using the Fog effect.
Middle: The World As Seen Through a Public Restroom Window, otherwise known as Glass Distortion.
Bottom: The Lens Flare creates an effective impersonation of an actual lens flare, especially if the angle of the shot changes to match the motion of the flare.

6.7.17. Letterbox

This filter adds black letterbox bars above and below the frame, creating the look of movies (which have 16:9 proportions) as they sometimes appear when presented on a TV (which has 4:3 proportions ). You may have seen this look on the Bravo channel, on a Woody Allen video, on some DVDs, or in artsy TV commercials.

The paradox, of course, is that your footage was already correctly shaped for a 4:3 TV screen. So to make it look as though the original was movie-shaped, iMovie has no choice but to chop off the top and bottom slices of your movie. It works, therefore, only when the subject matter is already vertically centered.

Fortunately, you can use the Shift slider to nudge the original footage upward or downward in the gap between the black bars, or use the Size slider to make the bars themselves more or less intrusive (thinner or fatter).

6.7.18. Mirror

This completely freaky effect makes iMovie split the video picture down the middle horizontally, vertically, or both (in quadrants). It then fills the left half of the screen with a mirror image of the right half, or the top half with a mirror of the bottom. There's no seam to indicate what's going on; the result is an Alice-in-Wonderland hybrid.

Vertical (Top Bottom). This slider moves a horizontal "mirror" up and down the frame. At the Top setting, the footage doesn't look any different. At far right, you've flipped the entire frame upside-down.

Tip: If you drag the Vertical slider all the way to Bottom, and the Horizontal slider to Left, you neatly flip your clip upside-downan iMovie first.
Horizontal (LeftRight). This slider moves a vertical "mirror" left and right across the frame. Pushing this slider all the way to Left removes the horizontal reflections altogether. At far right, you've flipped the entire frame right-for-left. (While the Mirror effect in general doesn't seem to be very practical for most filmmaking, the ability to flip the frame horizontally can be terrifically useful. It can make the actor look left instead of right, make the fire engine drive west instead of east, and otherwise fix continuity problems.)

If you drag both sliders to their center positions, all four quadrants of the picture are, in fact, upside-down and/or horizontally flipped copies of the lower-right quadrant of the original footage.

The Effect In and Effect Out sliders make the mirrors fly in from the top and side of the frame as the clip plays. (Memo to music-video makers : The effect can be truly creepy.)

Tip: Be careful of signs (such as road signs) in footage you've mirrored. Their reverse-image type is a dead giveaway that you've rewritten history.

6.7.19. N-Square

If you've been secretly burning to remake The Fly from the insect's point of view, this is your effect. It "echoes" the video frame over and over again in miniature , like tiles of a mosaic (Figure 6-12, top).

The Squares (MinMax) controls how many panes the frame contains, each showing the same image. At the Min position, you get four copies; at Max, you get literally hundreds. (Talk about The Matrix! )

Tip: If you use the Effect In and Effect Out sliders, you get an interesting variation on the N-Square effect. The clip starts out looking normal; as it plays, the grid of duplicates flies in from the lower right, sliding into its final matrix.

6.7.20. Rain

Here's one of iMovie's most realistic efforts. It makes your clip look as though it was filmed in a driving rainstorm (Figure 6-12, middle).

Figure 6-12. Top: The N-Square effect at a low setting looks like this. Higher settings make the video look like Hollywood Squares gone berserk.
Middle: Be grateful. The Rain effect is about the only time you'll ever be able to control the rain, at least in this lifetime.
Bottom: The Soft Focus effect is great for anything misty, nostalgic, or filmed through a nylon stocking.

How driving? You determine that by adjusting the Amount slider (which controls the lengths of the raindrop slashes ) or the Wind slider (which specifies how much the drop directions change over time).

Tip: You can create a better depth simulation by stacking this effect onto a clip twice: once with small-droplets (farther) and once with long ones (closer). Try throwing in a little Fog, too.

6.7.21. Sepia

You might think of this effect as a more nostalgic version of the Black & White effect. Once again, the color drains out of your clip, but instead of black-and-white, you get brown-and-white, which conveys the feeling of memory (thanks to its resemblance to the look of antique photographs). Don't forget to follow up with the Brightness/ Contrast effect, if necessary, to fine-tune the effect.

6.7.22. Sharpen

You might guess that this effect could help to repair out-of-focus scenes. In practice, however, the Sharpen effect isn't very effective in that role. Instead, it adds a fine grain to your footage, often creating a "solarized" color-banding effect, to the degree you specify using the Amount slider.

6.7.23. Soft Focus

Soft-focus lenses are often used when filming TV commercials that feature aging movie stars, because the fine netting or Vaseline coating on such lenses blurs fine wrinkles. (Soft-focus lenses also give everything a faintly blurry, fuzzy-edged look, but that's the price the stars pay for wrinkle obfuscation.)

Now you, too, can hide your subjects' wrinkles, by applying this soft-focus effect after the filming is complete (Figure 6-12, bottom). This effect is also good for suggesting dreams, memory, summertime nostalgia, or other hazy situations. At the sliders' extreme positions, the whole frame looks like the nuclear-holocaust scene in Terminator 2 (especially if you use the Effect In slider to make the glow creep in over time).

Use the Softness slider to adjust the amount of Vaseline on the lens, Amount to specify what percentage of the frame is smeared, and Glow to govern just how radioactive the bright spots look.