Section A.2. File Menu


A.2. File Menu

As in any Mac program, the File menu serves as the program's interface to the rest of the Macintosh world. It lets you open and close movie projects, import or export still frames , import QuickTime movies and audio files, and quit the program.

A.2.1. New, Open, Open Recent, Close Window

After you're finished working on a movie document (which iMovie calls a project ), you can take any of theses paths:

  • Begin a new movie project by choosing File New Project ( -N).

  • Open another existing project document. To do so, choose File Open Recent (for quick access to a submenu of the movies youve most recently edited) or File Open ( -O). In the latter case, the standard Open File dialog box appears. Navigate to, and double-click, the project you want to open.

  • Choose Close Window ( -W) to close the project window without actually leaving iMovie. If this is the last remaining open project, the Create Project dialog box appears (see Section 4.3.3).

A.2.2. Make a Magic iMovie

When you lack the time to do a decent editing job, Magic iMovie can throw something together for you quickly. Details appear in Section 4.8.

A.2.3. Save Project

This command ( -S) preserves any changes you've made to your project, exactly as in a word processor or any other program.

iMovie saves such changes fairly quickly. It doesn't actually store any changes to the video clips you've captured; instead, it just makes a list of the changes you've made, which gets stored in the relatively tiny project document.


Note: The Save command also purges certain information that iMovie's been holding in memorylike your Undo trail. After a Save, you can no longer undo your recent actions using the Undo command.

A.2.4. Save Project As

The Save As command peels off a copy of your project in progress, creating a duplicate on your hard drive. The benefit, of course, is that you can "freeze" the first copya mid-editing backupand travel down a different editing road with the copy, confident that you can always return to the first one if your editing inspiration turns out to be a bust.

The Save Project As command can take a long time and a lot of disk space, though, because it's duplicating all of your huge video files on the hard drive.

A.2.5. Revert to Saved

Here's another new one in iMovie HD. Revert to Saved undoes all the changes you've made to your files since the last time you saved it. It's a shortcut to using the Undo command over and over again, all the way back to the moment of your last Saveand a nice way to recover from a serious editing mess.

A.2.6. Import

You can use this command (or its keystroke, Shift- -I) to bring all kinds of multimedia files into iMovie:

  • Still images (photographs, scans , graphic "title cards," and so on), as described in Chapter 9. The program accepts JPEG, GIF, PICT, PNG, PDF, BMP, Photoshop, and other kinds of QuickTime-recognizable files. A graphics file you import in such a way behaves like a video clip, whose duration you specify using the slider in the Ken Burns panel.

  • Audio files that have been saved in AIFF, MP3, WAV, or other QuickTime-compatible formats, as described in Chapter 8, for the benefit of your soundtrack. These files go automatically into your audio track.

  • Video files , including any kind of QuickTime movie, AVI movie, DV clip from a camcorder, and so on.

A.2.7. Export

This command (Shift- -Eand called Share in the previous iMovie version) is, in a way, the entire point of iMovie. It lets you send your finished movie out into the world in search of an audience, the culmination of your video-editing adventure. You have several options:

  • Export it to your email program at a highly condensed, reduced size .

  • Export a tiny version to your copy of iWeb to post as a Web page for the entire global Internet village to enjoy.

  • Export it back to the DV camcorder, and from there to a TV or VHS cassette.

  • Export it to iDVD (Chapter 15), for making into a DVD.

  • Export it into a QuickTime movie for viewing on a computer.

  • Export it to GarageBand for adding a music track.

  • Export a compressed version to an iPod or Bluetooth cellphone to show off.

These options are described in gripping detail in Chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 through 18.


Note: The dialog box that appears when you use this command is the same one you get when you use the individual commands in the Share menuit's just that those commands pre-click one of the buttons at the top (QuickTime, iPod, and so on).

A.2.8. Burn Project to Disc

Once you've finished (or even half-finished) editing an iMovie project, what do you do with it? You can't leave it sitting on your hard drive forever, eating up multi-gigabytes of space. Sure, it's great that you can output the finished movie to a DVD or a tape, but what about the iMovie HD project itself? You'll need to hang onto it if you expect you'll ever want to return to it to make changes.

The purpose of the new Burn Project to Disc command is not to create a DVD that you can play on a TV. Instead, it's to create a data DVD, a DVD-ROM, containing a backup copy of your project file, so that you can get the original off your Mac.

Sure, you could accomplish the same thing by dragging the iMovie project's icon onto a blank DVD's icon, but this command is more convenient because it's right there in iMovie. Months or years later, you can insert the resulting DVD and open up the project for continued editing.

A.2.9. Show Info

Opens the Clip Info dialog box for whatever clip is highlighted in the Movie Track or Clips pane. (Unavailable if exactly one clipaudio, video, still, transition, or titleisn't highlighted.) The shortcut is simply double-clicking a clip. Keyboard shortcut: -I.

A.2.10. Save Frame

Thanks to this command, a digital camcorder is also a digital still camera. This command grabs whatever picture is visible in the Monitor window and opens the Save File dialog box, so that you can save the image to your hard drive as a graphics file. You can choose either PICT (better for reuse in your iMovie project) or JPEG format (better for exporting to other programs and people).

As Chapter 9 makes clear, the resulting images are nowhere near as sharp or as clear as the ones you get with an actual digital still camera. They're fairly low-resolution , for example, and the interlacing effect of the video signal makes it look like your image is composed of hundreds of thin horizontal lineswhich it is.

Still, for creating images you plan to distribute electronically , the iMovie-exported pictures may suffice. You can improve the image quality by shrinking the frame size in a graphics program, thereby condensing the component dots and sharpening the image, before you distribute it. Keyboard shortcut : -F.

A.2.11. Show Trash

The Trash referred to by this command refers to the project Trash, the Trash can icon on the iMovie screen. Every time you delete or crop some footage, iMovie pretends to put it into this Trash can. Later, you can use this command to view its contents or selectively rescue items inside it. Section 5.3 has the details. (Single-clicking the Trash icon achieves the same purpose.) Keyboard shortcut: Shift- -T.

A.2.12. Empty Trash

This command produces a message that asks: "Are you sure you want to permanently delete all items in the Trash of 'My Great Movie'?"

Never mind the split infinitive; what iMovie is saying is that you'll recover some hard-disk space, but you'll also lose your chance to use the Undo, Redo, Revert to Saved, Paste, or Revert Clip to Original commands. Now you know why many iMoviemakers avoid emptying the trash until the project is complete. Keyboard shortcut: Shift- -Delete.




iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

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