Section 6.3. Creating a Transition


6.3. Creating a Transition

To see the list of transitions iMovie offers, click the Editing button, as shown in Figure 6-2. Now click the Transitions button at the top to see the list of transition styles; click a transition's name (like Cross Dissolve) to see a preview of it.

Position your Playhead so that it's on the seam between the two clips involved in the transition.

Figure 6-2. When you click a transition's name, you get to see the new iMovie 6 preview feature in the Monitor window: a full- size , looping preview of the effect. Use the controls shown here, or drag the diamond-shaped scrollbar handle to step through the effect slowly.


Tip: If you don't click on or near the seam between two clips, the program doesn't know which clips you want to "transish." In that case, iMovie uses, for the purposes of the preview, whichever clip is currently highlighted in the Movie Track, into which it crossfades from the previous clip. If the very first clip is highlighted, iMovie demonstrates by transitioning that clip into the second clip.

6.3.1. Previewing the Effect

The instant you click the name of a transition in the list, iMovie's Monitor window starts showing you a live, full-size preview of the result. (That's a big change in version 6. There's no more little tiny Preview window.)

In fact, the Monitor keeps showing you the preview, looping it over and over again until you scream for it to stop.

Fortunately, the little controls in the see-through strip at the bottom offer you a way out (see Figure 6-2 to identify these elements):

  • Play/Pause . Click the button to make the preview animation stop. Click it again to resume.

  • Scroll bar . Click inside the narrow Preview scroll bar to jump to any point in the transition, or drag the diamond-shaped playhead.

  • Looping . Click this button to make the looping stop. Now you'll see the animation only oncewhen you click the button.

  • Close . To get rid of the preview, click here. The Monitor window now displays your existing movie, just as it usually does.

  • Apply . If you believe iMovie's online help, clicking the checkmark button is supposed to apply the transition and return you to your movie. In fact, though, it generally does nothing except close the Preview.

    It applies the transition only in two situations. First, when the selected transition is one of the four that can appear at the beginning or end of your movie: Fade In, Fade Out, Wash In, or Wash Out. Second, it works if you've first highlighted a pair of clips (or several pairs).


Note: See the Add button at the bottom of the Transitions pane? It's got the same quirks . It's dimmed and unavailable unless you've first highlighted a pair of clips. (Or several pairs; the Add button is useful for applying the same transition to multiple pairs of clips simultaneously . If it's just one pair you're transitioning, the drag-and-drop method works perfectly well.)

In any case, you can drag the Speed slider just below the list of transition styles to experiment with the length of each transition as you're previewing it. The numbers on this slider 00:10 (10 frames ) at the left side, 10:00 (10 seconds) at the right sidelet you know the least and greatest amount of time that a transition can last.


Tip: For more precision, you can double-click the timing numbers just to the right of the slider. Once you've highlighted them, you can type new numbers to replace them (in seconds:frames format).

6.3.2. Applying the Effectand Rendering

Once you've selected an effect and specified how much time you want it to take, place it into the Clip Viewer or Timeline Viewer by dragging the name or icon of the effect out of the transitions list and down onto the Movie Track.

Drag until your cursor is between the two clips that you want joined by this transition; iMovie pushes the right-hand clips out of the way to make room. (Most transitions must go between two clips, and so they can't go at the beginning or end of your Movie Track. The exceptions are the Fade and Wash effects.) Then a special transition icon appears between the clips, as shown in Figure 6-3.


Tip: The tiny triangles on a transition icon or bar let you know what kind of transition it is. A pair of inward- facing triangles is a standard transition that melds the end of one clip with the beginning of the next . A single, right-facing triangle indicates a transition that applies to the beginning of a clip, such as a fade-in from black (or wash-in from white). A single, left-facing triangle indicates a transition that applies to the end of a clip (such as a fade or wash out ).

Almost immediately, a tiny red line begins to crawl, progress-barlike, along the lower edge of this icon (see Figure 6-3). In the terminology of DV editors everywhere, the Mac has begun to render this transitionto perform the thousands of individual calculations necessary to blend the outgoing clip into the incoming, pixel by pixel, frame by frame.

Figure 6-3. Top: In the Clip Viewer, a transition shows up as a slide-like icon.
Bottom: In the Timeline Viewer, you get a bar whose width indicates its duration. Each transition has its own red progress bar that creeps along the bottom edge of the icon. After the clip has been fully rendered, this added strip beneath the icon disappears, and the transition is ready to play. (The Movie Track's top edge identifies the transition type and its duration when the transition icon is highlighted.)

Whether it's an iMovie transition or a scene in a Pixar movie, rendering always takes a lot of time. In iMovie, the longer the transition you've specified, the longer it takes to render. You should feel grateful, however, that iMovie renders its transitions in a matter of minutes, not days (which complex Hollywood computer-generated effects often require).

Furthermore, iMovie lets you continue working as this rendering takes place. You can work on the other pieces of your movie, import new footage from your camcorder, or even play your movie while transitions are still rendering.

In fact, you can even switch out of iMovie to work in other Mac programs. This trick makes the rendering even slower, but at least it's in the background. You can check your email or work on your screenplay in the meantime.

6.3.2.1. Applying simultaneous clips

You can apply the same transition to several pairs of clips at once. Figure 6-4 shows the idea.

Figure 6-4. Here's a nice new feature for efficiency freaks.
Top: Select clips, as shown here. (Best way to do that is to click the first clip, then -click as many other adjacent pairs as you like. As described in the Note on the facing page, you may have to begin your clicking by selecting two adjacent clips.)
Set up a transition the way you like it, and then click the Add button.
Bottom: iMovie applies the same transition to every selected clip and the one to its right.


Note: In iMovie 6.0.1, there's a tiny bug. If you want to apply a transition to multiple clips, the first two you select must be adjacent clips (for example, Clips #1 and #2). After that, you can select isolated clips (like Clip #5, Clip #10, and so on). The Add button will add a transition between each selected clip and the one to its right.And what if you didn't want a transition out of Clip #2? After iMovie applies the multiple transition, you'll have to manually delete the Clip #2 transition.
6.3.2.2. When rendering is complete

When the rendering is complete, you can look over the result very easily.

  • To watch just the transition itself, click the transition's icon or bar in the Movie Track (it changes color to show that it's highlighted) and then press the Space bar.

  • To watch the transition and the clips that it joins together, Shift-click the two clips in question. Doing so also highlights the transition between them. Press the Space bar to play the three clips you've highlighted.

  • It's a good idea to watch your transition by "rewinding" a few seconds into the preceding footage, so that you get a sense of how the effect fits in the context of the existing footage. To give yourself some of this "preroll," choose Edit Select None (or just click anywhere but on a clip) to deselect all the clips. Then click a spot on the Scrubber bar somewhere in the clip before the transition, and press the Space bar to play the movie from that point.

  • If you don't care for what you've done, choose Edit Undo.

  • If it's too late for the Undo command, you can return to the transition at any time, highlight its icon, and press the Delete key. Your original clips return instantly, exactly as they were before you added the transition.

6.3.3. How Transitions Affect the Length of Your Movie

As you can see by the example in Figure 6-5, most transitions make your movie shorter. To superimpose the ends of two adjacent clips, iMovie is forced to slide the right-hand clip to the left, making the overall movie end sooner.

Under most circumstances, there's nothing wrong with that. After all, that's why you wisely avoided trimming off all of the excess "leader" and "trailer" footage (known as trim handles ) from the ends of your clips. By leaving trim handles on each clipwhich will be sacrificed to the transitionyou'll have some fade-in or fade-out footage to play with.

Sometimes, however, having your overall project shortened is a serious problem, especially when you've been "cutting to sound," or synchronizing your footage to an existing music track, as described in Chapter 8. Suppose you've spent hours putting your clips into the Movie Track, carefully trimming them so that they perfectly match the soundtrack. And now, as a final touch, you decide to put in transitions. Clearly, having these transitions slide all of your clips to the left would result in chaos, throwing off the synchronization work you had done.

Now you can appreciate the importance of iMovie's Advanced Lock Audio Clip at Playhead command, which marries a piece of music or sound to a particular spot in the video. If all of your added music and sound elements are attached in this way, adding transitions won't disturb their synchronization. See Section 8.9 for details on locking audio into position.


Tip: Certain transitionsOverlap, Fade In, Fade Out, Wash In, and Wash Outdon't shorten the movie. As described at the end of this chapter, each of these five special transitions affects only one clip, not two. They're meant to begin or end your movie, fading in or out from black or white.
Figure 6-5. When you insert a 2-second transition (top) between two clips, iMovie pulls the right-hand clip 2 seconds to the left so that it overlaps the end of the left-hand clip. The result (bottom): The entire movie is now 2 seconds shorter.

6.3.4. How Transitions Chop Up Clips

After your transition has been rendered, you'll notice something peculiar about your Scrubber bar: The transition has now become, in effect, a clip of its own. In fact, if you open your project "package" icon (Section 4.12) and look in the project's Media folder, you'll even see the newly created clip file represented there, bearing the name of the transition you applied.

If you click the first clip and play it, you'll find that the playback now stops sooner than it once didjust where the transition takes over. Likewise, the clip that follows the transition has also had frames shaven away at the front end. Both clips, in other words, have sacrificed a second or two to the newly created transition/clip between them. Figure 6-5 illustrates this phenomenon .


Tip: You can rename a transition icon, if it helps you to remember what you were thinking when you created it. To do so, double-click its icon or bar. The Clip Info dialog box appears, in which you can change the name the transition icon displays in your Movie Track.

6.3.5. Editing the Transition

You can edit the transition in several ways: You can change its length, its type, its direction (certain effects only), or all three. To do so, click the transition icon, and then click the Trans button (if the Transitions pane isn't already open). You can now adjust the Speed slider, click another transition in the list, or both. (For the Push and Billow effects, you can also change the direction of the effect.)

When you click Updatea button that's available only when a transition icon is highlighted in the Movie TrackiMovie automatically rerenders the transition.


Tip: You can also adjust the effect on several clips simultaneously. Just select the ones that you want to edit ( -click each one)or, to select all transitions in the whole movie, click one and then choose Edit Select Similar Clips. (The selected transition clips don't have to have matching transition types; you can click one Disintegrate, one Twirl, and one Push, and then change them all to the same Cross Dissolve.)Now make the changes you want, and then click the Update button shown in Figure 6-4.

6.3.6. Deleting a Transition

If you decide that you don't need a transition effect between two clips after all, you can delete it just as you would delete any Movie Track clip: by clicking it once and then pressing the Delete key on your keyboard (or by choosing Edit Clear). Deleting a transition clip does more than eliminate the iconit also restores the clips on either side to their original conditions. (If you change your mind, Edit Undo Clear brings back the transition.)

6.3.7. Transition Error Messages

Transitions can be fussy. They like plenty of clip footage to chew on, and once they've begun rendering, they like to be left alone. Here are some of the error messages you may encounter when working with transitions.

6.3.7.1. When you delete a clip

For example, if, in the process of editing your movie, you delete a clip that's part of a transition from the Movie Track, a message appears (Figure 6-6) that says: "This action will invalidate at least one transition in the project. Invalid transitions will be deleted from the project. Do you want to proceed?"

iMovie is simply telling you that if you delete the clip, you'll also delete the transition attached to it (which is probably just what you'd expect). Click OK. If you first click "Don't ask me again," iMovie will henceforth delete such clips without asking your permission.

6.3.7.2. When the transition is longer than the clip

If you try to add a 5-second crossfade between two 3-second clips, iMovie throws up its hands with various similarly worded error messages (Figure 6-6, left). In all cases, the point is clear: The two clips on either side of a transition must each be longer than the transition itself.

Put another way, iMovie can't make your transition stretch across more than two clips (or more than one clip, in the case of the Fade and Wash effects).

6.3.7.3. When you quit while rendering

Creating transitions requires a great deal of iMovie's concentration. If you try to save your project, close it, or empty its Trash, you're advised to wait until the rendering is over, as shown in Figure 6-6 at bottom.

Figure 6-6. Three messages related to transitions that, sooner or later, almost every iMovie editor encounters.
Top: There's not enough footage for the transition. You're offered a choice: Either fiddle with the Speed slider so the transition is short enough to "fit" the surrounding clips, or let iMovie fiddle with it for you, automatically shortening the transition.
Middle: You've attempted to delete a clip to which you've attached a transition. What's iMovie supposed to do with the transition? (Hint: It pretty much has to delete the transition too.)
Bottom: You're trying to quit or save your project during rendering. iMovie can't do both at once. Click Cancel to say "I'm sorry to have interruptedplease continue," or Stop Rendering Clips to stop processing the transition and perform the Quit or Save command.




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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