Chapter 6. iMovie Overview

Being a fan of the moviemaking process, I enjoy reading "behind the scenes" articles about how films are produced. In nearly all cases, the reporter interviews cast and crew at the movie set during shooting (and invariably makes it sound more exciting than it usually is). But filming is only one part of the production.

Rarely reported on is the editing stage, when the editor and director spend long hours in a dark editing room sometimes for many months shaping hours of raw footage into what we eventually see in a theater. They grab the best takes from each day's shooting, assemble them according to the storyline, and then add transitions, audio, special effects, and whatever else is required for that particular flick.

The process of making your digital video is the same (minus the reporters). By this point you've shot your footage, but that doesn't mean you have a movie. Here's where iMovie and digital non-linear editing can take your mass of video and audio and turn it into a movie. This chapter introduces iMovie, making sure you have the tools you need to get started, and giving you an overview tour of the program's unexpectedly powerful yet simple interface.

Getting iMovie

If you've purchased a new Macintosh within the last couple of years, you should have a free copy of iMovie on your hard disk or on an accompanying CD-ROM.

In January 2003, Apple introduced iMovie 3 as a free download or as part of iLife, its $50 suite of digital hub applications (www.apple.com/ilife/). You don't need to purchase iLife to get iMovie the price mostly covers iDVD 3, which is too large to offer as a free download (see Chapter 16 for more on iDVD).