Removing Effects

On the off chance that you applied several effects in your sleep, waking up in horror to discover that everyone on your spouse's side of the family has been mirrored, there's an easy way to restore those clips: simply delete the effect, as you would with a title or transition.

To remove an effect:

1. Select the clip in your movie to which the effect has been applied.

2. Press the Delete key or choose Clear from the Edit menu. The effect is deleted, leaving the original clip intact (Figure 13.8).

   Figure 13.8. Deleting an effect doesn't delete the entire clip.

   

Tips

• When multiple effects are applied to a clip, you must remove each one in turn (Figure 13.9). To save time, you could use the Restore Media command (from the Advanced menu), but then you get the clip's entire original footage overkill.

  Figure 13.9. Deleting multiple effects from a clip is like peeling paint in an old house sooner or later you get to the original.

  

• If you move a clip with effects applied to the Shelf and select it there, pressing Delete or choosing Clear from the Edit menu deletes the clip entirely.

Modifying Existing Effects

In iMovie 2, you could tweak an effect's settings after you had applied it to a clip, then click the Update button to apply the new settings. However, if you wanted to use multiple effects, you first needed to commit the clip, rendering it so that iMovie no longer recognized it as an effects-laden clip. iMovie 3 no longer requires the commit step, but you cannot modify settings in effects that have already been applied. You must delete the effect and start over. I recommend making a copy of the clip before deleting its effect (Option-drag it to the Shelf) so you have a backup of the first version of the effect.