Adding Clips to the Movie


Even with lots of clips in the Clips pane, your movie doesn't exist until you begin building it in the Clip Viewer or the Timeline Viewer.

To add clips to the movie:

1.

Select one or more clips in the Clips pane.

2.

Drag the clip(s) to the Timeline Viewer or the Clip Viewer (Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3. Drag clips from the Clips pane to the Clip Viewer (shown) or Timeline Viewer to add them.


Tip

  • If you don't hear any audio as you play clips in the Monitor, go to iMovie's preferences and make sure the option Play DV project video through to DV camera is disabled.


Working through the Video Editing Backlog

One of the most common laments among home videographers is the backlog of footage that piles up, unedited. It's easy to shoot hours of video of your kids or vacation, but editing it into movies takes even more hours. I know people who have so many filled MiniDV tapes that they end up not editing any of it because the task is so huge.

The trick is to break the editing down into smaller components, so that it's not such an intimidating endeavor. Instead of facing an entire video that needs to be finished, approach the process in steps. You can tackle a step each weekend, for example. Here's one suggested approach.

  1. In the Clips pane, delete any clips that you know you won't ever use, such as the times when you didn't know the camera was on (yep, everyone does it). Don't try to edit out portions of clips; this step is just to remove the obvious deadwood.

  2. Assemble a rough cut by dragging clips from the Clips pane to the Timeline in the approximate order you want them to appear in the movie.

  3. Start culling the obviously useless footage from your clips using the techniques described in this chapter.

  4. Tighten your movie by trimming clips, paying attention to how it's paced. Start adding music and other additional audio.

  5. With a tight edit in place, start applying transitions, titles, and effects.

  6. Wrap up any final trimming and polishing.

See, it's not that intimidating after all!





iMovie HD 6 & iDVD 6 for Mac OS X (Visual QuickStart Guide Series)
iMovie HD 6 and iDVD 6 for Mac OS X
ISBN: 0321423275
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 197
Authors: Jeff Carlson

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