Adding Transitions

Adding a transition to your movie is as easy as dragging and dropping an icon. The trickery (and I use the term loosely) is in configuring how it appears in the movie. Don't worry about nailing it the first time: you can always change a transition's settings, even after you've added it to your movie.

To add a transition:

• Drag the transition to the intersection of two clips in the Clip Viewer or Timeline Viewer. (Transitions can be added to the beginning and end of the movie as well.) A transition icon appears with a red line moving from left to right (Figure 11.5).
  
  

  Figure 11.5. Transitions need to render before they can play back smoothly in the Monitor (top). The transition icon is similar in the Clip Viewer (bottom).

  

  

  
  That line indicates iMovie's progress of rendering the transitions. To build a transition, iMovie recreates the affected frames of the clip with the transition applied. For example, if we add a Fade In transition that's one second (30 frames) in duration, iMovie redraws each frame with a different brightness setting (Figure 11.6). This ensures that in the final movie, the transition appears at its best resolution and plays smoothly.
  
  

  Figure 11.6. An iMovie transition recreates your footage with the transition's effect applied. Here are three frames from a Fade In transition.

  

  
  

Tips

• Leave enough padding in your clips to accommodate transitions. Otherwise, iMovie displays an error that one or both of the clips is too short (Figure 11.7).

  Figure 11.7. iMovie needs a certain amount of source material to work with. It will tell you how much footage is needed, based on your Speed slider setting.

  

  

• To cancel a transition while it's rendering, choose Undo from the Edit menu or press Command-period (.).

• Go ahead and continue working while a transition is rendering, or even add other transitions, which are rendered concurrently. You can also play your movie before the rendering finishes, though the unrendered clips will appear jumpy and rough until they're fully rendered.