5.7. The Movie Track: Your StoryboardWhen you're not trimming or splitting your clips, most of your iMovie time will be spent in the Movie Trackthe horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen (see Figure 5-7). The idea is that you'll drag the edited clips out of the Clips pane and into the correct order on the Movie Track, exactly as though you're building a storyboard or timeline. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the Movie Track offers two different views: the Clip Viewer and the Timeline Viewer. Both are illustrated in Figure 5-9. In either view, you can freely rearrange clips by dragging them. In the Clip Viewer, just drag them horizontally; in the Timeline Viewer, drag them up and over (or down and under) the adjacent clips, rather than directly to the side. Tip: As you drag over them, the existing clips scoot out of the way, which can drive you crazy. In that case, hold down the key until you're ready to let go of the clip you're dragging. They'll stay still.
Moreover, you can freely drag clips back and forth between the Clips pane and the Movie Track. (The ability to drag clips back and forth between the Clips pane and the Timeline Viewer is new in iMovie HD, and really useful.) Remember, by the way, that you can switch the Movie Track between its two viewers by pressing -E. It corresponds to the second command in the new View menu, which says either "Switch to Clip Viewer" or "Switch to Timeline Viewer," whichever one you're not in. 5.7.1. Readouts in the Movie TrackiMovie identifies the name of your movie at the top of the window (and its format: DV-NTSC, for example, or HD-1080i-30 for "high-definition, 1080 interlaced scan lines, 30 frames per second"). At the very bottom of the window, you can see the name of the selected clip (or how many clips are selected), and how long it is relative to the whole movie. Tip: The iMovie HD screen no longer tells you when a certain clip was filmed, as did previous versions. But that information is still easy to find: just double-click the clip you're wondering about. The resulting dialog box includes a line for Capture Date, which lets you know when you shot that clip. It's an extremely useful little statisticlike the date stamp on the back of a Kodak print. 5.7.2. Dragging to the Movie TrackThere's not much to using the Movie Track: 12just drag a clip from the Clips pane directly onto it. For your visual pleasure , iMovie shows you a ghosted , translucent image of the clip's first frame as you drag. Here are a few tips for making the most of this Clips panetoMovie Track procedure:
Tip: As you're building your film on the Movie Track, think in terms of sequences of shots. By Shift-clicking, you can select, say, six or seven clips that constitute one finished sequence, and drag the selection (or cut and paste it) into a new location in the Movie Track to suit your artistic intentions.That's an especially terrific tactic, since the sequence of your Shift-clicking determines the order of the clips when they get dumped onto the Movie Track. You now have a great way to pluck the best clips out of your video toolbox, no matter where they sit at the moment, and plunk them onto the Movie Track, already in the proper sequence. 5.7.3. Copying and Pasting ClipsDragging isn't the only way to move footage around in iMovie; the Copy, Cut, and Paste commands can be more convenient . For one thing, you don't need the mouse. For another, if you copy a clip from the Clips pane instead of dragging it, you leave a copy of the original behind. Later, if you've really made a mess of chopping up the clip in your Movie Track, you can return to the copyyour backupwithout sacrificing the other editing work you've done since you made the copy. (Of course, the Revert Clip to Original command can do the same thing, but maintaining a whole, untouched original on the Clips pane is visual and easier to understand.) For example, you can move a clip from the Clips pane to the Movie Track by clicking it, pressing -X, clicking in the Movie Track, and then pressing -V. (You can also copy the clip by beginning that sequence with -C instead.) You can move clips around within the Movie Track in the same way. In fact, you can cut or copy clips out of one iMovie project and then paste them into a different one. The pasting process may take some time, because iMovie must move huge multimegabyte video files around on your hard drive. But this feature can come in very, very handy. Note: When you copy and paste clips within a single project, you're never duplicating any files on your hard drive, so copying and pasting clips doesn't eat away at your remaining free space. But when you paste into a different project, you may be using far more disk space than you think; see page 478. You may wonder how you're supposed to know where your cut or copied footage will appear when pasted. After all, there's no blinking insertion point to tell you. The scheme is fairly simple:
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