Section 6.3. Creating a Transition


6.3. Creating a Transition

To see the list of transitions iMovie offers, click the Trans button, as shown in Figure 6-2. The Clips pane disappears, only to be replaced , in the blink of an eye, by a completely different set of controls.

6.3.1. Previewing the Effect

Like most video editing software, iMovie has to do a lot of computation to produce transitions, so it can't show you an instantaneous, full-speed, full-smoothness preview. Therefore, iMovie offers a choice of lower-quality (but instantaneous) previews:

  • The Preview window. For a very small preview, shown in the tiny screen above the Transitions list, just click the name of a transition.

    This preview plays in real time, endeavoring to make the transition preview last exactly as long as the finished transition will. On slower Macs, you don't see all the frames in this little Preview window, making the transition appear jerky, but rest assured that the finished transition will be extremely smooth.

  • The Monitor window. To see a preview in a much larger formatbig enough to fill the Monitor windowclick the Preview button.

Either way, you can drag the Speed slider just above the list to experiment with the length of each transition as you're previewing it. The numbers on this slider 00:10 (10 frames) at the left side, 10:00 (10 seconds) at the right sidelet you know the least and greatest amount of time that a transition can last.


Tip: For more precision, you can bypass the Speed slider. Instead, double-click the timing numbers that appear just above it, in the corner of the black Preview area. Once you've highlighted these digits, you can type new numbers to replace them. These numbers are in seconds:frames format.

When you release the slider, you see another quick preview in the miniature screen above it, and you also see, in the lower-right corner of the Preview screen, the actual length of the transition you've specified.


Tip: The program doesn't yet know which clips you'll want to "transish." Therefore, iMovie uses, for the purposes of this preview, whichever clip is currently highlighted in the Movie Track, into which it crossfades from the previous clip. If the very first clip is highlighted, iMovie demonstrates by transitioning that clip into the second clip.If no clip is highlighted, iMovie is smart enough to seek out the "clip boundary" that's closest to the Playhead's current position. It uses the clips on both sides of that boundary for the previewif it's a two-clip transition. If it's a one-clip transition, iMovie uses the clip to the right or left.

Figure 6-2. When you click the Transitions button, a list of the transitions available in iMovie appears. When you click a transition's name, the Preview screen above the list shows a simulation of what the effect will look like.
Once you've clicked a transition name, you can press the up or down arrow keys to "walk" through the list.


6.3.2. Applying the Effectand Rendering

Once you've selected an effect and dragged the slider to specify how much time you want it to take, you can place it into the Clip Viewer or Timeline Viewer by dragging the name or icon of the effect out of the transitions list and down onto the Movie Track.

Either way, drag until your cursor is between the two clips that you want joined by this transition; iMovie pushes the right-hand clips out of the way to make room. (Most transitions must go between two clips, and so they can't go at the beginning or end of your Movie Track. The exceptions are the Fade and Wash effects.) Then a special transition icon appears between the clips, as shown in Figure 6-3.


Tip: The tiny triangles on a transition icon or bar let you know what kind of transition it is. A pair of inwardfacing triangles is a standard transition that melds the end of one clip with the beginning of the next . A single, right- facing triangle indicates a transition that applies to the beginning of a clip, such as a fade-in from black (or wash-in from white). A single, left-facing triangle indicates a transition that applies to the end of a clip (such as a fade or wash out ).

Figure 6-3. Top: In the Clip Viewer, a transition shows up as a slide-like icon.
Bottom: In the Timeline Viewer, you get a bar whose width indicates its duration. Each transition has its own red progress bar that creeps along the bottom edge of the icon. After the clip has been fully rendered, this added strip beneath the icon disappears, and the transition is ready to play. (The Movie Track's top edge identifies the transition type and its duration when the transition icon is highlighted.)


Almost immediately, a tiny red line begins to crawl, progress-bar-like, along the lower edge of this icon (see Figure 6-3). In the terminology of DV editors everywhere, the Mac has begun to render this transitionto perform the thousands of individual calculations necessary to blend the outgoing clip into the incoming, pixel by pixel, frame by frame.

Whether it's an iMovie transition or a scene in a Pixar movie, rendering always takes a lot of time. In iMovie, the longer the transition you've specified, the longer it takes to render. You should feel grateful, however, that iMovie renders its transitions in a matter of minutes, not days (which complex Hollywood computer-generated effects often require).

Furthermore, iMovie lets you continue working as this rendering takes place. You can work on the other pieces of your movie, import new footage from your camcorder, or even play your movie while transitions are still rendering. (If the transitions haven't finished rendering, iMovie shows you its preview version.)

In fact, you can even switch out of iMovie to work in other Mac programs. (This last trick makes the rendering even slower, but at least it's in the background. You can check your email or work on your screenplay in the meantime.)

6.3.2.1 Applying simultaneous clips

iMovie has always been able to render several transition effects simultaneously , albeit with some speed penalty. iMovie HD, though, offers an even more useful timesaver: you can apply the same transition to several pairs of clips at once. Figure 6-4 shows the idea.

Figure 6-4. Here's a nice new feature for efficiency freaks.
Top: Select clips, as shown here at top. (Best way to do that is to click the first clip, then -click as many other adjacent pairs as you like. As described in the Note on the facing page, you may have to begin your clicking by selecting two adjacent clips.)
Set up a transition the way you like it, and then click the Apply button.
Bottom: iMovie applies the same transition to every selected clip and the one to its right.



Note: In iMovie HD 5.0.1, there's a tiny bug. If you want to apply a transition to multiple clips, the first two you select must be adjacent clips (for example, Clips #1 and #2). After that, you can select isolated clips (like Clip #5, Clip #10, and so on). The Apply button will add a transition between each selected clip and the one to its right.And what if you didn't want a transition out of Clip #2? After iMovie applies the multiple transition, you'll have to manually delete the Clip #2 transition.
6.3.2.2 When rendering is complete

When the rendering is complete, you can look over the result very easily.

  • To watch just the transition itself, click the transition's icon or bar in the Movie Track (it changes color to show how that it's highlighted) and then press the Space bar.

  • To watch the transition and the clips that it joins together, Shift-click the two clips in question. Doing so also highlights the transition between them. Press the Space bar to play the three clips you've highlighted.

  • It's a good idea to watch your transition by "rewinding" a few seconds into the preceding footage, so that you get a sense of how the effect fits in the context of the existing footage. To give yourself some of this "preroll," choose Edit Select None (or just click anywhere but on a clip) to deselect all the clips. Then click a spot on the Scrubber bar somewhere in the clip before the transition, and press the Space bar to play the movie from that point.

  • If you don't care for what you've done, choose Edit Undo.

  • If it's too late for the Undo command, you can return to the transition at any time, highlight its icon, and press the Delete key. Your original clips return instantly, exactly as they were before you added the transition.

6.3.3. How Transitions Affect the Length of Your Movie

As you can see by the example in Figure 6-5, most transitions make your movie shorter. To superimpose the ends of two adjacent clips, iMovie is forced to slide the right-hand clip leftward, making the overall movie end sooner.

Under most circumstances, there's nothing wrong with that. After all, that's why you wisely avoided trimming off all of the excess "leader" and "trailer" footage (known as trim handles ) from the ends of your clips. By leaving trim handles on each clipwhich will be sacrificed to the transitionyou'll have some fade-in or fade-out footage to play with.

Sometimes, however, having your overall project shortened is a serious problem, especially when you've been "cutting to sound," or synchronizing your footage to an existing music track, as described in Chapter 8. Suppose you've spent hours putting your clips into the Movie Track, carefully trimming them so that they perfectly match the soundtrack. And now, as a final touch, you decide to put in transitions. Clearly, having these transitions slide all of your clips to the left would result in chaos, throwing off the synchronization work you had done.

Figure 6-5. When you insert a 2-second transition (top) between two clips, iMovie pulls the right-hand clip 2 seconds to the left so that it overlaps the end of the left-hand clip. The result (bottom): The entire movie is now 2 seconds shorter.


Now you can appreciate the importance of iMovie's Advanced Lock Audio Clip at Playhead command, which marries a piece of music or sound to a particular spot in the video. If all of your added music and sound elements are attached in this way, adding transitions wont disturb their synchronization. See page 231 for details on locking audio into position.


Tip: Certain transitionsOverlap, Fade In, Fade Out, Wash In, and Wash Outdon't shorten the movie. As described at the end of this chapter, each of these five special transitions affects only one clip, not two. They're meant to begin or end your movie, fading in or out from black or white.

6.3.4. How Transitions Chop Up Clips

After your transition has been rendered, you'll notice something peculiar about your Scrubber bar: The transition has now become, in effect, a clip of its own. (In fact, if you open your project "package" icon [page 112] and look in the project's Media folder, you'll even see the newly created clip file represented there, bearing the name of the transition you applied.)

If you click the first clip and play it, you'll find that the playback now stops sooner than it once didjust where the transition takes over. Likewise, the clip that follows the transition has also had frames shaven away at the front end. Both clips, in other words, have sacrificed a second or two to the newly created transition/clip between them. Figure 6-5 illustrates this phenomenon .


Tip: You can rename a transition icon, if it helps you to remember what you were thinking when you created it. To do so, double-click its icon or bar. The Clip Info dialog box appears, in which you can change the name the transition icon displays in your Movie Track.

6.3.5. Editing the Transition

You can edit the transition in several ways: You can change its length, its type, its direction (certain effects only), or all three. To do so, click the transition icon, and then click the Trans button (if the Transitions pane isn't already open). You can now adjust the Speed slider, click another transition in the list, or both. (For the Push and Billow effects, you can also change the direction of the effect.)

When you click Updatea button that's available only when a transition icon is highlighted in the Movie TrackiMovie automatically re-renders the transition.


Tip: You can also adjust the effect on several clips simultaneously. Just select the ones that you want to edit ( -click each one)or, to select all transitions in the whole movie, click one and then choose Edit Select Similar Clips. (The selected transition clips dont have to have matching transition types; you can click one Disintegrate, one Twirl, and one Push, and then change them all to the same Cross Dissolve.)Now make the changes you want, and then click the update button shown in Figure 6-4.

6.3.6. Deleting a Transition

If you decide that you don't need a transition effect between two clips after all, you can delete it just as you would delete any Movie Track clip: by clicking it once and then pressing the Delete key on your keyboard (or by choosing Edit Clear). Deleting a transition clip does more than eliminate the iconit also restores the clips on either side to their original conditions. (If you change your mind, Edit Undo Clear brings back the transition.)

6.3.7. Transition Error Messages

Transitions can be fussy. They like plenty of clip footage to chew on, and once they've begun rendering, they like to be left alone. Here are some of the error messages you may encounter when working with transitions.

6.3.7.1 When you delete a clip

For example, if, in the process of editing your movie, you delete a clip from the Movie Track that's part of a transition, a message appears (Figure 6-6) that says: "This action will invalidate at least one transition in the project. Invalid transitions will be deleted from the project. Do you want to proceed?"

iMovie is simply telling you that if you delete the clip, you'll also delete the transition attached to it (which is probably just what you'd expect). Click OK. If you first click "Don't ask me again," iMovie will henceforth delete such clips without asking your permission.

6.3.7.2 When the transition is longer than the clip

If you try to add a 5-second crossfade between two 3-second clips, iMovie throws up its hands with various similarly worded error messages (Figure 6-6, left). In all cases, the point is clear: The two clips on either side of a transition must each be longer than the transition itself.

Put another way, iMovie can't make your transition stretch across more than two clips (or more than one clip, in the case of the Fade and Wash effects).

6.3.7.3 When you quit while rendering

Creating transitions requires a great deal of iMovie's concentration. If you try to save your project, close it, or empty its Trash, you'll be advised to wait until the rendering is over, as shown in Figure 6-6 at right.

Figure 6-6. Left: Three messages that tell you there's not enough footage for the transition.
Right: Messages that appear when you delete a clip to which you've attached a transition (top); when you try to quit or save your project during rendering (middle); and when you try to empty the project Trash before the transitions have finished rendering.




iMovie HD & iDVD 5. The Missing Manual
iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100337
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 209
Authors: David Pogue

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