Introduction


Over the years , home movies have developed a bad name , one that's not entirely undeserved . After all, you know what it's like watching other people's camcorder footage. You're held prisoner on some neighbor's couch after dessert to witness 60 excruciating, unedited minutes of their trip to Mexico, or maybe 25 too many minutes of the baby wearing the spaghetti bowl.

Deep down, most camcorder owners are aware that the viewing experience could be improved if the video were edited down to just the good parts . They just had no idea how to accomplish that. Until iMovie came along, editing camcorder footage on the computer required several thousand dollars' worth of digitizing cards, extremely complicated editing software, and the highest-horsepower computer equipment available.

Some clever souls tried to edit their videos by buying two VCRs, wiring them together, and copying parts of one tape onto another. That worked greatif you didn't mind the bursts of distortion and static at each splice point and the massive generational quality loss.

You know what? Unless there was a paycheck involved, editing footage under those circumstances just wasn't worth it. The fast-forward button on the remote was a lot easier.

All of that changed when iMovie came along. It certainly wasn't the first digital video (DV) editing software. But it was the first DV-editing software for nonprofessionals , people who have a life outside of video editing. Within six months of its release in October 1999, iMovie had become, in words of beaming iMovie papa (and Apple CEO) Steve Jobs, "the most popular video-editing software in the world."

Apple only fanned the flames when it released iMovie 2 in July 2000 (for $50), iMovie 3 in January 2003 (for free), and thenas part of the iLife software suiteiMovie 4, iMovie HD, and iMovie 6 in successive Januaries.


Note: The icon and welcome screen for iMovie 6 still say "iMovie HD." But that's also what the previous version was called! To avoid completely confusing you, this book refers to the iLife '06 version as iMovie 6, and the previous version as iMovie HD.

Meet iMovie

iMovie is video-editing software. It grabs a copy of the raw footage from your digital camcorder or still camera. Then it lets you edit this video easily, quickly, and creatively.

iMovie is the world's least expensive version of what the Hollywood pros call nonlinear editing software for video, just like its much more powerful (and much more complex) rivals, like Final Cut Express ($300), Final Cut Pro ($1,000), and Avid editing suites ($100,000). The "nonlinear" part is that no tape is involved while you're editing. There's no rewinding or fast-forwarding; you jump instantly to any piece of footage as you put your movie together.

Your interest in video may be inspired by any number of ambitions. Maybe you want to create professional-looking shows for your local cable station's public-access channel. Or you aspire to create the next Blair Witch Project (which was created by nonprofessionals using a camcorder and nonlinear editing software) or the next Tarnation , an iMovie project that was a hit at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals.

On the other hand, maybe all you want to do is make better home moviesmuch, much better home movies. Either way, iMovie can accommodate you.

The world of video is exploding. People are giving each other DVDs instead of greeting cards. People are watching each other via video on their Web sites. People are quitting their daily-grind jobs to become videographers for hire, making money filming weddings and creating living video scrapbooks. Video, in other words, is fast becoming a new standard document format for the new century.

If you have iMovie and a camcorder, you'll be ready.

What's New in iMovie 6

iMovie 6 represents only a light overhaul of the program, so iMovie veterans won't have a lot to learn and unlearn.

Big-Ticket Features

Here's a summary of the really big improvements in iMovie 6, the ones that Apple either advertises or should:

  • Full- size previews . When you're setting up a video effect, title, or transition ( crossfade ), you used to have to preview the results in a tiny, Triscuit-size window. In iMovie 6, though, the entire full-size Monitor window shows the preview. It loops over and over, changing its display in real time as you fiddle with the settings of your effect.

  • Themes . A theme, in iMovie lingo, is a prefab, canned, professional animated graphic that you can use for opening credits, section dividers , end-of-movie "bumpers, "and so on. Actually, they're not entirely canned. Each Theme design contains big holes called drop zones that you can fill with your own photos or movies, so that the result looks like it was tailored just for your movie. (The Themes match the menu-design templates in iDVD, too, so the whole thing can have a consistent look when burned to DVD.)

  • More than one movie open at once . No longer must you close one movie project before opening another. In fact, you can have 10 of them open at once, for ease in comparing versions or copying material (or drag-and-dropping material) between them.

  • Audio effects . iMovie 6 offers a new, sweet suite of audio-processing effects. There's a graphic equalizer to bring out (or throttle back) the bass, treble, or midrange ; reverb and delay for those echoey effects; even a tool to change the pitch of someone talking, turning a man into a woman or a woman into a chipmunk.

  • Magic iMovie . When you're pressed for time, check out the newly enhanced Magic iMoviea completely automated movie-assembly feature. You connect the camcorder, choose the music and options you want, and then sit back (or walk away). iMovie, unattended, rewinds the tape, creates an opening title, imports all the footage, adds transitions between shots, backs it all up with music that you choose, and, if you like, hands off the result to iDVD for quick burning to disc.

  • Time-lapse importing . Now you, too, can create spectacular PBS nature documentaries! Speed up the blossoming of a flower, the setting of the sun, the clouds crossing the skyby hundreds of times, so that what usually takes hours takes only a minute.

  • More export offerings . When your movie is finished, you can now fire it off not only to iDVD, a QuickTime movie, a cellphone, or a tape in the camcorder, but also to iWeb (for turning into a Web page or video blog) or your iPod for watching on the road. Cooler yet, you can actually export an iMovie movie to GarageBandand then compose a soundtrack for it in real time as the movie plays!

  • More visual effects . Dozens more, actually. Some are totally undocumented but profoundly useful, like the Exposure control that can bring out lost details from deteriorating old VHS tapes.

  • New preference settings . iMovie can handle both standard-definition video (shaped roughly squarish) and hi-def video (widescreen). Things can get sticky, though, when you try to mix and match. For example, what if you own a widescreen TVand you try to play older, 4:3 videos on it? Or what if you have a traditional 4:3 TVand you try to play widescreen material on it? A new preference lets you specify whether iMovie responds by stretching the video or by adding black letterbox bars.

    Another new preference setting limits the length of each incoming clip to, say, two minutes (or whatever you specify)which, for complicated technical reasons described in Chapter 5, can help you keep down the massive size of your projects on disk.

You'll also find lots of smaller tweaks. Some are unheralded but fantastic, like a revised Ken Burns effect ( graceful zooming or panning across a still photo) that slows down, rather than speeds up, as it approaches the end. Others are unheralded but less joyous, like a redesign of the main control-pane buttons that requires an extra click to view, say, your effect options.

iDVD Changes

As you may have noticed, this iMovie book comes with a free bonus book: iDVD 6: The Missing Manual , which constitutes Chapters 15, 16, 17, and 18. If your Mac has a DVD burner , iDVD can preserve your movies on home-recorded DVDs that look and behave amazingly close to the commercial DVDs you rent from Netflix or Blockbuster.

iDVD 6 is loaded with enhancements that help you make your DVD look even more like a commercial Hollywood DVD.

  • Widescreen DVDs . Someday, high-definition DVDs will be standard and commonplace, and iDVD will be updated to handle high-def video. As 2006and iDVD 6dawned, however, the world was still using standard-definition DVD discs. The ones from Hollywood, though, often come in widescreen editions, cinematically shaped to fit today's hi-def TV screens. For the first time, iDVD can create discs whose picture fits that widescreen TV shape.

  • Magic iDVD . You can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend fiddling around in iDVD using this feature. You choose a menu-screen design; specify which movies and slideshow photos you want to include; and click one button. iDVD creates the menu screens, chapter menus , and slideshows automatically. The result is a ready-to-burn DVD projector a ready-to-edit one, if you choose to fine-tune the results first.

  • Autofill drop zones . A drop zone is a placeholder in one of Apple's dozens of menu-screen designs where you can install your own photos or movies. Now, at your option, iDVD can fill them automatically, using raw materials from the DVD itself.

  • Editable map . As a DVD's menu design grows more complicated, iDVD's Map view becomes more useful. It looks like a corporate organizational chart, except that each little tile represents one menu screen. In iDVD 6, these tiles are draggable and editable, making it possible to design your entire menu structure on a single bird's-eye-view screen.

  • Non-Apple DVD burners . At last, you can burn DVDs even if you've bought some third-party DVD drive. You can use all kinds of blank DVDs to burn on, too, including DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD+R DL.

There are other nice touches, too. A single Project Info window shows you the status of your project, and warns you if anything is amiss before burning (like you've got too much video to fit on one disc). New stage-by stage progress barsand even a live video thumbnailshow you exactly where you are in the burning progress. There are ten new menu Themes, too, five of which are coordinated to match iMovie's new Themes. More flexibility awaits when it comes to the buttons on your menu screens, too; you have greater typeface and transition control, for example.

About This Book

Don't let the rumors fool you. iMovie and iDVD may be simple, but they're not simplistic. Unfortunately, many of the best techniques aren't covered in the only "manual" you get with iLifeits electronic help screens.

This book was born to address three needs. First, it's designed to give you a grounding in professional filming and editing techniques. The camcorder and iMovie produce video of stunning visual and audio quality, giving you the technical tools to produce amazing videos. But most people don't have much experience with the artistic side of shootinglighting, sound, and compositionor even how to use the dozens of buttons packed onto the modern camcorder. This book will tell you all you need to know.

Second, this book is designed to serve as the iMovie/iDVD manual, as the book that should have been in the box. It explores each iMovie feature in depth, offers illustrated catalogs of the various title and transition effects, offers shortcuts and workarounds, and unearths features that the online help doesn't even mention.

About the Outline

iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts, each containing several chapters:

  • Part 1, Capturing DV Footage , covers what happens before you get to iMovie. It explains the DV format, helps you buy and learn to use a camcorder, and offers a crash course in professional film technique.

  • Part 2, Editing in iMovie , is the heart of the book. It leads you through transferring your footage into iMovie, editing your clips, placing them into a timeline, adding crossfades and titles, working with your soundtracks , and more.

  • Part 3, Finding Your Audience , helps you take the cinematic masterpiece on your screen to the world. Even if you don't have the necessary gear to burn your work onto DVD, iMovie excels at exporting your work in two different ways: back to your camcorder (from which you can play it on TV, transfer it to your VCR, and so on) to a QuickTime movie file (which you can burn onto a CD, post on a Web page, or send to friends by email), or to the screen of a video iPod. This part of the book offers step-by-step instructions for each of these methods , and also shows you how you can use QuickTime Player Pro to supplement the editing tools in iMovie.

  • Part 4, iDVD 6 , is just what you'd expect: a bonus volume dedicated to the world's easiest -to-use DVD design and burning software, written by guest author (and bestselling digital-video goddess) Erica Sadun. It goes way, way beyond the basics, as you'll see.

At the end of the book, three appendixes provide a menu-by-menu explanation of the iMovie menu commands, a comprehensive troubleshooting handbook, and a new master cheat sheet of iMovie's keyboard shortcuts.

About These Arrows

Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you'll find sentences like this one: "Open your Home Library Preferences folder." Thats shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this: "In the Finder, choose Go Home. In your Home folder, youll find a folder called Library. Open that. Inside the Library window is a folder called Preferences. Double-click to open it, too."

Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus, as shown in Figure I-1.

Figure I-1. In this book, arrow notations help to simplify folder and menu instructions. For example, "Choose Dock Position on Left is a more compact way of saying, "From the menu, choose Dock; from the submenu that then appears, choose Position on Left," as shown here.

Technical Notes for PAL People

If you live in the Americas, Japan, or any of 30 other countries , your camcorder, VCR, and TV record and play back a video signal in a format that's known as NTSC. Even if you've never heard the term , every camcorder, VCR, TV, and TV station in your country uses this same signal. (The following discussion doesn't apply to high-definition video, which is the same across continents.)

What it stands for is National Television Standards Committee, the gang who designed this format. What it means is incompatibility with the second most popular format, which is called PAL (Phase Alternating Line, for the curious ). In Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and China (among other places), everyone's equipment uses the PAL format. You can't play an American tape on a standard VCR in Swedenunless you're happy with black-and-white, sometimes jittery playback.


Tip: France, the former Soviet Union countries, and a few others use a third format, known as SECAM. iMovie doesn't work with SECAM gear. To find out what kind of gear your country uses, visit a Web site like www.vidpro.org/standards.htm.

Fortunately, iMovie converses fluently with both NTSC and PAL camcorders. When you launch the program, it automatically studies the camcorder you've attached and determines its format.

However, most of the discussions in this book use NTSC terminology. If you're a friend of PAL, use the following information to translate this book's discussions.

The Tech Specs of NTSC

Whether you're aware of it or not, using the NTSC standard-definition format means that the picture you see is characterized like this:

  • 30 frames per second . A frame is one individual picture. Flashed before your eyes at this speed, the still images blend into what you perceive as smooth motion.

  • 575 scan lines . The electron gun in a TV tube paints the screen with this number of fine horizontal lines.

  • The DV picture measures 720 x 480 pixels . This figure refers to the number of screen dots, or pixels , that compose one frame of image in the DV (digital video) version of the NTSC format. (But don't count on these specs if your intention is to crop photos or graphics to just that size, thinking that they'll fit neatly. They won't, as described in Section 9.2.)

The Tech Specs of PAL

When iMovie detects a PAL camcorder (or when you inform it that you're using one), it makes the necessary adjustments automatically, including:

  • 25 frames per second . Video fans claim that the lower frame rate creates more flicker than the NTSC standard. On the other hand, this frame rate is very close to the frame rate of Hollywood films (24 frames per second). As a result, many independent filmmakers find PAL a better choice when shooting movies they intend to convert to film.

  • 625 scan lines . That's 20 percent sharper and more detailed than NTSC. The difference is especially visible on large-screen TVs.

  • The DV picture measures 720 x 576 pixels . This information may affect you as you read Chapter 9 and prepare still images for use with iMovie.

About MissingManuals.com

At www.missingmanuals.com, you'll find news, articles, and updates to the books in this series.

But if you click the name of this book and then the Errata link, you'll find a unique resource: a list of corrections and updates that have been made in successive printings of this book. You can mark important corrections right into your own copy of the book, if you like.

In fact, the same page offers an invitation for you to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up to date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we'll make any confirmed corrections you've suggested. Thanks in advance for reporting any glitches you find!

In the meantime, we'd love to hear your suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual line. There's a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.

The Very Basics

You'll find very little jargon or nerd terminology in this book. You will, however, encounter a few terms and concepts that you'll see frequently in your Macintosh life. They include:

  • Menus . The menus are the words in the lightly striped bar at the top of your screen. You can either click one of these words to open a pull-down menu of commands (and then click again on a command), or click and hold the button as you drag down the menu to the desired command (and release the button to activate the command). Either method works fine.


    Note: Apple has officially changed what it calls the little menu that pops up when you Control-click (or right-click) something on the screen. It's still a contextual menu, in that the menu choices depend on the context of what you clickbut it's now called a shortcut menu. That term not only matches what it's called in Windows, but it's slightly more descriptive about its function. Shortcut menu is the term you'll find in this book.
  • Clicking . This book offers three kinds of instructions that require you to use the mouse or trackpad attached to your Mac. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something onscreen and thenwithout moving the cursor at allpress and release the clicker button on the mouse (or laptop trackpad). To double-click , of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while keeping the button continuously pressed.

    When you're told to - click something, you click while pressing the key (next to the Space bar). Such related procedures as Shift-clicking, Option-clicking , and Control-clicking work the same wayjust click while pressing the corresponding key on the bottom row of your keyboard.


    Note: On Windows PCs, the mouse has two buttons. The left one is for clicking normally; the right one produces a tiny shortcut menu of useful commands (see the note below). But new Macs come with Apple's Mighty Mouse, a mouse that looks like it has only one button but can actually detect which side of its rounded front you're pressing. If you've turned on the feature in System Preferences, you, too, can right-click things on the screen.That's why, all through this book, you'll see the phrase, "Control-click the photo (or right-click it)." That's telling you that Control-clicking will do the jobbut if you've got a two-button mouse or you've turned on the two-button feature of the Mighty Mouse, right-clicking might be more efficient.
  • Keyboard shortcuts . Every time you take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse, you lose time and potentially disrupt your creative flow. That's why many experienced Mac fans use keystroke combinations instead of menu commands wherever possible. -P opens the Print dialog box, for example, and -M minimizes the current window to the Dock.

    When you see a shortcut like -Q (which closes the current program), it's telling you to hold down the key, and, while it's down, type the letter Q, and then release both keys.

If you've mastered this much information, you have all the technical background you need to enjoy iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual .




iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net