iMovie lets you take video that you’ve recorded with a camcorder and make your own movies. It gives you the power to be your own movie director. In Hollywood, the process of deciding which parts of the footage end up in the final product is called editing. Movie editors craft the various scenes to fit together—in essence, they’re making the same kind of decisions that you’ll make for your iMovie.
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iMovie will also let you capture video directly from iSight cameras, which were introduced in Chapter 16, “Using iChat AV.” We’ll discuss further details in Chapter 25, “Working with Video and Clips in iMovie.”
Apple explains the process of making iMovies in four general stages, which roughly follow the general process that professional movie makers follow: shoot, edit, enhance, and share.
Shooting video is simply the process of using your digital camcorder to record scenes or events for your iMovie. Most people find themselves recording sound with their video using the built-in microphone on their camcorder, but you don’t necessarily need to do this. With the right equipment, you can record sound separately and then import it into your iMovie. For example, you might shoot some footage of an event and want to record yourself separately, making narrative commentary about the footage.
There are really no limits to what you can do when shooting video—you’re limited only by how many blank tapes you have and how well charged your batteries are. (Hint: Extra batteries are definitely a wise investment, and you’ll almost surely find yourself in situations in which they come in handy.) Keep in mind, though, that you can work only with a limited amount of the footage you have shot because iMovie temporarily stores your production on your computer’s hard drive. That means that the available free space on your hard drive has a direct relationship to the amount of video you can edit at one time. For example, you can shoot as much video as you want, but you might not be able to edit all 10 tapes worth of footage at one time.
The way that you get video into the computer so that you can use it in iMovie is called capturing video. Apple makes it so simple to capture video, you don’t really need to think of it as a separate stage in the process of making an iMovie. You simply shoot your video, connect your camcorder to your Mac with a FireWire cable, and click a button. iMovie captures the video for you and automatically processes the incoming video into separate clips.
Some people find that editing video is their favorite part of working with iMovies. This is where you get to make the creative decisions that cause the final product to take form. The most common adjustments that iMovie enables you to make when editing video are the start and end of an individual video clip. For example, let’s say that you bring a new video clip into iMovie. It’s a scene of a friend standing in front of a building, talking about an event, and the total length of the clip is about 2 minutes long.
But when you look at the clip in iMovie, you notice that at the beginning of the clip there’s a little boy sticking his tongue out at the camera while walking by in the background. One option is to leave this type of accidental action in a clip, but ultimately you’ll probably find yourself wanting to remove or add things to your iMovie—thus you’ll want to learn how to edit.
If you want to edit the boy out of the scene in this example, iMovie gives you the ability to pick a new start for the clip. For example, you could start the clip 2 seconds later.
You’ll learn the details of capturing video and editing scenes in Chapter 25, “Working with Video and Clips in iMovie.”
iMovie gives you a number of tools and special effects that you can use to spice up your iMovie. In the context of video production, the word enhance has no special meaning, but Apple’s use of the term to describe this stage of working with an iMovie is an apt description. In traditional video or film production, the same stage is referred to as post-production, when a movie or television show is tweaked and developed, special effects are added, and final decisions are made about how the production will turn out.
iMovie is simple to use, but powerful, and one of the places it shines is in the category of effects. iMovie comes with many built-in effects, including Brightness/Contrast and Adjust Colors.
Sharing is my favorite stage of making an iMovie, and iMovie offers several options for sharing your movies: from exporting them back to videotape through your camera to exporting for use with iDVD. We’ll cover the options in-depth in Chapter 29, “Exporting iMovies.”
iMovie is a simple yet powerful video editor that enables you to develop your video project with three main tools: the Monitor, where you look at the video clip; a shelf, which gives you the ability to look at all the clips you have to work with at a glance; and a special area at the bottom of the screen known as the Timeline Viewer, where you can put together your clips and make decisions about when you want them to start and end.
You’ll find that the iMovie workspace is easy and fun to work with, like a well-planned playroom (see Figure 24.1), and the iMovie Monitor will end up being the center of activity. After you’ve created a new project, the action happens in the Monitor window, which is used both to capture and preview video in iMovie. The deceptively simple Monitor window is a powerful tool that enables you to switch between looking at video that’s coming from your camcorder and the clips that you already have on your Mac by toggling the import/edit control, labeled with camera and scissors icons, below the window.
The controls for the Monitor window are much like what you use on a DVD player and VCR, enabling you to quickly move through your video or jump to a specific location.
The value of the shelf, visible to the right of the Monitor window in Figure 24.1, quickly becomes apparent when you connect your camcorder to the Mac for the first time and start capturing clips. It almost seems like alien technology at work as you watch the video clips from your tape start to appear in the shelf. The shelf is like a pantry for video—when you capture video, you load up the shelf with clips, and you can take a quick glance to see what you have to work with.
As you’ll see in later chapters, the shelf gives you several additional tools to enhance your video productions, including transitions, titles, and effects, as well as a place to put audio if you’ve recorded it separately from your video.
The Clip Viewer (see Figure 24.2) represents one way of looking at video clips that you’ve added to your movie.
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The alternative to the Clip Viewer is the Timeline Viewer, which is discussed in the following section. You switch between the two viewer options using the buttons below the monitor that show the icon of a film frame (for Clip Viewer) or clock face (for Timeline Viewer). The Timeline Viewer provides more editing options, so we’ll spend most of our time working with the Timeline Viewer.
In the Clip Viewer, video clips are treated more like icons. You can easily click and drag an individual clip to position it differently and thus have a different order for your video production. We’ll take a closer look at the clip viewer in Chapter 27, “Working with iMovie’s Clip Viewer.”
The Timeline Viewer, visible along the bottom of the iMovie interface in Figure 24.1, enables you to make adjustments to your video clips, such as adjusting the start and end times of each clip, as well as adjusting effects and other things that you might add to a clip.
The Timeline Viewer also enables you to see things (clips, transitions, sound effects) as they progress over time.
The Timeline Viewer makes it easy to make more specific adjustments to your project, such as in situations in which you might want to go to a specific location in a clip. It also enables you to work with multiple audio clips, so if you want to add different sounds that you’ve recorded, it’s as easy as clicking and dragging.
At the very bottom of the iMovie window in Timeline view is a row of controls (refer to Figure 24.1).
The first control is a slider labeled Zoom that allows you to zoom in on the Timeline to see more detail. As you add more and more scenes to the Timeline, the proportion of the whole that each takes up shrinks—and so do the rectangles representing those clips. Use the Zoom slider to focus in one part of the Timeline by selecting a clip and dragging the Zoom controller to the right.
Next is the Speed slider, labeled with icons of a rabbit (or hare) and a turtle (or tortoise), which may call to mind Aesop’s fable about the fast hare and the slow tortoise. (To refresh your memory, the slow-but-steady tortoise wins the race.) This slider controls the speed of the selected clip. If you want a clip (or other element in the Timeline) to be sped up or slowed down, drag the slider toward the appropriate side.
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If a slider control button moves sluggishly when you try to drag it, you could instead click on the spot along the slider path where you want to set it. The button will jump precisely to that spot with ease.
Near the middle of the bottom row are controls for audio. Checking the box for Edit Volume produces a volume level in each of the elements in your Timeline. You can then adjust the volume of each clip or sound file so that there aren’t unpleasant volume changes. The slider next to the check box controls the overall volume of the movie. There are some additional features of the Edit Volume check box, which we will discuss in Chapter 28, “Working with Still Photos and Sound in iMovie.”
Before you begin any projects, let’s take a brief look at the options in the iMovie Preferences panel, which can be opened from the iMovie application menu. The Preferences panel, shown in Figure 24.3, contains a relatively small number of options and is categorized into general, import-related, and advanced items.
The General preference options in the Display are
Display Short Time Codes—. Shows only the digits for seconds and frames, such as 46:19, instead of showing the digits for minutes as well, such as 00:46:19. Use of short time codes in projects may be confusing because the minutes digits will simply be left off.
Automatically Start New Clip at Scene Break—. Choose whether iMovie imports your video as clips, based on when you stopped and restarted filming. If you want to import your video as a continuous clip, be aware that iMovie limits a single clip to less than 2GB. You’ll learn how to import clips in Chapter 25.
Play Sound When Export Completed—. Alerts you when your movie is finished exporting. (We’ll talk about exporting iMovies in Chapter 29, “Exporting iMovies.”)
Show Locked Audio Only When Selected—. Hides the indicators for locked audio unless you have selected a clip that is affected by locked audio. Checking this option removes some of the clutter from a complex movie project with added sound effects. (You’ll learn about working with audio, including locking audio to clips, in Chapter 27.)
The Timeline preferences include Show Audio Track Waveforms and Enable Timeline Snapping. These features help you match up video and audio tracks more precisely.
The options for Advanced Preferences are split into three sections. The first is a pair of radio buttons where you can choose whether clips imported from the camera are placed in the Clip pane or placed directly in the Timeline. If you are making an iMovie and want to be sure to keep all the scenes in order, choose to have the clips go directly into the Timeline; otherwise, storing them in the Clip pane while you decide what clips to add makes good sense.
The setting for New Projects refers to the format, NTCS or PAL, for which the video in your project is prepared. In North America or Japan, televisions use a system called National Television Standards Committee (NTSC). When you design video on your computer for NTSC televisions, the screen is 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels high when it’s displayed at full size. If you live in Europe, you probably use the PAL system for working with video, which has a screen size of 768×576. The PAL system also uses a different frame rate. (See the following note for more information.) Before starting your project, be sure this preference is set to the correct format for your region.
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What’s a pixel, you wonder? Your Mac divides the screen into a grid of individual pieces called pixels, which essentially are individual dots that make up a picture.
The frame rate of digital video is the number of images displayed in a second as they flash by, like frames in a traditional movie. In traditional movies, the individual images and frames are contained in large reels, and they go by at a rate of 24 frames per second. The frames per second measurement has been adopted by digital video, but the measurement depends on a variety of factors, including the country you live in and the way you want to deliver your digital video. For example, if you use the NTSC digital video system, the measurement is most often 29.97 frames per second (fps).
The Playback Quality settings allow you to choose whether iMovie displays high-quality images, which require more effort from your computer, or standard-quality images, which will play smoother on computers with slower processors. By default, computers with G4 processors or better will be set to the high quality and those with a G3 will be set for standard quality, and it’s best to leave those settings unless you are experiencing video playback problems.
Under the heading Other Settings are three additional checkboxes:
Extract Audio in Paste Over—. Marking this box means means that if you paste one clip on top of another, the original audio track appears as a separate audio track instead of having the new audio track layer over it. (See Chapter 28 for more about working with audio in iMovie.)
Filter Audio from Camera—. Apple recommends that you keep the option to filter audio from the camera checked. If you hear clicks or popping in imported clips, double-check that filter audio is enabled.
Play Video Through to Camera—. This setting allows you to watch recording on the camera and your Mac simultaneously while you import your clips.
Now that you’ve seen the iMovie interface and a few examples of what iMovie can do, let’s see how to start a new project.
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When iMovie creates a project, it puts all your video material in one location on the hard drive, sort of like a suitcase, making it easy to store everything for your iMovie in one place. When you capture video, all the clips end up in the project; and even though there are separate files, everything stays together.
Before you can begin working on making iMovies, you must know how to create a new project. iMovie makes this easy by bringing up a special screen (shown in Figure 24.4) if you don’t already have a project started. (If you have already created a project, or even several projects, iMovie tries to open the one last opened on your computer.)
To create a new project:
Start iMovie. If you get the window shown in Figure 24.4, click the Create Project button.
If you don’t get this window when you start iMovie, you can choose File, New Project from the menu bar to get the same thing.
When you create a new project, iMovie brings up the Create New Project sheet window to ask where you want to put the project on your hard drive (see Figure 24.5). Type in a name for your movie and click Save if you want iMovie to simply save the file directly to the hard drive.
You might want to switch to a more convenient location than the one iMovie suggests (such as the desktop), by clicking the pop-up menu at the top of the Create New Project dialog sheet. This opens a view of your hard drive so that you can choose where to save the project.
In Chapter 25, you’ll learn how to import video from your digital video camera, but before you move ahead take a few moments to look around the iMovie interface.
In this chapter, you were introduced to the basics of the iMovie interface. You took a closer look at the shelf (where video clips are stored), the Monitor (which lets you see the clips), and the Timeline Viewer (which gives you another way to interact with clips) as well as iMovie’s menus and preference settings. You also learned a little bit about iMovie’s capabilities and how to start a new project.