iMovie - University of Texas at Austin...iMovie Essential Training 1. Creating a New Project To create a new Project file click on File < New Movie, or Trailer Choose depending on

iMovie Essential Training

1. Creating a New Project To create a new Project file click on File < New Movie, or Trailer

Choose depending on what you want to work on. Usually if it’s a Video project you’d select Movie. When you select either, a new window with different themes will appear.

If you select Movie you’ll get something like this.

If you select Trailer you’ll have something like this.

I’ll work with Movie, and chose the No theme for this exercise. (These themes are start points for your project; they include specific transitions, text and effects that you can always change later or delete while working). Once you’ve selected your project theme your interface should look like this (image below) and you can now Import your Media to start working.

2. Importing Video Importing existing video files is easy. To import choose File < Import Media and select the Videos from your computer you’d like to use.

You can also click Command + I to open the import box.

Or select the import button on the top of the software’s interface.

NEXT This Import box will appear. Here, browse and select the clips you’d like to bring into iMovie. You can also drag the files directly to the timeline on iMovie.

Now, your interface should look something like this (but with the clips that you’ve imported). You have your project and Event Browser on the left side, the Preview window on your right and your new editing timeline on the bottom.

3. Adding clips to your project

Assembling a movie in iMovie pretty much consists of 2 basic steps.

• First, select the clip you want to use in the Event Browser. When you select the clip from the Event Browser you can either drop it all on your timeline by dragging and dropping, or you can crop your selection to the points where you want that clip to start and end (You can always trim or make longer later too if necessary).

You notice the yellow selection around the clip. You hold your mouse for a moment and drag until you’ve selected the start and end points of the clip you want to add to your timeline.

Once you’ve made your selection, drag and drop it on your timeline.

Then, repeat until you're done. Of course, there are other intermediate steps involving fine-tuning your selections, and rearranging your clips, and you can add some extras with titles and transitions and music. The basic process is, select the clip and drag it in.

After you’ve done your first pass on the footage you wanted to use, now you can add these elements to your project:

• Transitions • Text and Titles • Music and Sound

TRANSITIONS

You’ll notice this highlighted icon in between your clips. This is the space for the transition. It usually has a Cross-Dissolve as a default transition, but you can change it.

On the left bottom side of your screen you’ll notice your Content Library and in it the option for Transitions. Click on that. Then, another box will open on your Event Browser. It’ll look something like this. Here, you can select and choose the different transitions that you’d like to use (You can preview them by clicking dragging the mouse through each one of them, and you’ll see the preview, or just try them out on your timeline).

After you choose, just select and drag the transition to the transition icon in between the clips you’ve chosen, or you’ll also find an empty transition spot that’ll look like this. Same thing applies, just drag effect in between clips.

TEXT and Titles You'll find the titles here in the Content Library on your left bottom side. And there are 48 types of titles here covering a wide range of uses and themes. As with transitions, you can preview your titles by skimming your mouse over them.

All you have to do now is to find the one that’s most appropriate for your project and drag it into the clip that you want it to appear over.

You can make the text last shorter or longer time. Just select the start or end point and drag it to where you want the text effect.

PREVIEW

You can edit the text by clicking on the text bar on your timeline and on your Preview screen there will be a T for Text Editing. Here you can change the font face, the color, the font size, you can make text bold, outlined or italicized. And just basically click any combination you like. The options to change text are pretty limited, but you can always select other options on the Preview Screen if the text didn’t work out as you wanted.

You can Preview your changes by playing the timeline project. Use the Spacebar on your keyboard to Play and Stop.

MUSIC & SOUND Music can dramatically change the mood and tone of your movie and you're free to drag in any MP3, iTunes AAC, or any other QuickTime compatible audio format file you want into iMovie. You can either drag them in from some other location on your Mac, or if you have your music organized in iTunes, you can access your iTunes library directly from iMovie. iMovie itself, comes with tons of professionally recorded musical pieces, as well as a huge library of sound effects. So you're almost always sure to find something that will enhance your movie project.

In your Content Library you’re going to find the access to your iTunes library, the Sound Effects included in iMovie, and GarageBand items/songs that you’ve made.

To apply audio to a specific clip, drag and drop it from the Event Browser to the specific clip that you want that sound/song to play to. (REMEMBER: This will link the audio file to the specific clip). If you want to do Background music, with no interruption, drag and drop the song/long sound to the bottom part of the timeline where the Background music option is located. To change the audio level of the entire clip, you want to roll your mouse over the audio area. And you'll see this horizontal line get highlighted. Click anywhere on that line and drag up to increase the audio level or down to decrease it.

For some audio clips where the volume is already pretty loud, those peaks will actually turn red if you drag them all the way up. So keep an eye on those peaks when you're adjusting the audio level. So the waveform area of the clips and both your timeline and in the browser that you see exactly which clips are louder or quieter than the others, but you can also use the waveform area to make adjustments and raise or lower the audio level of the entire clip or just specific sections of the clip. To change the audio level of the entire clip, you want to roll your mouse over the audio area. And you'll see this horizontal line get highlighted. ** Notice if I drag too far up, some of the peaks of the waveforms turn yellow, warning me that that section is too loud and may distort.

You can fade in Music and Effects by dragging the circle at the beginning of each audio file up to where you want it to fade (BOTH BEGINNING AND END OF SOUND CLIP)

When you move your cursor, it’ll look like this.

If you want to split a sound clip, MARK where you want to split and Control + mouse click to open your options menu, and select Split Clip.

Should look like this. (SAME WITH VIDEO CLIP – to split)

BTW If you don't see these waveforms, click the film strip icon up here, and make sure Show Waveforms is checked.

4. Add Voiceovers In addition to letting you adjust and add pre-recorded audio files, iMovie gives you the ability to record your own voice-over narration to your movies live while watching the movie. This is a fantastic feature if you're the type of person that likes to do a lot of explaining when people are watching your videos. EXAMPLE: Saying things like, “this is the part of the trail that was completely deserted at 6 o'clock in the morning.” Or “we almost dropped our camera in the water in this shot.” You can use your Mac's built-in mic if it has one. Or you can pick up an inexpensive USB microphone from any computer or office supplies store. To record your Voiceover just press V as in voice-over, and it makes these controls appear below your preview screen.

You can also come up to the Window menu and choose Record Voiceover from here as well. In either case, that opens this set of buttons that we see in the viewer. Now first, you want to make sure you're recording from the correct source. INSTRUCTIONS When you're ready, click the Microphone button to start recording. iMovie will give you a countdown and then you can start speaking. When you're done recording, just press the spacebar to stop or click the Microphone button again.

5. Cropping and Rotating clips The Crop tool is useful in a variety of circumstances.

§ Maybe you have a great shot of the beach on your vacation, but it's ruined by some people walking around near the edge of the shot. You can easily get rid of them by cropping them out.

§ Or, if you have standard size footage that you're using in a widescreen

aspect ratio project. And you want to avoid having black bars on the side of your image. You can zoom in on the shot using the Crop tool.

§ Or even if your footage is in the same aspect ratio as your project. You

might want to zoom in a little anyway to place more focus on the subject of your footage.

The Crop tool can also be used to rotate your footage.

We can choose from three styles of cropping. We have Fit, Crop and Ken Burns. Two most commonly used crop options are: - Fit is used when your clip isn't the same aspect ratio as your project, usually in the case of still photos. - Crop: That puts a crop order around the entire viewable area, and all you have to do to crop is grab a corner and resize that area. The crop area will remain in proportion to the

project's aspect ratio. So just drag the lower left hand corner until the parked cars are cropped out. Maybe I'll also want to see a little bit more of the water, so I'll click inside the cropped area and drag it down a little bit. You do want to be careful to not crop it too much, because what you're essentially doing is zooming in on the video. And zooming in too much will cause the video to start looking pixelated and just not that great.

6. Adjusting Color So with the clip selected, the first thing you might want to try is the Enhance button. This is a simple one click tool that examines your footage and tries to improve its appearance by making automatic adjustments to the color balance, brightness, and contrast. There are no sliders or knobs to adjust. Either you like how it makes your clip look, in which case you can leave Enhance on, or you don't like how it looks. You can just turn it on or off.

If you want to manually change the color options click on the second icon over the preview window.

The half moon sliders here are for adjusting the contrast of the clip. Notice that moving either one of these, either this one or this one, moves the other one, so it doesn't really matter which one you use. The gray slider is for adjusting the overall brightness of the image. Generally though, I recommend first adjusting the shadow and highlight sliders before messing with the overall brightness and contrast. So the white slider here is for adjusting the highlights or bright areas of the image. You can also adjust the Saturation of the image (intensity of color)

And the Temperature (cold or warm) of your colors.