iMovie 2 tips

If you've never used iMovie before, see Getting started with iMovie.

For more about film-making techniques, see Making your film make sense.

Planning
Mac techniques
Organising your movies
Camera
Editing
Sound
Split editing

Planning

Keep projects short: it’s better to put a lot into a thirty-second film than to struggle to fill ten minutes.

The more you plan in advance, the better. You will work much more efficiently if you log and select the footage you want to use, and plan the edit out on paper first, before importing anything into the computer.

Allow plenty of time for projects. For high quality work, think in terms of "1:1:1" - an hour’s filming and a day’s editing to make a minute of film. If you're working with ambitious perfectionists - or just disorganised - it may take longer.

Mac techniques

You have to select an object (eg a clip) - by clicking on it once with the mouse - before you can move or manipulate it. Clicking on a neutral area of the screen will cancel your selection.

When an object is selected, it will be highlighted (it will change colour in some way). The movie clip icons in iMovie are highlighted with a yellow outline.

To select another object at the same time, hold down the shift key and click on the second one.

To select several objects together, click on the first, hold down shift, then click on the last

To move an object, press and hold on the mouse, then drag the object to where you want it to go before letting go of the mouse.

To undo the most recent action, hold down the command (apple) key and press Z.

To select everything (eg all the clips on the timeline) use command-A.

Organising your movies

Create a folder on your hard disc called 'Movies' and save all your movies there. To make access easier, put an alias of the 'Movies' folder on your desktop.

Give your movies logical names.

Don’t import everything you’ve filmed: log your footage and be selective about what you capture.

Give your clips useful names, rather than just ‘Clip 01, Clip 02’, particularly when you’re editing dialogue, or splitting clips.

Rename them by clicking on the name and typing in the new name.

Don’t rename clips in the project's Media folder - iMovie won’t recognise them.

Camera

If iMovie fails to recognise that the camera is connected:

Check your connections.

Check that the camera is in VCR mode and that it hasn’t gone into standby mode (try turning it off then on again).

If the problem persists, save your work then quit and relaunch iMovie (this only takes a few seconds).

If you’re still having problems, restart the computer.

If iMovie tells you your camera is a different video standard from your project, save your work and restart the computer.

Editing

If you’re having trouble inserting the crop marks, make sure the tip of the arrow is just beneath the grey shadow below the blue scrubber bar. Alternatively, holding down the shift key and clicking on the playhead will insert crop marks.

Review edits as you go along:

Select the clip you’ve just edited plus the clips before and after it
Move the playhead back to just before the clip
Press the spacebar to play
If you want to change your edit, press Command-Z (Undo)

To revise a clip you edited earlier, use Advanced>Restore Clip Media.

If iMovie tells you that you can’t use a particular transition because the clips around it are too short, use the ‘Speed’ slider to reduce the duration of the transition.

Go easy on the transitions and effects! Fade in, Fade out and Dissolve are the only transitions used in most films.

Learn and use the keyboard shortcuts: they will help you to work much faster. Use the spacebar rather than the on-screen buttons to start and stop your clips, or to capture footage

Sound

Try to keep sound levels consistent.

Adjust the sound levels for individual sound or video clips by clicking on each clip (in the timeline) and then using the slider at the bottom right of the timelne.

To adjust how the audio of a clip fades in and out, double-click on the clip in the timeline and use the sliders in the dialogue box.

To edit the beginning and end of sound clips precisely, use a larger magnification on the timeline.

To be sure that you don’t have sound glitches when you’re doing cutaways, do the following:

Select the master clip (the one that you’ll be inserting the cutaways over)
Go to Advanced>Extract Audio
Make sure the clip and its audio are locked together (in the timeline, there should be a pin symbol on the clip and its audio)

You can record voiceovers using the iMac’s internal microphone, but the quality isn’t very good. Instead, plug in a powered microphone into your iMac or Powerbook (you need a USB microphone for iBooks).

If you don’t have a microphone, you can use the camcorder’s microphone (except on iBooks). Plug the red and white audio cables from the camera’s composite video output into a ‘two phono to stereo minijack’ adaptor (availabe from Maplins, under £2)

To insert a cutaway:

There are two ways to do this. You can either trim the clip you want to insert, and then copy the entire clip; alternatively you can just insert the crop marks and copy the section you have selected.
Go to the timeline and move the playhead to where you want to insert your cutaway
Go to Advanced>Paste over at playhead.

Split editing

Split editing (not to be confused with ‘Split clip at playhead’) is the term for an edit where the sound and picture change at different times. It can make continuity editing flow much more smoothly.

Split edit 1

Sound from Clip 2 comes in over the picture from Clip 1.

Trim the two clips to include all the sound and vision you want from both clips.
Put your clips on the timeline.
Extract the audio from both clips. Put the audio from Clip 2 on the second audio track.
Move the playhead to the point in Clip 2 at which you want the picture to change. Go to Advanced>Split Clip at Playhead.
Now move the playhead to the end of Clip 2.
Go to Advanced>Unlock Audio Clip
Then to Advanced>Lock Audio Clip at Playhead
Delete the first part of the picture from Clip 2.
Trim the audio from Clip 1 by moving its handle (the grey triangle at the end of the audio clip) left until it lines up with the beginning of the audio from Clip 2.

Split edit 2

Sound from Clip 1 carries on over the picture from Clip 2

Trim the two clips as before.
Extract audio from both clips.
Move the audio from Clip 2 to the second audio track.
Split the video of Clip 1 at the point you want the audio from Clip 2 to come in.
Delete the unwanted video from Clip 1.

Backup

Backup your work regularly if you can. If you don't have an external drive or removeable media to back up to, you should consider exporting important projects (such as coursework) to DV tape at the end of each session.

Tom Barrance

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