Unlocking iMovie '08

iMovie is dead. Long live iMovie.

2009-01-06T10:47:00.002-07:00

It's here! iMovie '09 was just announced today at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. I have been planning a new blog for when the time came. So, without further ado, I now present:

Unlocking iMovie '09

There will be a lot of new features to cover. I have transfered some of the articles that I guessed would be relevant. (We'll see how accurate I was in my guessing.)

Please feel free to update any links to the new site. I plan to leave this one up, but this post officially marks the EOL of Unlocking iMovie '08.

Thanks to everyone who visits, helps, and makes the Mac-user experience a better place.

iMovie Software Update Out: Version 7.1.4

2008-07-22T15:41:00.003-06:00

That's right, it's version 7.1.4. Don't ask me what happened to 7.1.3. I guess it never reported for duty.

According to Apple, "This update addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues."

It looks like this update at least changes all the references for ".Mac" to "MobileMe," logos and all.

Anyway, you can get yourself this new update via your Software Update, or use the following link:

iMovie 7.1.4 Standalone Updater

iMovie Software Update Out: Version 7.1.2

2008-06-14T14:21:00.004-06:00

Apple is tweaking iMovie '08 again. This time version 7.1.2 has been pushed out to the masses via Software Update. (If you don't see it, you probably need to run the Quicktime 7.5 update first.) You can also download the standalone installer if you prefer, just be sure to run the standalone Quicktime 7.5 installer first (for Leopard, for Tiger, and for Panther).
Apple says:

This update addresses general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

I have learned a few more details on what this update improves, namely:

Support for Panasonic's HDC-SD-9 and HDC-HS-9
Support for the Flip Mino
Direct import of MPEG-1 videos from Sony's Digital Still Cameras (Pretty slick, it allows you to pick and choose what you import from the SDHC card directly into iMovie.)
Improved AVCHD import on multi-core systems (Most Macs of recent date have multi-core processors, so if you import AVCHD, you will probably see improvements.)
Fixes a number of critical bugs

If you have seen any changes, for better or for worse, please share in the comments!

iMovie Software Update Out: Version 7.1.1

2008-01-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

Apple released a maintenance update to iMovie 08 today. Check your software update or download the standalone updater here:

iMovie 7.1.1 Update

According to Apple:

This update addresses issues when publishing movies to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

If this fixes or breaks anything for you, please take a moment to share your experience in the comments.

How to use the Space Saver

2007-12-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

No doubt about it, the Event Library makes iMovie better in the same way that drawers and cupboards make kitchens better. Having your footage conveniently organized and accessible makes a huge difference in your productivity. The problem with kitchen drawers, though, is the infernal junk drawer. It's never fun to clean out, but who really needs the dead batteries and gum wrappers that fill it up?

The Event Library can get filled up with all kinds of junk: blurry shots, shaking shots, long and boring shots. The problem is that this kind of stuff takes up a lot of space, especially if you are shooting HD. You can get rid of it by rejecting and deleting each individual clip, but this can be time consuming. iMovie, in its wisdom, gives us a faster way: Space Saver.

WARNING: Space Saver risks getting rid of footage you want to keep. Using the junk drawer analogy, it works by picking out the things you want to save then just shoving everything else into the trash. There might be a ten dollar bill or important phone number that you'll never get back. That said, here is how to use the Space Saver.

You'll find the Space Saver in the File menu.

Before you select it, it's important to understand that Space Saver only works on events that you have selected in the Event Library. You can go an event at a time, not unlike going a drawer at a time in your kitchen. Or, you can select multiple events at once and run Space Saver on all of them together.

I realize that my warning may scare you from doing anything with Space Saver, but iMovie actually takes you through a few steps before anything really gets deleted. If you select "Space Saver" from the File menu, you will see this dialog box show up:

What it basically tells you is that Space Saver can delete any footage that:
1) Isn't used in a project,
2) Isn't marked as a favorite, and/or
3) Isn't marked with a keyword.
This essentially means that it will delete any footage that you haven't touched using any of the tools described in this post:

How to use the advanced editing tools

So if you want your footage to be saved from the Space Saver, go read that post and learn how you can make sure the right stuff gets passed over for deletion.

Depending on the criteria you select in the dialog box, iMovie will delete more or less of your footage. After you have click the "Reject and Review" button, it marks all the deletable footage as rejected and changes your view of the Event so that you only see the rejected footage. Click "Move Rejected to Trash" and iMovie cuts out the rejected footage from the event and moves it into the trash in the Finder. This last part of the process works just like the process covered in the post:

How to delete a clip

If you want to undo the Reject marking that Space Saver applied, don't bother unmarking all the footage. Just hit Command-Z, and iMovie undoes what Space Saver did.

Have fun with all that free space!

Quick Tip: Slow down a clip with JES Deinterlacer

2007-11-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

This is a really nice tip for those needing slowmo effects in iMovie '08, but don't want to send their project to iMovie HD. (If you haven't noticed, I don't really ever post tips that say, "Do it in iMovie HD." Where is the fun in that?)

Anyway, Karsten Schluter, one of the most helpful and insightful regulars on Apple's iMovie '08 Discussion boards has posted a great walkthrough for creating a slowmo effect with a free application called JES Deinterlacer.

The link:
SlowMo with iMovie '08

All I would add to Karsten's instructions is that you can just save the slowmo clip in the correct Event folder and iMovie will automatically find it and create thumbnails for it the next time you launch iMovie.

And by the way, Karsten, if you read this: That demo clip is A W E S O M E. What a kick!

How to add chapter markers: an addendum

2007-11-02T15:00:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been awhile since I posted any more information about using GarageBand for DVD chapter markers. Since that time I have come across two very common problems that people have encountered in the process:

1. Large movies sent from GarageBand to iDVD lose their audio track.
2. DVD quality can be poor.

Here are two very useful pieces of information for those have been experiencing these problems.

1. Apparently, the audio dropping during the move from GarageBand to iDVD is a known issue. Sid shared in the comments on the original post that deselecting "Auto Normalize" in the Advanced pane of the Preferences.

I haven't experienced the problem, so I can't confirm that it works, but this is certainly worth a try.

2. There has been a lot of discussion about the best way to squeeze the highest quality DVDs from your audio. The problem is that iMovie requires you to render your movie before you can send it to iDVD, where it just gets rendered again into MPEG 2 format for DVD players.

I have it on good authority from a very knowledgeable expert at Apple that the best quality will come by exporting from iMovie using the Apple Intermediate Codec. You can access this as an export option by choosing "Export Using QuickTime" in the Share menu.

Once there, select "Movie to QuickTime Movie" in the Export dropdown menu. Then click "Options." You will see this window.

Click the "Settings" button to access and choose the Apple Intermediate Codec.

You will also want to export the right size of file. You can do this by clicking "Size" in the Options window. For people in the US, NTSC at 720 x 480 is a good size for widescreen content. If is is 4:3 content, choose NTSC 640 x 480.

Once you are done, export it to your Movies folder in your home folder. You can then add chapter markers in GarageBand, which you read about here:

How to add chapter markers

Or you can send the file straight to iDVD. Just open an iDVD project and drop in your movie file.

Book for Sale

2007-10-31T22:26:00.000-06:00

Well, now that Amazon has iMovie 08 & iDVD: The Missing Manualin stock, I am letting the cat out of the bag. It comes in the form of a story.

Two months ago David Pogue unleashed his initial review of iMovie '08 on his blog. As I noted in this post, he wasn't happy. Trying to be a responsible netizen, I sent him a link to my blog. Knowing that the guy receives a googolplex of emails every day, I assumed that my email had the same likelihood of contacting alien life as actually being read by said Pogue.

I was joyfully mistaken. David Pogue not only replied, but graciously invited me to take part in the writing of his new book on iMovie. He was wonderful to work with and taking part in the book was a lot of fun.

Needless to say, I highly recommend the book. This blog was never really intended to be a primer for iMovie, but more to sort of fill in the blanks. David's book takes you from zero to sixty in seconds flat and is written in the same approachable, humorous style that makes him so successful. Having read it all myself, I think that everyone can get something useful from it. There's a convenient link on the right-hand column of the blog, or you can just click on this link:

iMovie 08 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Reader Tip: Use Shift-Arrow to set start and end points

2007-10-26T07:15:00.000-06:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love the keyboard shortcuts in iMovie '08. Michael Avory sent me this tip on using Shift and the arrow keys to mark start and end points of a clip while you are editing. I love the trick because if I am being slow and methodical about selecting a particular range of footage, I don't have to keep holding my mouse button down as I drag. It also works great because it means you can select footage during playback, no dragging required.

Anyway, take a moment to try out Michael's great tip:

Here is a tip for setting IN/OUT points that might interest you:

Make sure clip is not selected (no yellow frame). Play/drag to IN-
point (pause), hit shift + left arrow (IN is marked) Play/drag to OUT-
point (pause), shift + left arrow and the clip is selected from IN to
OUT. To select a portion of clip up to a specific point: play/drag to
point, hit shift+left arrow, place cursor at start of clip, shift +
left arrow and the clip is selected up to your first chosen point.
These are very useful for editing clips to the beat of a music track
etc.

What Every iMovie HD User Should Know About iMovie '08

2007-10-23T15:45:00.000-06:00

Perhaps this post is long overdue. In reality, you can find a lot of this information elsewhere in this blog, but I think that having it all contained in one, easy-to-link post will help smooth the transition for those taking their first dive into iMovie '08.

So here it is. If you used iMovie HD, here are the things you should know about iMovie '08 before you get started.

1. Don't expect iMovie '08 to behave like previous versions of iMovie.
This is the most important thing I will say to you. It bears repeating:

Don't expect iMovie '08 to behave like previous versions of iMovie.

If you switched from Windows to the Mac (or from OS 9 to OS X, for that matter) you had to relearn a few things. Trying to get the OS X to act like Windows only resulted in frustration. Buttons were in different places. Functions did different things. The same concept applies here. iMovie '08 may share a name with iMovie HD, but they are two completely different pieces of software. Use iMovie '08 the way it was meant to be used.

If you were a heavy iMovie HD user, the editing process may confuse you at first. For example, you won't be able to use a traditional timeline view. Be patient. You will learn it quickly and probably, as in my case, learn to love it.

Relevant posts from this blog:
How to customize your interface
How to use the advanced editing tools

2. iMovie '08 uses nondestructive reference editing.
What in the world does that mean? Well, in old versions of iMovie, if you trimmed a clip, the actual video file in the Finder was trimmed. Once you were beyond the limited power of the Undo command, these changes were irreversible. If you regretted an edit, you'd have to reimport video from your camera, assuming you still had it.

iMovie '08 doesn't work this way. A movie project in this version acts something like a big list of instructions. All the source video is stored safely in your Event library and iMovie '08 just makes a list of what pieces should appear where. It doesn't actually move or edit your source footage. (iMovie will edit or move your source footage if you are rejecting it for deletion or reorganizing your events.) Everything you see when you preview a project is just a representation of "the list" that iMovie is creating and showing you on the fly. As far as I can tell, this is one of the reasons older Macs don't run iMovie '08, because creating a preview on the fly is demanding on the computer.

The benefits of this ability:
* Your source footage is always safe and sound.
* Using footage in two different projects does not require two space-hogging copies of the same clips.
* iMovie doesn't render anything during the edit process. Transitions, titles, and color effects are instantaneously available.

Some warnings:
* Don't mess around with Event footage in the Finder, unless you know what you are doing. If you delete event footage, all projects using that footage will be broken.
* You don't save projects. This means that if you want different versions of an individual project, you need to make copies of the project in the Project list.

Relevant posts from this blog:
How to change the date DV event footage
How to delete a clip
How to save your movie project

3. iMovie '08 is missing some features found in iMovie HD, but not all the features others have said are missing.
Missing features are the biggest complaint that most people have about iMovie '08. Unfortunately, many people (myself included) had a knee-jerk reaction to iMovie and made some unfounded accusations. In fact, you might see some people refer to this version of iMovie as "iMovie Lite". (An ironic name considering some of the incredibly advanced stuff that iMovie '08 does that no previous version of iMovie can do.) I'd like to dispel some misconceptions before you start using iMovie '08.

Here is a list of key missing features.

* Video effects (including fast/slow/reverse) other than color adjustments
* Audio effects
* Themes
* Export to camera
* Chapter creation for iDVD
* "Rubber band" audio editing
* Some styles for transitions and titles

Here is a list of features still in iMovie.

* Frame-precise editing
* Precise audio level editing and fading
* Multiple audio tracks
* Extracting audio from a clip
* Adding black space to a project
* Sending movies to iDVD, iTunes, iWeb, or GarageBand
* Capturing a still image from a video clip
* Selecting multiple clips

Of course, there is an impressive list of things you can do in iMovie '08 that you cannot do in iMovie HD, but people inclined to complain don't spend a lot of time on these. Here are some of the really nice things you can do in iMovie '08.

* Crop or rotate video clips
* Footage organization tools, like favorites and keywords
* More than two audio tracks
* Advanced, flexible typography in titles
* Using images with transparency
* Adaptable editing interface
* Full screen scrubbing

Relevant posts from this blog:
Missing in Action: Export to Camera
How to add black space
How to add chapter markers
How to send movies to the Media Browser
How to fade audio within a clip
How to extract audio from a clip
How to make a clip black and white
How to capture a still image from a clip
Reader Tip: Create Video Masks
Quick Tip: Moving, lenghtening, and spanning titles
Quick Tip: Full Screen Scrubbing

3a. You can edit audio with basically the same precision, it's just done differently.
The very common complaint leveled against iMovie '08 is that you can't edit audio as well. This isn't a fair accusation. The rubber-band tool is gone, but you can still have audio dip at just the right point to just the right level. Just a few observations about this:

First, you can't edit audio within a clip, which means audio changes always apply to an entire clip. But, you can easily split clips. This is important to getting particular parts to dip or swell in the right places. Splitting clips doesn't effect the end product.

Secondly, as of the 7.1 update, you can get audio to fade in and out with custom settings you determine. This means a fade can last half a second or up to two seconds.

Just remember that, in general, editing audio revolves around the video clips. You don't need to dip an audio track itself, instead you just tell the video clip to dip all the other audio around it.

Relevant posts from this blog
How to fade audio within a clip

4. Keyboard shortcuts in iMovie '08 are awesome.
iMovie is still crazy-easy to use with just your mouse, but if you want more power you can get it. In fact, be prepared to enter an editing world where you feel like one of those pros who has a keyboard with different colored keys just for video editing. The keyboard shortcuts in iMovie are multitudinous.

More importantly, Apple recognized that you don't need the normal keys on your keyboard for actual typing. This means a lot of the keyboard shortcuts don't require the annoyance of modifier keys, like Shift or Option. (There are still plenty of those kind of keyboard shortcuts, but mostly because Apple is getting full use out of the keyboard.)

Why use keyboard shortcuts? They are fast and pretty easy to learn. You will feel like a pro when you edit, and you won't have to spend a lot of time learning before you start using the keyboard like crazy.

To view a list of keyboard shortcuts, go to the iMovie Help menu, open the help application, and search for "Keyboard Shortcuts."

Relevant posts from this blog:
Quick Tip: Play Around
Quick Tip: Cut or Add Frames with a Keystroke

5. Thumbnails can take a long time to make, so plan ahead
When you first add some footage to iMovie and discover that it may take a long, long time to make thumbnails for your footage, you might wonder if you did something wrong. You didn't. Thumbnails are just an integral part to the skimming ability of iMovie. If you don't have the time to create thumbnails for a whole set of footage, do what you can to import just the video clips you will need for your project.

Relevant posts from this blog:
How to Recreate Bad Thumbnails

6. iMovie '08 is still a work in progress.
If you decide to use iMovie '08, consider yourself an early adopter. And what that means, Early Adopter, is that you might encounter bugs or other problems. These are a tradeoff to all of the rather amazing features iMovie '08 provides to you.

It feels to me something like using OS 10.0. When OS X came out, I insisted on using it because it was the future. With each new version, I saw the different bugs melt away into what is now the best operating system ever made.

As an early adopter, you will also have a chance to contribute to the future versions of iMovie. Apple reads all of the feedback people submit through the established channels. If you submit thoughtful, insightful feedback, don't be surprised if Apple makes an improvement as a result.

Relevant posts from this blog:
Feed on Back

The right expecations
I hope these comments are useful. Having the right expectations from the start really does make a huge difference in the way you will use iMovie '08.

How to recreate bad thumbnails

2007-10-23T15:25:00.001-06:00

Sometimes iMovie '08 chokes on a bit of footage and, as a result, coughs up some bad thumbnails as a result. The iMovie interface doesn't provide an easy way to recreate these, so we have to delete the old thumbnail files to induce iMovie to make new ones. (iMovie automatically knows if thumbnail files for a clip are missing, and will create the missing ones every time it launches.)

This all means we have to go folder diving in the Finder to fix the problem. There are two potential locations for bad thumbnails.

Normal iMovie Events
In iMovie, right-click (or hold the Control key and click) on the bad thumbnail clip in the Event browser.

Select "Reveal in Finder" and it will take you to the folder containing all of that event's footage, as well as a folder called "iMovie Thumbnails." Go into the thumbnails folder.

Once you are there, you can move any of these Quicktime files to the trash, and iMovie will just recreate them. Be sure that you are deleting clips in the "iMovie Thumbnails" folder. If you delete clips from the event folder itself, you will lose your original footage. To be sure you have deleted the right stuff, just move the thumbnail files to a different location. iMovie will still make new files, and you can delete the files you moved after the new ones have been created.

Relaunching iMovie will cause it to create new thumbnails.

iPhoto Videos
iMovie conveniently looks into your iPhoto library and includes video clips from iPhoto in your Event Library. This is great if you want to include any footage you caught with your digital still camera. If iMovie created some bad thumbnails for clips in iPhoto, we have to take a different approach.

In the Finder, go to your Pictures folder in your home folder. Right-click on your iPhoto library and select "Show Package Contents." A new window opens with all of the stuff found in your iPhoto library.

Open the folder called "Data" then open the folder for the year the video clips were taken. Next open the folder for the date the video clips were taken.

In this folder you will find a Quicktime movie and a JPEG file for each video clip associated with this date. Move to the trash just the Quicktime movies for each clip that had bad thumbnails. (Don't delete the JPEG file, or iPhoto will have trouble displaying the video clip in its own window.) Relaunch iMovie and it should recreate the thumbnails.

Just a few other things. If you need access to the original files in the iPhoto library, they are stored using the same folder names (year and date), but inside the "Originals" folder instead of the "Data" folder. Also, you can quickly go straight to the original video clips from iMovie by right-clicking the clips and selecting "Reveal in Finder."

Quick Tip: Play Around

2007-10-15T17:01:00.001-06:00

There are dozens of reasons you might need to view just a snippet of footage over and over. Editing to music, previewing a transition, or checking the entry of a title can all involve tweaking to get things just right. A way to quickly view just that part of your footage would be golden.

To more quickly view how you are doing, use the "Play Around" feature that is new in version 7.1. Position your playhead right over the point you want to quickly preview, then hit either the "[" key or the "]" key. The left bracket key will preview the two seconds of footage surrounding your playhead, one second before and one second after. The right bracket key will preview six seconds, three on either side.

So make a tweak, hit a bracket key, make another tweak, then hit a bracket key. This is a nice touch.

Quick Tip: Capture a still frame

2007-10-10T21:54:00.000-06:00

In a past post we put QuickTime to work in order to resurrect the creation of still images from video clips. It was a semi-complicated process, but a very powerful and flexible one at that. But you may not want powerful. You just want easy. Here's easy, thanks to the 7.1 update. (You did update iMovie to version 7.1, right?)

Skim your playhead to any point in a video clip that you want to capture as a still image. Right-click and choose "Add Still Frame to Project" from the menu that pops up. iMovie automatically creates a still frame and ads it to the end of your project. (If you have a one-button mouse, hold down the Control key and click to get the same menu.)

If the image was created from an Event library clip, iMovie will auto-apply the Ken Burns effect. If it was created from a clip sitting in a project, iMovie will leave the Ken Burns effect out so your image sits statically in the frame. (This is pretty intelligent behavior. If I am creating a still from a project, I probably want it to be a freeze-frame of the clip I am working on, not a "Ken Burnsed" image.)

Now here's the really handy part. If you want access to the image for other purposes, like adding to iPhoto, right-click on the image that iMovie created in your project and choose "Reveal in Finder."

There it is, sitting in a folder that is hidden inside the project package file. You'll only get JPEGs, but these should work fine for most people. If you want more options for still image exports, go read my original post on this subject.

Quick Tip: Use the Fine Tuning Controls

2007-10-09T10:04:00.000-06:00

This is a new feature in iMovie that needs its own post. If you find that you want to add just a few frames to the beginning or end of your clip, Fine Tuning makes this quite a bit easier. In the bottom corners of a clip, there is a button with a line that has two arrows on either side. You can see the buttons I am talking about in the bottom corners of this clip.

When you click on either button, an orange border wraps around that end of the clip. This border comes with a draggable handle.

Go ahead and drag the handle. As you do, you will see iMovie counting the frames that you add or remove from your movie, together with the Viewer window showing the footage you are adding. Pretty dang handy.

One other tip: if you hold down Command-Option as you mouse around in your project, you will see the Fine Tuning option pop up without the need to click the little buttons.

Quick Tip: Cut or Add Frames with a Keystroke

2007-10-02T18:30:00.000-06:00

This is a new feature in iMovie '08, and its a gem. You can quickly cut or add frames to a clip in your project by doing the following:

1. Hover your mouse cursor over the clip you want to edit. (If you hover near the beginning of your clip, you will be cutting or adding to the beginning. If you hover near the end of your clip, you will be editing the end.)

2. Use the right or left arrow keys while holding down the Option key.

If you are adding frames, you will see it working as the clip grows beyond the yellow selection outline. If you are cutting frames, the yellow outline will still cover the entire clip.

Back in Action: Selecting Multiple Clips

2007-10-02T18:22:00.000-06:00

It's back. The 7.1 update released last week has enabled selecting multiple video clips. Multiple selections aren't available for every feature, but they work for the most import ones. A selection of multiple clips will allow you to:

Paste adjustments
Drag and Drop
Mark favorite, rejected, and keywords
Drag from event browser to event list

It's great to see Apple responding to user needs.

How to use QuickTime video effects

2007-10-02T16:15:00.000-06:00

If iMovie is a Boy Scout, QuickTime is the Swiss Army knife. Where iMovie's powers fall short, the built-in QuickTime features take up the slack. I have used it for a few different workarounds on this blog. Well, it's time to add one to the list.

The loss of most video effects in iMovie '08 is especially baffling because so many of them are built in to OS X. Core Video was supposed to be one of the coolest parts of Tiger (OS 10.4). Why not include these effects if they are already there?

Well, what iMovie ditched, QuickTime lovingly stuck in its back pocket. Here is how to use QuickTime video effects.

Preface
Because of their current location in iMovie, you cannot apply video effects as easily before. In fact, you can only apply them to a clip you are exporting as a Quicktime movie, a step usually taken at the end of an editing project. Let’s look at how QuickTime video effects work, then discuss a creative way to use filtered clips in an active project.

About QuickTime video filters
Quicktime, Apple’s video workhorse, lies at the heart of iMovie. It is generally the case that if Quicktime can do it, then iMovie can do it. For example, if Quicktime can play a particular video format, then iMovie can probably not only play it, but also edit it.

Quicktime is also capable of applying a variety of filters to video. These filters can do simple tasks like sharpen and blur, or they can do very complicated things like alpha gain. The filters most people would be interested in are:

• Blur will soften your footage;
• Edge detect creates outlines of the subjects in your footage;
• Emboss makes your footage look like it was carved into a sheet of metal;
• Sharpen crisps up blurry footage (as much as is possible anyway);
• Color tint will make your footage turn black and white, sepia tone, cobalt, or like it was run through an x-ray machine;
• Film noise takes modern footage and makes it look like it sat in your attic for 20 years; and
• Lens flare adds a cool looking light flare that progresses across your footage.

A Disclaimer
I assume no responsibility for your movie looking amateurish and unprofessional due to a failure on your part to apply video effects judiciously. With great power comes great responsibility. Don't emboss your whole movie just because you think it looks cool. If an effect isn't helping you tell your story, do us all a favor and leave it out.

Applying a video filter
As mentioned above, these filters can only be applied when you are ready to export a project as a Quicktime movie. This means that whatever video filter you apply will be applied to your entire movie. You can also only apply a single video filter to footage, for each time you export it anyway. That said, let’s walk through the steps for doing it:

1. Export your movie as a Quicktime movie.
This is done by selecting Share-->Export using Quicktime.

2. Select “Movie to Quicktime Movie” and click the Options button.
This setting from the Export pulldown menu is the ultimate custom Quicktime setting. All the other options in that list are basically just (very) convenient shortcuts to what you can do with this setting.

3. Click the Filters button.
This is where you’ll find the video filters discussed earlier.

4. Select the video filter you want to apply, then click OK.
Each filter has its own settings. You can just accept the default settings, or you can adjust them to get the desired effect. The filters window provides a tiny preview window in the bottom right to help you see the results.

5. Adjust any other video or audio settings, then click OK.
Remember when I called the other export options convenient? I wasn’t kidding. If you find yourself lost with all the confusing options in this process, you’re not alone. There are some very advanced tools in here.

6. Select the name and save location for your movie, and click Save.
iMovie will go through the process of exporting your movie, including the video filter you applied. After it has finished, you can find your filtered movie in the place you told iMovie to save it.

Using Video Filters in an Active Project
What if you want to apply one of these filters to a single clip within a movie? You can’t do that by exporting the movie itself, because iMovie will apply the filter to all of your movie’s footage. The trick is to create a separate project containing just the clip you want to filter. Export this project using the steps listed above. Add the exported footage back into iMovie using the Import Movies option from the File menu. Once you’ve added the filtered footage into your Event library, just add it to the project that needed the filtered footage.

Note: When you are exporting clips to bring back into your project, you should probably export them in the format of your original footage. This can be tricky if you are unsure of what format to use, especially because this export method will overwhelm you with options. If you aren’t sure what format to use, find the original footage in your iMovie Events folder and open the footage in QuickTime player by double-clicking on the footage file. Press Command-I or select Show Movie Inspector from the Window menu. The window that pops up will tell you the video format you should use when you export the footage from iMovie.

There's a reason carpenters don't rely on Swiss Army knives.
If you find yourself underwhelmed by what you've just learned how to do, you aren't alone. The problem with Swiss Army knives, after all, is that they just barely get the job done, even when they have the right tool built in. QuickTime is great and all, but hopefully iMovie relearns some old (and new) tricks when it comes to video effects.

Reader Tip: Using iMovieHD to edit audio

2007-09-26T20:54:00.000-06:00

Although the newest iMovie audio features are great, some of you may still want access to the rubberband tool. Reader William Pytlik, like many, finds GarageBand cumbersome for simple audio edits. He passed on the following advice for using iMovieHD to edit audio instead of GarageBand:

To me the most significant issue with iMovie 08 is lack of manipulating multiple sound tracks. My solution is somewhat time consuming, but it does work.

I first create my video project in iMovie 08 and export it (under Share). This creates a .m4v file. I then import this file into iMovieHD -- drag and drop does not work here -- use File then Import... I really don't care about quality of the video since all I'm looking for is to be able to edit audio against a timeline.

I create the sound track using the iMovieHD capabilities and export the soundtrack ( not the video) using File, Export... Compress Movie for: Expert Settings, Share, Export: Sound to AIFF. The .aif file can be dragged and dropped (it works here) into the Project window. Obviously one should wait as long as possible to do this because changes to the video may require that the audio be changed as well.

iMovie '08 Software Update - v7.1

2007-09-26T15:05:00.000-06:00

Hallelujah! Apple has substantially updated iMovie. Here is a full list of improvements:

iMovie 7.1

There are quite a lot of improvements, including multiple clip selection, manual audio fades, and still frame creation. I will be covering the improvements over the next week here on Unlocking.

PS - You are best off updating through Software Update. If you need to use the standalone updater, be sure to upgrade all of your other iLife applications as well. There is also an iLife update that you need to run before updating iMovie.

How to change the date for DV event footage

2007-09-26T13:53:00.000-06:00

(Warning: If you use this tip, be sure not to use it on clips that have already been added to a project. This tip changes the names of clips, which will break projects that use them. Thanks to Mgarbowski for sharing this in the comments below.)

If you have old analog footage you want to import into iMovie, there are a lot of options for doing so. Most import methods work like MiniDV cameras, where you import the footage directly into iMovie. The problem is that analog footage imported this way doesn't come with timecodes that tell iMovie when the footage was filmed. As a result, iMovie assumes the date of the footage is the current date.

This makes for a confusing Event library. If you view your footage by date, the stuff you really filmed in 1994 actually shows up as being from 2007. iMovie doesn't provide an easy way to change this. But there is a way, and it doesn't require you to change creation dates in the Terminal, or other complicated procedures. It just involves changing some file names. Here is how you change the date of DV event footage.

The Basics
Although MiniDV footage has a timecode embedded in the file, iMovie uses filenames to organize footage by date. (This is because iMovie is creating new files when it imports DV footage, not copying existing files off of a camera. Other cameras' footage is sorted by the creation date of the files stored on the camera. I explain this more at the bottom of this post.) Presumably, when iMovie imports footage it looks for a timecode. If one exists, it names the imported DV clip with the timecode. If an embedded timecode doesn't exist--like with analog footage--it will use the current date to name the footage. Here is a list of some timecode-named clips

Here is where the footage exists in the Event library.

Because iMovie uses the names to evaluate the dates of the footage, this means that if you just change the names of footage to reflect the correct date, iMovie will change the date it uses to display the footage in the Event library.

Here is our list of clips again, but the dates were all changed to 1908.

Here is how they appear now in iMovie.

Everytime your change the names, iMovie will regenerate the thumbnails for the newly named footage. It doesn't delete the old thumbnail files, but you can delete the old ones yourself. They reside in the iMovie Thumbnails folder inside a given event folder. You can delete all of the thumbnails that use the old names you changed.

Other interesting behavior occurs if you have multiple dates in a single event. iMovie will group them into the year of the most recent footage. If I have footage from 1908 and 2006 in the same event, they will be listed under 2006.

Here is the renamed footage.

Here is how it appears in iMovie. Notice the date range listed under the clips.

If you split this event using the "Split Event Before Selected Clip option in the File menu--one event for the 1908 footage and one for the 2006 footage--iMovie will then display them under the proper years, respectively.

The Code
The timecode names are easy to interpret. Here is what a sample filename means:

clip-2006-07-15 19;19;56.dv

The "clip-" is just part of the naming convention, and doesn't effect the name.

The "2006" refers to the year.

The "07" refers to the month.

The "15" refers to the day.

The 19;19;56 refers to the hour, minute, and second of the footage's beginning.

To change the name, just select the file in the Finder and hit enter. The text of the name will be highlighted and ready for your to change to the date you see fit.

The Exception
This entire description works with DV footage, but I can't speak for other video formats as I don't have a wide range of cameras to play with. I do know that iMovie uses the file creation date for clips downloaded from still cameras. Replacing a name like "MVI_0186.AVI" with a timecode name like "clip-2006-07-15 19;19;56.AVI" doesn't change the date of the footage in the Event library. Still, footage like this may not need to have its date changed. I imagine that changing the creation date with some advanced tools would have the desired effect, but that is another topic for another day...

Reader Tip: Create Video Masks

2007-09-19T22:35:00.000-06:00

New feature time! We have How To's (the long ones) and Quick Tips (the short ones) but we need another category. See, I have a list of reader-contributed tips that deserve sharing. To make sure no one thinks I came up with these great tips, we are giving them their own category. I'll be posting more of these over the coming weeks and months.

The tip today comes from Karel Gillissen. He figured out that you can add images over top of video clips. Mix in some transparency, and you get masks!

Karel has taken his tip to a whole new level and posted videos of how the process works. To keep his .Mac account from getting kicked too hard, I have posted his walkthrough below. He shows how he creates the mask using Photoshop Elements, then how he adds it over top of a video clip. (Just drag and drop! I love it!) Check it out, because this is a very cool trick.

Karel then shows us that with video masks you can do all kinds of cool things. Duck hunt, anyone?

Quick Tip: Moving, lenghtening, and spanning titles

2007-09-18T16:18:00.001-06:00

Titles work really well in iMovie '08. Previous versions of iMovie had to render titles when you added them, taking a lot more time than the instant placement you get in '08. But there is more to iMovie '08 titles than just the speed.

Moving titles
First, you can place titles wherever you want in your movie with pinpoint accuracy. Once a title has been placed in your movie--represented by a blue flag running above your clip, you can drag that title to any point in the movie. This is even true of titles "over black". In iMovie HD, you'd have to split a clip at the point you wanted a title to enter, then add the title to the second half of the split clip.

Lengthening titles
Another really nice feature of '08 is the ability to lengthen or shorten a title quickly. Simply grab the end of a blue title flag by clicking on the end with your mouse and drag the title to lengthen or shorten it. In iMovie HD, you'd have to select the rendered title footage and readjust and rerender the title, guessing at the right length with each render. This new way is much faster and easier.

Spanning titles
By either moving a title or lengthening a title, you can get a title to stretch across multiple clips. In the case of lengthening, you'll notice that you can drag the end so it runs across as many clips as you like, with no rendering! (You just can't span a title across another title.) Very handy and much faster and more accurate than iMovie HD.

Quick Tip: Full Screen Scrubbing

2007-09-06T14:30:00.000-06:00

The full screen preview in iMovie '08 is excellent. Here are a few quick tips on drawing out all of its power.

You can enter full screen mode either by selecting the "Play Full Screen" from the View menu, or by clicking the full screen button below your project or event footage.

The button you want is the darkened rectangle with the arrow inside it. There are two of these, one under your project and the other under your Event Browser.

Once you are in full screen mode, you will immediately notice that if you move your mouse around, a clip navigation shows up across the bottom of the screen.
(Click to enlarge.)

This navigation bar will ignore your mouse movements until you click on it. Once you have clicked on it, dragging your mouse across the bar will scrub just like it does when in the normal iMovie window.

If you have scrubbed to a given point in full screen mode, and want to begin normal playback from that point, just hit the space bar. (Clicking a second time on the navigation bar does not disable the scrubbing ability.) Alternatively, you can move your mouse cursor straight up so it no longer runs across the clips in the navigation bar, then move your cursor over to click the play button.

One other really nice feature is being able to restrict full screen playback to the correct resolution of your footage. Because most of us are editing footage that is lower resolution than our computer displays, a full screen preview will make your footage look worse because it upscales it to fill the screen. If you want to see what your footage looks like in its natural dimensions, go into the iMovie preferences and select "Actual Size" from the drop-down menu selecting full screen playback size.

Now your footage will display at its actual quality.

The more I delve into iMovie '08, the more hidden gems I find. If you have found any hidden gems, please send them my way or share them in the comments.

Missing in Action: Selecting Multiple Clips

2007-09-05T14:14:00.000-06:00

This one is Back in Action. Ignore everything below and go here.

Time for another MIA. I actually get Google traffic on this issue, so I figured I'd do my civic duty and give those people a quick answer: You cannot select multiple clips in iMovie '08. You can select an entire clip and a subset of a clip, but multiple clips are out.

What do you do if you have a lot of individual clips to add to a project? Here's a handy way, the fastest way I know to add clips to a project.

1. Enable the advanced editing tools in the preferences. (I describe those tools in this post: How to use the advanced editing tools.)
2. Select the "Edit" tool in the middle toolbar. It looks like a page with a star in it.
3. Option-click all the clips you want to add to your project.

Like magic, all the clips you click will be added with each click. Be warned that this is really super fast. You might end up adding footage you don't want in your project, especially because it will add an entire clip, even if it's two hours long. (Heck, that's what Undo is for.) If you were in the habit in iMovie HD of Shift-clicking clips and dropping them all together into your project, this is just as fast. We'll see more of the Option key in an upcoming Quick Tip.

How to customize your interface

2007-09-04T19:54:00.000-06:00

Love it or hate it, the iMovie HD interface was always the same. The preview window was always large, often larger than necessary. The clips pane was always three clips wide, which meant for a lot of scrolling if you had too many clips. If you had a large project in your timeline, the only way to see it all was to shrink it to the point it was useless to try to make accurate edits to it.

The funny thing is, I thought I loved it. I always knew where I was and what I was doing. The reality is, I just didn't know things could be different, or, for that matter, better. When I first got into the iMovie '08 interface I felt like someone moved all the rooms around in my house. Just like how I can stumble into the bathroom in the middle of the night, I could move around in iMovie HD without putting much thought into it. In iMovie '08, I was stumbling into walls.

Then I started playing around, and that's when it hit me: I can put stuff just about wherever I want it. It's like moving the door to the bathroom right next to my bed (or even better, next to my three-year-old's bed) then putting it back when I am done. Talk about power. Here is how you customize your interface.

There are going to be a lot of full-size window captures for this one, so when you see an iMovie window, click on it to get the full view.

The default
This window is what most of you are now seeing in iMovie '08:

This really isn't a bad way to start. What you should notice if you are coming from iMovie HD is that your preview window is really small, much smaller than you are accustomed to. But think about it, did you really need to see your footage that closely? Probably not, especially because there was always the full screen preview. (It was like ordering food in America. "Did you want that extra large or super extra large?") When scrubbing through your rough footage, smaller is better because...

Now you can see more of your footage at once. Notice how the Event Browser takes up a full two thirds of the window. All the more room to see where you have been and where you am going. This isn't a big deal if you have twenty minutes of footage, but what if you have 300 minutes? It makes a lot more sense to have your rough footage get the lion's share of window real estate, for now at least. Sure the project window is small as a result, but it's big enough for me to drop footage into. At the start of making my movie, that is all I need it to do.

Trading Places
So what happens when my project is getting too big for comfort? Editing a large movie in something the size of a playing card only invites frustration. There are two ways to deal with this.

If I am the kind of person that always wanted timelines to run vertically--so I can feel like I am skydiving--I can just drag on any part of the middle toolbar not occupied by a button or slider and drag that bar downward. (I could also drag it upward if I wanted more room for my source footage.) Dragging the toolbar gives me this:

Probably not the improvement you were hoping for. Method number two of granting more real estate to your project will get the job done much better. On the middle toolbar, you will see a button with facing, curved arrows. Go ahead and give it a click.

Voila. Now all that space that was dedicated to your Event Browser appears to be not so dedicated. This is the kind of room you can really use to dig into your project with transitions, additional edits, and audio tracks.

This space becomes even more useful if you use the "Trim..." feature to re-edit clips within your project. All of this and a cool animation to boot. (Can't get enough of watching your project flushed to the bottom of the window? Hold down the Shift key while you click the button. Slo-mo!)

Now you see it...
There is even more room to capture, for either my project or my source footage. What's up with those lists, either my project list or my events list? If everything I want is in a single event, and the only place it's going is into a single project, then why keep those lists in view? Click the little star-page button below either your events list or your project list.

Ahhhhhhh. Now we can really stretch out.

Of course, the same buttons will bring your lists back.

When things are big that should be small*
So what if something is big and you want it smaller? What if something is small, and you want it bigger? Let's make it happen.

The preview window, or "viewer", can be resized two ways. You probably noticed that dragging the middle bar will resize it up or down. You can also select "Viewer" in the Window menu and choose between small, medium, and large. (You can also use the Command key with "5", "6", or "7" to the same effect.)

If your clip thumbnails are too small or too big, the slider in the middle toolbar will resize them to your liking.

You can have big thumbnails,

Or itty-bitty ones.

Tiny ones obviously help you see your whole project better. Big ones will help you find the particular point in your footage more easily. The size to which you set your clips will be reflected in the print-out if you decide to print them. ("Print?" Yes, you can print.)

Finally, if the fonts in your project or events lists are too small, you can make them bigger in the iMovie preferences.

(* You earned bonus points if you knew that this section's title comes from a Jamiroquai song.)

Set it, but don't forget it.
You may be a creature of habit, but don't be needlessly stuck in just one way to view your movies. iMovie '08 wants you to shift it, swap it, and twist it around to suit the task at hand. Put this flexibility to good use by being flexible yourself. In then end, it will probably save you time and sore eyes.

Missing in Action: Export to Camera

2007-09-04T10:52:00.001-06:00

I have come to realize that Unlocking needs a new feature: Missing in Action. People often come to the blog looking for a particular feature in iMovie '08 that they were used to using in iMovie HD. While I try to be very creative in finding workarounds for most features, there are a handful that are not at all possible in iMovie '08 (yet).

Today's MIA is exporting to camera. You cannot use iMovie '08 to export to a camera. I imagine this has a lot to do with the much broader camera support in iMovie '08 (a good thing!) as exporting to all of these different cameras may not even be supported across the board. Perhaps the techies-in-the-know can enlighten the rest of us in the comments.

As always, when you want a feature not currently available in iMovie '08, give Apple your feedback!

Quick Tip: Using Project Folders

2007-08-31T18:33:00.000-06:00

Having all of your projects at your fingertips is a great addition to iMovie. It's really just as good as having them all open at once, but without the hassle of having a bunch of windows open at once. But what do you do when your projects start to pile up?

Apple was a step ahead on this one. iMovie '08 provides folders to organize your projects. These are just like the album folders in iPhoto or the playlist folders in iTunes. You can find them up in the File menu.

You can rename a folder by double-clicking on it.

I expect to be using this feature for several reasons. It would be a nice way to organize a group of projects I plan to add to a single DVD. This is useful because the Media Browser in other iApps will show the same folder structure that you set up in iMovie. I fully expect to use this to archive old projects as well. Hats off to Apple. This is a nice touch.

Sony HDR-CX7

2007-08-29T19:23:00.000-06:00

Official Site
Sony

iMovie '08 Support
This camera is not yet officially supported by iMovie '08, but it appears to work without issues. (Note: Like with all AVCHD cameras, an Intel Mac is required.)

Video Format
AVCHD

Storage Media
This camera uses Media Stick PRO Duo cards.

Known Issues

One user is very pleased with this camera in iMovie '08.
One user experienced crashing and distorted thumbnails until disabling third-party Quicktime plugins, like Perian.

Know anything else about this camera? Have any questions? Please share in the comments below.

Macworld iMovie '08 Review

2007-08-29T10:41:00.000-06:00

Macworld today has a pretty even-handed review of iMovie '08. I learned some new things, such as how iMovie allows selective import from non-tape-based cameras.

There are also a couple of other tidbits of interest. The reviewer says that Apple "has been very pleased with their third-party iMovie developers in the past and is looking into ways to allow third party plug-ins while maintaining the speedy performance of iMovie ’08." That is pretty encouraging.

There is also a little insight into future plans for the application. "Apple is clear that this is a 1.0 release that it will build upon, so I would hope and expect some of these features to return in future releases." This is what I have suspected as well. A lot of people have been speculating that iMovie '08 will always be trimmed down in features in order to drive people to Final Cut Express. I won't go so far as to call this baseless blathering, but I do find it hard to believe. I have directly asked a few people at Apple about this and, although they are not necessarily in the know, they had a hard time believing it. The reviewer for Macworld seems to have a little more insider insight, so his view that more complex features will return is also encouraging.

Here is the link to the review.
Macworld Review: iMovie '08

Quick Tip: Printing

2007-08-27T20:29:00.000-06:00

I am starting a new feature tonight. I call it the Quick Tip. This is for useful iMovie tricks that don't fit or shouldn't be buried in a longer tutorial. Our first quick tip was pointed out by a kind reader. You can now print in iMovie!

"Print?" you say? "Why in the world would I need to print?" Well, I can think of a number of reasons. Thanks for asking!

For example, let's say you are working in a long project that doesn't all fit into your window. Alternatively, let's say you want to share a visual representation of your movie project, identifying particular transitions, clips, or titles for someone who isn't there in front of your screen with you. Finally, imagine having a plethora of events in your library and you are sorting through them to decide which to trim or delete. In all of these cases, you can print your events or projects to have as a handy reference.

Just a few observations about printing behavior.

1. The print command will print whatever project or event(s) you have selected. (Select your events in the left-hand navigator to make sure you are getting the right ones. You can select multiple events.)
2. The print command respects the level of zoom you are using to view your clips. (The 1/2 second zoom means a lot of frames on your printed page while the 30 second zoom means a lot fewer frames on your page.)
3. (Updated. See Below) Whatever you select to print will be fit to one page, unless you really do have a lot. If you have too much for one page, it will spill to another page but all of your clips will appear very small.
4. If you are printing events, the printed page will have a divider identifying the each event.

I would advise using the print preview button as you are playing around with this. It will give you an accurate view of your output before you commit it to ink and paper. Have fun printing your movies!

Update: I always forget to check the application-specific print settings that many apps place in the print dialog. Someone pointed out that iMovie allows you to choose up to 8 pages for your output and also let's you turn on and off the metadata like favorite markups. Very cool.

How to capture a still image from a clip

2007-08-25T18:29:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: The 7.1 software update created a very easy way to accomplish this. Although this post is still useful for those wanting a more powerful, flexible method of creating stills, I have written another post on the simpler method.

A lot of recently upset Mac users are keeping two lists. List A is a list of all the iMovie HD features missing from iMovie '08. List B has all the iMovie HD features that are found in iMovie '08. Their complaint is that list B is too short and list A is too long. In all fairness, there ought to be a list C, containing all the features of '08 not found in previous versions of iMovie, but I can't blame them for neglecting list C. I was among the first who started out only keeping two lists.

So it's time for everyone to pull out list A. Scan down the list to where it says that iMovie '08 can't capture a still image from a clip. Cross that out. Now pull out list B. At the bottom of your list, write down, "iMovie '08 can capture a still image from a clip". Here is how you capture a still image from a clip.

Feature Diving
A little nagging thought kept telling me that there would be a relatively easy way to capture a still image in iMovie '08. I just felt that it had to be in there somewhere, somewhere I hadn't yet thought to look. So I went feature diving. It turned out it didn't take long to find, but I think I got lucky. After all, who thinks of Quicktime when thinking about still images?

Exporting to Quicktime offers more choices than I ever picture myself using. I have no idea, for example, what an AU or an FLC is. But exporting as an Image Sequence seemed promising. It's more than promising, it's perfect. For those who want to skip the rest of this post, you can just isolate the frame you want to capture in a new project, export it with Quicktime as an image sequence, using the image settings that you want, and find the image or images in the folder where you sent the export. For those wanting a sample walkthrough, read on.

The Setup
Before you export anything, you need to select the frame or frames you need images of and add them to their own movie project. For help selecting specific frames, go to this post on frame-precise editing.

How to make frame precise edits

I called my project "Image" because I plan on keeping this project around for any footage I plan on capturing into still images. Once I have selected the appropriate footage and added it to my project, I am ready to proceed.

Remember that any footage in here will get the full treatment, and there are up to 30 frames per second in your footage. If you add a full second of a clip to this project, you will have up to 30 still images to sort through. This may not be a bad thing, as I will discuss below, but just be aware of what you are going to get.

The Export
Go to the Share menu, and choose "Export using Quicktime...". In that window, choose the menu option, "Movie to Image Sequence."

Once you have this selected, you can choose among the preset export options:

Or you can click the "Options" button and choose your own image type, frame rate, and even compression settings specific to your image format. (The compression settings are found by clicking the next "Options" button.)

I chose to export mine with a custom setting of JPEG at highest quality. You will probably want to do the something similar, but if not, it's probably because you know a lot more about image formats than me.

Your export window won't look much different when you have changed your settings, but be sure to take a moment to choose the destination folder and a name. The name will be repeated with image numbers behind it.

Go ahead and click "Save" and head on over to your destination folder. There you will find one or more images with the image name you gave and a number.

If you have multiple images to review, it's really easy to do so by selecting all of them and opening them in Preview. (Preview is a photo and PDF viewing application in your Applications folder. Double clicking on them all will probably open them in Preview by default.) Here you can figure out which to delete, which to keep, and even which to add to iPhoto if so desired.

The most humorous part about all of this is that this export setting is available in iMovie HD. Who knew? I guess with such easy access to the menu option "Save Frame..." under the File menu, I never thought to look.

Using the image in iMovie
Most of you probably want to capture a still image in iMovie to actually use it in iMovie. Doing so is as easy as ever. Just like in iMovie HD, you can add the image to iPhoto and grab it from your Media Browser, or you can just drag it from the Finder and drop it into your project. Obviously the way you actually use it in your project is a whole other ball of wax, so I won't go into that here. Just remember that if you are using the image to "pause" your footage on a particular frame, and have the footage resume after the image, head over to the previously referenced post on frame-precise edits if you need more help.

Hooray for List B
I'm still convinced that list B will grow with time. Still, with High Definition cameras now becoming so common, it's nice to know that we don't have to wait for Apple to add back in this particular feature. In fact, I really like this way of doing things. It doesn't have the convenience of a single menu item like in iMovie HD, but it does give me a lot more control over what I am getting.

How to use the advanced editing tools

2007-08-24T21:30:00.000-06:00

So, there I was, just meandering through the iMovie '08 preferences settings when I saw it, almost glowing at the bottom of the window:

Eureka! Could it be that all of the complaints about iMovie '08 were just one big misunderstanding? Would checking this box enable a timeline, the rubber band, and all the other missing editing features in one fell swoop? The whole world seemed to take a deep breath as I checked the box...

They weren't there...

Bummer.

In spite of that major letdown, I have come to appreciate the value of these tools. It's true that calling them advanced is something like calling alphabetical filing "advanced" in comparison with shoving everything in a drawer. Still, I like using them and they make editing easier when you have a lot of footage. Here is how to use the advanced editing tools.

I can only blame myself for getting so excited about that little checkbox. It clearly says (in tiny little type) that it enables the "dual mode toolbar, keyword controls, and direct trimming." And that's it. Oh well. We'll just go through each of these tools and show you how they work.

Preface: The Single Mode Toolbar
Before you ever enable the advanced editing tools, there is a lot the toolbar can already do. This is what the non-advanced toolbar looks like:

I will ignore the four buttons on the right for the purposes of this post. The four buttons on the left have different effects on the footage in your Event Browser.

The first button, the edit button, is essentially an alternative to dragging clips into your project. If you select a range of footage in your Event Browser, clicking this button will add the footage to the end of your project. You can get the same result by pressing "E" on your keyboard. Once footage is in your project, the corresponding footage in the Event Browser will show an orange line running along the bottom.

The second button, the solid star, marks the selected footage in your Event Browser as a favorite. Fav-ed footage will have a green line running across the top. Hitting the "F" key will do the same as clicking the Favorite button. This editing tool is especially useful if you have a lot of footage to sort through, footage you may not want to use but don't want to delete entirely.

The fourth button (yes, I know I skipped the third one) with the big X is the Reject button. This is not for marking footage involving your deadbeat brother-in-law. Instead, this button is for getting rid of footage you never intend to use. (So maybe it is for your deadbeat brother-in-law.) The letter "R" or Delete key on your keyboard are alternatives to this button. Rejected footage has a red line running along the top. Rather than getting into the Reject button's further uses, I am going to refer you to another How To:

How to delete a video clip

The third button with the empty star (see, I knew what I was doing) is the Unmark button. If you have marked Event Browser footage as a Reject or a Favorite, this button clears that away. The letter "U" will also unmark footage.

These tools beat out anything that iMovie HD had to offer in terms of sorting footage. But their power isn't limited to making little lines across your footage. In the bottom left corner of the iMovie window, you will notice this:

That pull-down menu allows you to restrict the footage you see in your Event Browser. You can see only favorite footage. You can see favorite and unmarked footage, which is another way of saying that you don't want to see rejected footage. Or you can see only the rejected footage. You can also select these different options in the View menu. There is no way to see only footage that is in your project, presumably because you can already see that footage in your project, but I hope Apple adds this view in the future because I can think of situations where it would be useful, like making changes to all of a project's source footage for use in another project.

Ready for the final cool trick? If you have one long clip with only some of it marked, you can automatically select just the marked footage by clicking on the color bar in the clip. This makes selecting marked footage a piece of cake and was a nice touch by Apple.

All of your footage markings will stay in place no matter what project you are editing, with the obvious exception that footage marked with the orange line will differ from project to project. I think it would be very cool to have project-specific favorites, but I can see how this behavior could be confusing to a user who thinks favorite footage is always a favorite. Despite that minor complaint, all of these marking tools work pretty well. And so they should, when you consider that quick sorting and editing is the central design theme behind iMovie '08.

Part I: The Dual Mode Toolbar
So all of those marking tools are available without ever enabling the Advanced Editing Tools in the preferences. Enabling them turns the marking tools up a notch with "dual mode." The advanced editing toolbar looks like this:

You'll notice two additional buttons. The key button is for keywords and will be addressed below. The arrow button is just for enabling the normal selection behavior you have already become accustomed to. This button can also be enabled with the Escape key on your keyboard.

So what is dual mode? It is basically a way to mark and edit footage by simply dragging the mouse. Think of it as a set of footage highlighters. The orange highlighter will add the footage to your project. The green one will mark it as a favorite. The red one will reject it. You also have your highlight eraser to remove red and green marks. To test this out, make sure no footage is selected in the Event Browser and click the "Favorite" button. You still scrub like normal with your mouse, but if you hold down the mouse button as you scrub, the footage you drag over will be highlighted green. Let go of the mouse button and the green line remains along the top of that footage. The "Edit", "Unmark", and "Reject" buttons all work the same way. In fact, if you really want to maximize the editing speed of iMovie '08, using the "Edit" tool in dual mode is scary-fast. Welcome to the new iMovie.

As mentioned above, you can always return to the normal clip selection behavior by hitting the escape key or clicking the arrow button. The other marking tools will work like normal as long as the arrow button is selected. Dual mode does take a little practice, especially if you are still getting accustomed to scrubbing in iMovie '08. With a little practice, however, the dual mode toolbar is worth keeping enabled all the time.

Part II: Keywording
For you grammar buffs, "keywording" is a word now. After all, Apple has added "keywording controls" to iMovie '08. This takes your marking tools to a whole new level. If you click the key button in the advanced mode toolbar, you will get this floating window:

This is where you can mark up footage with specific words or phrases of your choosing. For example, say you wanted to identify all footage that contains an annoyingly exuberant soccer mom, you could add "soccer mom" to your list of keywords and mark all footage with her in it. It's footage you don't necessarily want to reject, but it certainly isn't your favorite. This is where keywords help.

Enough of the concept. How do these actually work? You'll notice in the aforementioned window that there is an "Auto-apply" tab and an "Inspector" tab. The "Auto-apply" tab works just like our highlighter versions of the other markup tools. You select the keywords you want to apply and click-drag to highlight the appropriate footage. If you want to add keywords to your list, you enter them into the text field at the bottom of the "Keywords" window.

The "Inspector" tab only works if you have already selected a stretch of footage. If you have some footage selected, it will show you what keywords have been applied to that footage and allow you to add more keywords by checking boxes or typing in the text field at the bottom of the "Keywords" window. Whether you added keywords with the "Auto-apply" tab or the "Inspector" tab, all footage with keywords applied will have a blue bar running across the top, but just under where the green favorites and red reject bars are found. This clip has a green, a blue, and an orange bar showing it is a favorite, has a keyword, and is used in my project.

Also notice that while you cannot mark clips in your project as favorites or rejects, you can mark project clips with keywords. Doing this will also mark the corresponding footage in the event browser with the same keywords. (Remember, iMovie '08 works by referencing source footage instead of making copies of it. This is why a keyword applied in your project will also be applied to the source footage.)

You can easily see which keywords have been applied to which clips by enabling "Playhead Info" in the View menu.

Now when you scrub, it will not only show the footage timestamp, but it will also show any keywords that have been applied to that footage.

Now for the really useful part. Once you have applied keywords to various lengths of footage, you can tell iMovie to only show footage that has been marked with a specific keyword. You do this by clicking on the new magnifying glass button that showed up in the bottom left corner of your iMovie window when you enabled the advanced editing tools.

This button opens a pane in your Event Browser that lists all your keywords and allows you to show all clips with matching keywords, to not show all clips with matching keywords, or to show or not show clips with any single one of the matching keywords. This is powerful stuff for a video editor.

Two more cool little tricks before we finish discussing keywords. In the "Keywords" floating window, you may have noticed numbers next to each keyword. You can tag clips more quickly by just typing the numbers that correspond with the proper keyword. Even cooler, if you press the number Zero on your keyboard, it will clear all keywords from the selected footage. The other cool trick is that you can organize your keywords in whatever order you want by dragging the words inside the "Keywords" floating window. Notice that the number shortcuts will always be in order, no matter how you reorder your keywords.

Part III: Direct Trimming
We have discussed trimming before in the post on making frame-precise edits.

How to make frame-precise edits

This is something you can throw in your little bag of tricks for future editing purposes. Once the advanced editing tools have been enabled, you will find a new set of tiny icons showing up on project clips as you scrub through them. They are little arrows with a "+" next to them and show up in the lower corners of a clip.

By default, clicking on these plus-arrows will add one second of source footage to the beginning or end of a clip, depending on which arrow you click. If one second is too much or too little, you can change the time each click will add by adjusting the slider in the iMovie preferences titled "Extend buttons add:"

You can set the arrows to add anywhere from a half second to five seconds per click, all in half second increments.

Apple Programmers: If you are reading this, I have a feature request. Because frame-precise edits are still a bit of a challenge in this interface, these buttons would be incredibly useful if they could be set to add or subtract just a frame at a time. I don't think this is too much to ask. I'll be really good!

Conclusion: When "advanced" really means "organized"
So the advanced editing tools are more about efficient and convenient organization than anything else. I am okay with that, in spite of having my hopes of iMovie HD features pulverized like my kids sidewalk chalk under a car tire. They are useful tools, so I can forgive them their little teasings. Let's just hope that the truly advanced tools in iMovie HD show up in the near future.

How to delete a clip

2007-08-24T21:00:00.000-06:00

I have seen some comment that the new iMovie is space-efficient. The idea is that your drive only needs to contain one copy of some footage, and all projects built on that footage will not needlessly multiply it like iMovie HD does. Others have commented that iMovie '08 will take a lot of hard drive space because it acts like an iPhoto for your footage, storing and cataloging it all so you don't have to leave it on external devices like DV tapes. Footage, just like photos, adds up quickly, just as quickly filling up your hard drive.

So which is it? Are we getting a fit Jack Sprat or his more corpulent wife? The truth is that it is up to you. There is certainly no requirement to leave footage in the Event Browser. It is up to you, however, to get rid of it. So if you select footage in your Event Browser and hit delete, is it deleted? Almost, but not yet. Here is how to delete a clip.

Deleting a clip in a project
I am just getting this out of the way before we move on to real, space-saving deletion. As mentioned before, iMovie edits by referencing source video, not copying it. This means if you delete a clip in your movie project, you have only deleted a reference to the clip. The clip is still on your hard drive, taking up space. You need to delete the clip in the Event Browser to finally be rid of it.

Deleting a clip in the Event Browser
The Delete key in iMovie '08 actually works in a very similar way to the Delete key in iMovie HD. Previously, if you deleted a clip, it went to your trash. There it lived indefinitely, that is until you emptied the trash, at which point it was gone forever.

iMovie '08 doesn't move clips to the trash. It just rejects them. A "rejected" clip is actually just a clip marked up by the Reject tool. This behavior is a lot like moving clips to the trash. You can read more about the reject tool in my post about the Advanced Editing tools.

How to use the advanced editing tools

The Delete key just marks a selected clip as a reject, but doesn't actually delete it. To accomplish that, you need to take an excusive look at all your rejects. You can do this by viewing Rejected clips only in the View menu, or in the pull-down menu in the lower left corner of your window.

Once you have selected to view only rejected clips, you have the opportunity to remove them from the Event Browser and move them to the trash in the Finder. (Yes, this is now a three-step deletion process. If you accidentally delete something from this point on, you better have a dang good excuse.) The iMovie window is pretty obvious about how this is done. (Click to enlarge)

What happens behind the scenes here is pretty cool. Once you move your rejected clips to the trash, iMovie '08 will actually split the source video file in the Finder into separate clips and and toss the rejected clip file into the Finder trash. It also does this with the corresponding thumbnail footage that it generated when you imported the video. To finally be truly rid of the footage, you have to empty the trash in the Finder.

Once you delete the footage in iMovie, by which I mean the second delete when you send it to the Finder trash, the surrounding footage that survived becomes two different clips, and that forevermore. You can always reimport the footage, but you can't resurrect it from the Finder trash and rejoin it to its surrounding footage.

I'll take the lean
So whether your iMovie is a Jack Sprat or a Mrs. Sprat depends on your diligence in deleting video from the Event Browser. I personally find that I have always recorded something that I will never bother watching again, so I expect I will be keeping my iMovie on a regular diet.

iMovie '08 Software Update

2007-08-22T16:19:00.001-06:00

Apple has posted an update for iMovie '08 (a.k.a. iMovie 7). This brings it to version 7.0.1. The update "addresses issues associated with publishing to .Mac Web Gallery. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues." If it doesn't show up in your Software Update, you can download the standalone updater here:

iMovie 7.0.1 update

If anyone notices and significant differences (or minor differences, for that matter), take a moment in the comments and tell us about it.

Without Rhyme or Reason, but with RSS!

2007-08-20T18:21:00.000-06:00

I don't really have a posting schedule, since this is something I do as time permits and as the mood hits me just right. Keeping that in mind, don't forget that magical Blogger elves can get you updates through RSS. Reasonably assuming that you are all Mac users, you can subscribe to my site by clicking the RSS icon in the right part of your browser's address bar. (I guess this further assumes that all of you use Safari or Firefox. I am oblivious to the features of Opera, Camino, etc.) You can bookmark the resulting feed address or put it in your favorite RSS reader. When you get bored of me, or when Apple ninjas kidnap me for revealing too much, just delete the bookmark!

How to save your movie project

2007-08-20T17:57:00.000-06:00

This is a quickie, but a goodie. I have noticed in some places a little confusion about how to save your project in iMovie '08. This is how you save your project:

1. Make all the edits you need to make.
2. There is no step 2.

From what I can tell, the genius in iMovie '08 is that it doesn't actually make permanent changes to your source video as you cut, color, and do whatever else you do to it. (My wife often wishes salons worked this way.) In fact, it appears that a project is just a list of changes that iMovie shows you while you are editing, referencing the necessary video as it goes along. Your edits are only permanent in the videos you export from iMovie, such as to YouTube or to the Media Browser. (Hence the warning you get if you make a change after already sending it to the Media Browser.) Even then, when iMovie exports it just renders a new video file that follows the instructions laid out by your project. Because all of your edits are nondestructive, the Apple engineers decided to do away with the mundanity of saving projects. I am also confident that this explains why older machines can't run iMovie '08. All this dynamism take a lot of horsepower!

The only caveat to this behavior is that your list of Undo's will be lost if you quit iMovie. Still, that is just a matter of convenience because you can always manually go back to what you had before. All in all, I really like this new editing method of iMovie '08.

How to make a clip black and white

2007-08-20T17:30:00.000-06:00

Somewhere out there, with the release of iMovie '08, an aspiring, 11 year-old, film noir director was thwarted from his true calling. With the untimely demise of video effects in iMovie '08, the classy and timeless "Black & White" effect found its early grave. Do not give up, young John Houston! You can find your voice by cranking up iMovie '08 and doing the following:

Reports of Black and White's death have been highly exaggerated
It isn't completely accurate when people complain that iMovie '08 ditched all video effects. Although the breadth of video effects tools in the new iMovie is slim, the depth of what exists is pretty impressive. All '08 video effects boil down to the color effects iMovie has to offer. The color correction tools are really nice, better than before.

If you select a clip in your project, you can make color changes by hitting the letter "V" on your keyboard or by clicking the "Adjust Video" button.

This will bring up the "Video Adjustments" window, which really is just about correcting the color in your video clips. (It really doesn't let you adjust anything else.)

Rather than give a full rundown of the new color correction tools, I am just going to talk about the saturation and contrast tools. (Be sure to come back for a look at the excellent white balance tool.) Before I do, I just want to point out the histogram at the top of the "Video Adjustments" window. This shows you how many pixels of Red, Green, or Blue you will find in a given level of brightness. (Forget what you learned in Kindergarten about mixing colors. When it comes to actual light and not paint, Red, Green, and Blue mixed together will make White! In a histogram, as colors show up in the same amounts at a given brightness level, you will get more blacks, grays, or whites.) While you play with the different color correction tools, the changes in the histogram will give you a sense of what is going on.

Color is overrated
To make a clip look Black & White, we need to first make changes to the saturation settings for the clip. Saturation is just a measure of how vibrant the colors are. Oversaturated colors make a clip look almost fluorescent. Undersaturated colors look....yes, Black and White! Drag the saturation slider all the way to the left and watch all the color wash out. In the histogram, all of the colors will merge together such that for any level of brightness you are getting all colors equally (i.e. black and white). Although your histogram will look different, your "Video Adjustments" window should look like this:

Now for some emotion
You might think we are done, but we are not. Most of you wanting a Black and White effect are looking for something with a more meaningful look to it. At this point, the black and white clip you have probably looks too modern or smooth. You don't want black and white, you want Black and White.

Enter the contrast slider. Contrast is a measure of the difference between the lights and darks in your image. Old films used to have higher contrast levels, primarily because the film used was less capable of capturing fine differences of light. You can replicate that by shifting the contrast slider to the right. This makes darks darker and brights brighter, giving your clip a more classic Black and White look. For most videos, I like increasing the contrast by about 50%. If you do the same, your "Video Adjustments" window should now look like this:

Copy and Paste, Now in Color!
Of course, if you want to change the color in multiple clips, rather than adjusting the sliders in every case, you can simply select the Black and White clip, and hit Command-C or select "Copy" from the Edit menu. Now select the each of the other clips needing the same touch and for each one press Option-Command-I, or select "Video" inside the "Paste Adjustments" option in the Edit menu. (This is where I again shake my fist violently toward Cupertino because you can't select multiple clips at once. Please shake your fist with me.) Of course, you can always apply the effect to your source video in the Event Browser first. Now all the footage you drag from it into your project will already have the color effect applied to it.

Ultimate Undo
Before parting, I just want to point out the "Revert to Original" button. If you take a look at the clip in your project, there will be a tiny icon looking like a sun.

This icon represents the fact that color corrections have been applied to the clip. Because iMovie '08 applies color effects dynamically, the original video is still intact. If you click the "Revert to Original" button in the "Video Adjustments" window, you will get your original footage back, unspoiled. In fact, you can make a color change, quit iMovie '08, and still get your clip back when you launch iMovie later. Pretty handy feature.

Oscar speeches are too long, unless it's you they are thanking
Now you have a film worthy of the Maltese Falcon! I hope when our little aspiring director is accepting his Oscar, he remembers my little blog for setting him aright. He'll have time to mention me, won't he?

How to extract audio from a clip

2007-08-18T16:18:00.000-06:00

There is a reason that documentaries will cut away from an interview and show photos or other footage while the interviewee's voice continues over top the alternative footage. (The alternative footage in this case is often called the B-roll.) This is a great film-making technique. Who wants to stare at the same person sitting still in a chair for five minutes, even if they are saying something really important? You see the same thing happening in newscasts. Most sports guys are not exactly handsome, and their ridiculously colored sport coats are even worse. It's much better that we can watch the footage of the high school football game while the sports guy dazzles us with his voice instead of his jacket.

iMovie HD was up to this task. Exporting the audio from a video track was as easy as selecting a menu item. A common misconception is that iMovie '08 removed this feature. It's still there, but like everything else in the new iMovie, it's different, and in this case even a little better.

Although this wasn't on my list for the week, there has been a lot of demand for a How To on this feature. Here is how you extract audio from a video clip.

A rose by any other name
Everyone who was used to extracting audio from a clip probably went to the iMovie '08 help documentation and searched for the term, "extract audio." It didn't turn up. And so, many reasonably assumed that it can no longer be done. But it can. Apple just decided not to call it "extracting audio". There are some who say they found a description of the feature in the help documentation, but I have had no such luck. (An incredibly helpful Apple Support Specialist hooked me up with an explanation of how it works.) Whatever Apple calls it now, I am still calling it "extract audio".

Double the fun
This feature requires a little bit of planning. That's because you can't easily extract the audio from a clip that you've already added to your project. Instead, you can only extract it from a clip in the Event Browser. The easiest way to manage this is to plan on dragging a clip into your project twice. Here is a sample walk-through of the process.

First I select a range of video in my Event Browser and drag it to my project. In my project window, it will look something like this:

The range I selected in the Event Browser should still have the yellow (but now appearing gray) line around it. Taking care not to lose that selection by clicking somewhere else, I drag the exact same clip to the project, but this time I am holding down the Command (Apple) and Shift keys. I drop it at the beginning of the corresponding clip in the project window, making sure to hold those two keys until after I let go of the mouse. Now, just the audio from the clip has been added, represented by a little green flag below the video clip.

There's always a catch
I could stop there and all of you would know everything about extracting audio. But, there are some oddities about working with extracted audio, or any audio for that matter, that I feel compelled to point out.

Some of you may find yourselves wanting to come back from your B-roll footage to the original video, just like you might do in a newscast by coming back to your newscaster. This means that you need to make sure that whatever middle footage you remove from your A-roll perfectly matches the length of the B-roll footage you insert. If you don't do this, your audio will be out of sync when you come back to your A-roll.

The easiest way to do this would be to split your audio so you can match the pieces of audio and video together. Unfortunately, you can't split an audio track in iMovie '08, only shorten and lengthen it. You could deal with this alternatively by only dragging from the Event Browser the audio that corresponds with the B-roll. It would look something like this: Drag in the A-roll footage; add your B-roll footage drop in the corresponding extracted audio; drag in more A-roll footage. This will work fine as long as you pay attention to select the proper ranges in the clips in your Event Browser. If you are having trouble selecting the clips with accuracy, go read the post I made about frame-precise edits.

How to make frame-precise edits

But what if you want insert B-roll footage while working inside the project window? Let me show you something to watch out for. If I select the range I want to delete, it looks like this:

Notice that I have a total of 15 seconds of video and 15 seconds of corresponding audio. I can also tell how much I have selected if I look at the bottom of my project:

This is telling me that I will need to come up with 2.2 seconds of B-roll to replace the clip I am deleting. When I actually hit the delete key, the selected video is deleted, and I am left with this:

Here is where an oddity (well, actually a bug) pops up. I should have about 13 seconds of video and 13 seconds of audio. The audio track--the little green flag--actually says I have 15 seconds of audio, even though the track is finishing at the same time as my 13 seconds of video. Maybe the 15 seconds will show up when I drop in the right amount of B-roll footage?

No! The audio clip really was only 13 seconds! It got shortened by a new "feature" that automatically cuts all audio to end with the last video clip. Adding enough footage after the fact doesn't restore the lost audio. I can fix this problem by just dragging out the end of my audio clip, but I can avoid it all together by taking another approach.

More Planning Ahead
Before I delete any of the A-roll footage, this time I will add in the B-roll footage I want at the end of the project.

This is actually a wise practice anyway, because usually if you go to a B-roll, there is something of a specific length that you want to show, so why not begin with adding it to your project? Notice that the extracted audio ends before my B-roll clip starts. (This B-roll is actually just a photo I added.)

Carrying on, I select a range of the A-roll for deletion that is the same length as my B-roll footage. I go ahead and delete it, and you will notice that the B-roll footage at the end preserved the length of my extracted audio.

I move my B-roll footage to the middle where my A-roll was deleted, and I get this:

The full 15 seconds of extracted audio was preserved. All that remains to to mute the audio on the A-roll video, so that you don't have two tracks playing the same audio. Just select the clip you want muted and open the Audio Adjustments window. The button looks like this:

And the window looks like this:

Reduce the volume for that clip to zero, just like I did in this window. Leaving this window open, select the other A-roll clips that need muting and do the same thing. Your final project window should look something like this:

Notice how my A-roll clips have a muted speaker icon on them. (That icon on my B-roll footage is actually telling me that it is a picture, not video. Pictures don't have audio, hence no speaker icon.)

Let's be precise about it
You may have now noticed a hitch in my description of the process. Even if you replace 2.2 seconds of A-roll with 2.2 seconds of B-roll, your audio sync could still be off by a tiny bit. This is because with video, there are anywhere from 2.5 to 3 frames of video (depending on your format) per tenth of a second. Even if you measured out 2.2 seconds of B-roll, you could still be 1 to 2 frames out of sync. How can you repair this accurately?

Again, an incredibly helpful person at Apple helped me out with this one. If you have a clip selected, choose "Trim..." from the Edit menu.

This shows the original source footage in the project window and gives you the opportunity to basically reselect the video you added to your project.

For the really cool trick, hover your mouse over the edge you want to extend or shorten and. while holding down the Shift key, use your left or right arrow key to bump the selection left or right by one frame. If you were just barely off on your sync before, one or two key strokes should be sufficient.

The same trim trick works for the extracted audio. If you want to make adjustments to that, select "Trim..." from the Edit menu again. You will see the source video in your project view again, but it will appear as a waveform. Reselect the range you need and click done. You should now have a well synced A to B to A sequence, with A-roll audio running throughout.

The best laid plans
So planning really is key to using extracted audio efficiently. In some ways I like the new way better, but this has more to do with the way iMovie edits by reference rather than making changes to the actual clips. In the old days, if you deleted your extracted audio, you had to make sure you were quick to undo your mistakes. That clip was all you had, absent reimporting the video you were using. This new way is much more forgiving. However, this forgiving nature is necessary, considering the clumsiness of the tools you have to use to edit audio. All in all, you can get the same results as before, so we can be grateful this functionality didn't really get the axe.

Pogue Hates iMovie '08

2007-08-16T23:15:00.000-06:00

Knowing how much fun David Pogue of the New York Times has with those video reviews he does, this comes as no surprise. I am just glad to see that he didn't sugarcoat it.

Apple Takes a Step Back With iMovie ’08

(Free registration required to read it, and all that.)

Just how bad is it?

2007-08-16T22:18:00.000-06:00

Curiosity has gotten the best of me, so I made a petiton:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/imovie08

As I have commiserated and combated with others over this iMovie '08 brouhaha, I can't help asking myself,

"Just how bad is the iMovie '08 problem?"

This begs the question of how we measure the new iMovie. I thought we could compare it to iMovie HD, or maybe weigh great new features against needed missing ones. Then it occurred to me:

"iMovie '08 is only as good as people find it."

After all, this software was made for people. If people find it great, then it's great. If people find it worthless, then it's worthless. Unlike healthy eating and going to the dentist, the value of this thing really comes down to how much people like it.

Because online forums are too unreliable, I got all civic-minded and started an online petition. (Yes, I know this is only marginally better.) Although what I wrote in the petition was quite sincere, I mostly want to know just how many people really think iMovie '08 is a problem. Apple gets to read their user feedback, so I know Apple knows how bad it is. I think we should know too.

How to fade audio within a clip

2007-08-16T17:20:00.000-06:00

We've all had it happen, or something like it. In my case, it was an Ultimate Frisbee highlight video I was editing with music and everything. For a number of clips I wanted the music to dominate up until a score, at which point I wanted the hooting and hollering to win out. The handy rubber band in iMovieHD always obliged. Not so in iMovie "the Rebirth". In your case there may have been the occasional car vrooming by or an unwelcome bout of flatulence by Uncle Ralph. Either way, just because the rubber band ran off doesn't mean your hopes did too.

Okay, being completely honest you can't fade audio, or "duck" audio, within a clip, but you can accomplish the same effect. Another caveat is that this How To does not cover all audio editing issues you will face. This is just about audio levels in general and you may come across issues with audio levels that this post does not address.

While I strongly suspect that the handy little rubber band in iMovies of yesteryear will make a comeback, here is how to get (very) close to the same results in the current incarnation of iMovie '08.

Video Killed the Radio Star
Editing audio levels in iMovie '08 is very "video-centric." In iMovieHD, editing audio always involved going to the actual audio track and making changes. If you wanted a track to be quieter than another track, you reduced the volume on that track. With iMovie '08, you will have a much easier time by generally focusing on making audio changes to the video track. Put your song in place. Put your sound effects in place. Once they are in place, focus your audio level editing on the video tracks. This might seem counter-intuitive to you like it did to me, but it helps me focus on how the new iMovie works.

How do I make the song quieter than the video?
First it's important to understand how audio ducking works in iMovie '08. In the interest of simplicity, Apple automated the audio ducking process. Instead of having to manually fade an audio track in a sound or video clip, iMovie will subordinate one track to the other depending on the audio settings for a given clip. This is pretty reasonable, as long as you like the actual levels iMovie gives to the quieter track.

To auto-duck other audio tracks, select the clip you want to dominate and either hit the letter "A" or select the "Adjust Audio" button.

That will bring up this floating window:

Notice that I have already checked the box titled, "Reduce volume of other tracks." You, too, will need to check that box. Once checked, all other audio tracks that run during that video clip will fade to become quieter and then, when the clip is finished, will fade back up to full volume.

To this you may say, "Wow! That's great. No more fiddling around with the sound levels. All is as it should be." I suspect a lot of you are saying, "Boo! Bad iMovie! Who's in charge here? I am the director of this movie, not some algorithm!"

Well, if you are really picky about your audio levels, editing the audio of the sound track itself looks to be a much messier operation if you want to make the change for only the portion of the clip. For a song, from what I can tell it would involve actually importing the song three times and trimming each of the three copies of the song to the particular fade points, reducing the volume of the middle copy, and lining all three songs up in the "Arrange Music Tracks" window. Even then, I don't think the audio would fade, but just drop off then jump back up. The auto-ducking option suddenly makes me feel a lot less picky.

Of course, if you want to fade an entire song, you can select that song, open the "Audio Adjustments" window I mentioned earlier, and just reduce the volume on the volume slider.

What if I want to duck more than one clip?
You can prioritize the audio on as many clips as you like. To do this, you could use the old fashioned way and, while you have the audio adjustment window open, click on the each of the other video clips and check the same "Reduce volume of other tracks" button. Or, you could use the fancy-new-super-duper-mega-cool way and select the first clip you prioritized, press "Command-C" to copy the settings of that clip, and then select each of the other clips and press "Option-Command-U" to paste the audio adjustment to those clips. (The "audio paste" ability can also be accessed in the Edit menu under "Paste Adjustments".) Now that you have done that, you can feel totally ridiculous because the fancy-new-super-super-mega-cool way took the same amount of time and effort. Curse this new iMovie and its inability to select multiple clips at once!

(An Aside: Selecting video clips for adjusting audio has a slightly confusing UI-thing going on. Consider the following:

If I select a clip and open the "Audio Adjustments" window, I will get this. This looks normal.

If I then immediately click on another clip to edit its audio, I get this. This is confusing. For which clip am I editing the audio? The one on the right with the fainter yellow border.

If I had originally selected only part of a clip to edit its audio and then open the "Audio Adjustments" window, I get this. This is a little weird, but it at least tells me that I am editing audio for the entire clip.

This is behavior I don't expect to continue into future versions of iMovie because it will probably change as iMovie's audio editing abilities are improved.)

How do I make the video quieter than the song?
You might think that all you need to do is select the entire music track and choose the "Reduce volume of other tracks" checkbox. It doesn't work. That option is greyed out for music tracks. Lame.

Again, focus on the video clips, not the audio tracks. In this case, you want to select the video clip you want to be quieter than the music and, upon opening the "Audio Adjustment" window, reduce the volume on that clip by moving the volume slider to the desired amount. iMovie knows to fade the clip, so don't worry about a sudden volume change when your movie gets to that point.

If you want to do the same to multiple clips, you might want to use the "audio paste" feature I described above. It's not much of a time-saver, but will help you be more consistent. If instead you decided to drag the volume slider for each clip, it opens the opportunity to get different levels between clips.

Quick Tip: If you plan ahead, you can save your self a little monotony in changing the audio levels for a lot of clips. Before you begin adding video clips to your project, select the source video you are using in the Event Browser and make the audio adjustments you need. All of the clips you drag into your project from the source video will land in your project with the same audio adjustments.

How do I make these changes within a clip?
You can't. iMovie can only make audio changes to entire clips. This doesn't mean you can no longer get the same result. The trick is to create a new clip for the range of video you need to adjust. Odds are you want to make sure your audio adjustments cover a very specific range of audio. If you haven't already seen it, I covered how to make frame-precise edits in another post. Go read that if you need help making accurate video edits.

How to make frame-precise edits

The easiest way to make a new clip for a range of video is to use the "Split Clip" ability from the Edit menu.

This will take the range of video you selected and make three clips: the video before your selected range, the selected range itself, and the video after your selected range. If you make a mistake in splitting, just select the middle clip and choose "Join Clip" from the Edit menu.

Once you have made a new clip from the range of video you need to fade up or down, just select the new clip, open the "Audio Adjustments" window, and do what you need to do.

May the rubber band bounce back
Looking over this How To, many people can complain that the rubber band was more elegant, intuitive, and accurate. They're right. For example, you can't extend an audio fade for over a second or two. Nor can you easily adjust the audio levels of multiple tracks all in the same window. For these and many other reasons, I really think that the rubber band will make a comeback. Until then, I hope this How To helps.

Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2

2007-08-16T13:45:00.000-06:00

Official Site
Sanyo

iMovie '08 Support
This camera is officially supported by iMovie '08.

Video Format
MPEG 4

Storage Media
This camera uses SDHC cards.

Known Issues

One user reports crashing when iMovie recognizes the camera for import.

Know anything else about this camera? Have any questions? Please share in the comments below.

New Header

2007-08-16T12:48:00.000-06:00

So my brother told me my old header was ugly. It was. I put up a less ugly one.

How to send a movie to iDVD

2007-08-14T16:06:00.000-06:00

I don't have an AppleTV. I have a DVD player. My in-laws don't have an AppleTV. They, too, have a DVD player. Steve Jobs has an AppleTV. This post is not for him. Here's how you send a movie to iDVD.

First things first
"Send to iDVD" is gone. It left no forwarding address. Last I heard, it ran off with GarageBand. Before it left, however, it trained the Media Browser to take its place. Before you can send a movie to iDVD, you need to send it to the Media Browser. I have already covered the "MB", so head on over there if you haven't yet read that post.

How to send movies to the Media Browser

NOTE: If you want to add chapter markers to your movie before you send it to iDVD, you will need to send your movie through GarageBand instead. That, too, has already been covered.

How to add chapter markers

Send your movie to the Media Browser and make sure to select the highest quality setting available.

Media Browser: Check. Now what?
Now that you have your movie in the media browser, feel free to quit iMovie. You are done with it. Launch iDVD and create the new DVD project or open the one you already made for burning this particular movie.

Within iDVD, there is a new and (slightly) improved Media Browser for getting at your iLife. Get there by clicking the "Media" button in the bottom right corner of your window.

Select the "Movies" button on the top right and open the project you created under the "iMovie" menu option. You will see all the different sizes that you sent to the media browser, ready and waiting.

At this point comes the easiest part of the whole process. Drag the largest size you sent to the media browser and drop it into your iDVD project. That's it. No, really. That's it. Don't believe me? Go to the Project menu and select "Project Info..."

You will probably still see your movie being encoded for DVD. Depending on the size you dropped into the iDVD window, it will probably be called "large.m4v".

Make any of the other changes to your DVD menus and so on. Then burn, baby, burn!

I'm concerned about quality
The quality of this process concerns me, too. What is happening here is your movie is being encoded once by iMovie to get it into the Media Browser and then again by iDVD to get it in the proper format for a DVD. Each step involves a "lossy" encoding, so a little data is lost at each step along the way. However, as long as the video you dragged from the Media Browser into iDVD was better than 480p quality, you'll probably be okay. You can check this by looking under "Dimensions" in the Media Browser and looking at the number after the "x".

I will have to look into the quality issues another day, but if you notice any differences in quality or notice that there are none, please take a moment to tell us about it in the comments.

Everyone burn an extra copy and send it to Steve. Something tells me he still has a DVD player.

How to make frame-precise edits

2007-08-14T16:01:00.000-06:00

For those of us who used to drag the timeline zoom slider so far in iMovieHD that you could see electrons orbit in your video clips, cutting video in iMovie '08 feels something like making an incision with a cannon ball. Making precision edits in iMovie '08 requires a little understanding of video formats and a much better understanding of the new UI. Want to trade in your cannon ball for a scalpel? Here's how.

A little info about video
Most of the video you will work with in iMovie '08 is probably in a format called NTSC and contains the equivalent of 29.97 frames per second. If it doesn't have 29.97 frames per second, then it probably will have less. PAL, for europeans, has 25 frames per second. Videos from your still camera might have as few as 15 frames per second. The reason I bring up framerates is that, as I understand it, the vast, vast majority of editing situations are satisfied as long as you can select each individual frame. There is nothing in between frames to edit, really, so cutting video with precision is a matter of cutting it at the right frame.

Enter the slider
The Project Slider

The Event Browser Slider

And this brings us to the new iMovie zoom slider. The slider actually shows up in two places: first, in your project window; and second, in your event browser. This is an improvement over iMovieHD because the only way to zoom in on video there was to add it to your timeline first. The Event Browser slider allows you to zoom and precisely edit a clip before you drag it to your project.

This new slider feels very different because the old zoom slider moved fluidly. That is, you could zoom in exactly as far as you wanted to. (At least enough to see only about 1.5 seconds of video in the timeline, depending on the size of your iMovie window.) The new slider has preset stops: 1/2 second, 1 sec, 2 secs, 5 secs, 10 secs, 30 secs, and "All". These stops refer to the amount of video that will be represented by a thumbnail. (And this is why iMovie '08 makes thumbnails of all of your video. It basically creates a really small version of a clip and uses that to represent your clip in the application window.) You'll notice that as you drag the slider around, you get more or fewer thumbnails. This is because you are telling iMovie how much video you want inside each thumbnail.

You can see this in action in the following shots:

1/2 Second

5 Seconds

All

Notice how the Five Seconds shot and the All shot have the same number of thumbnails. This is because none of my clips are longer than five seconds. So no matter the zoom setting, individual clips will not be put together by the zoom slider. (Why the thumbnails look different between the two is beyond me.)

Yeah, yeah. How do I edit?
Taking what we know about the slider and what we know about framerates, all this means is that the most precise editing can be done when you select the 1/2 Second view on the slider. If your footage has thirty frames per second, you can put your understanding to the test. Set the zoom slider to 1/2 Second. Then, without clicking, slowly drag your mouse across a clip. (This is called scrubbing.) You will notice that the playhead (the red line) will jump as you slowly scrub. Each jump represents a frame. Within one thumbnail at the 1/2 second setting, you should be able to count about 15 jumps. If you set the slider to 1 second, you would be able to count about 30 jumps, or 25 in PAL-land. (Hehe! "PAL-land is such a friendly place!")

The way you select video by dragging will work the same way. You can see this by clicking on a point in a clip and holding down your mouse button as you drag.

Dragging to select: Point A

Dragging to select: Point B

Point A and Point B are separated by a "jump" in the movement of the mouse, or one frame. If you zoom in to 1/2 second per thumbnail and you pay close attention as you drag, your edits can be just as precise as was possible in any previous version of iMovie.

Remember me? I'm the one who asked how I actually edit.
Once you have selected a range of video, what you do next depends on where you are. If you are adding video from the Event Browser to your project, just drag the selected clip and drop it in. If you are editing within your project, you can trim a clip down to the part you selected. Press Command-B or select "Trim to Selection" from the Edit menu.

You can split a clip, by selecting "Split Clip" from the Edit menu.

Spliting a slip will actually split a clip into three clips. One that comes before the range you selected, one made up of what you selected, and one coming after the range you selected. NOTE: You can no longer split a clip at the playhead, like in older versions of iMovie.

Another very interesting feature is the "Trim..." option in the edit menu. (This is replaced by the "Trim Music..." option that appears if you have a music track selected.) This will show the original video source in the project window and allow you to basically reselect the range you imported from the source clip. I consider this a very handy feature. You can bring it up by pressing Command-R or by selecting "Trim Clip..." in the Edit menu.

What about editing where an audio track comes in?
Editing audio is a whole other bag of chips. In some cases, editing audio works very similarly. What I call "sound bytes," which show up in your project as little green or purple flags sticking out under the video clips, exhibit the same frame-by-frame jumping as you drag your mouse to move or trim them. Not so if you are editing sound in the Trim Music window. In that window as you drag your mouse it is no longer jumping like before. This is because music is not broken into frames like video. Paying close attention to the preview window, you will see that the video is still jumping frame by frame, even though your mouse isn't. Back in the normal project view, if you are dragging a background music track to pin it to a particular point in the video, the dragging (for a reason I cannot discern) becomes much less precise, jumping many frames at a time. This one especially bothers me because sometimes you want a downbeat in the music to coincide with a specific frame in video. Hopefully, as you drag the music track you will be lucky enough to land on the correct frame. Perhaps someone can add a little insight in the comments below. Also, there will be more audio editing posts on the way.

I hope this has been useful. Although video selection and editing is pretty different than in older versions of iMovie, it is no less precise. So grab that scalpel and get cutting!

Coming Attractions

2007-08-13T07:42:00.000-06:00

This is just a quick post to let you know what I am working on. These topics will be covered here over the course of the week:

These how-tos will be linked to this post once they are completed, so go ahead and bookmark this post if you like.

Something missing? Please let me know via email or in the comments if you would like to see a particular topic covered.

How to send movies to the Media Browser

2007-08-11T14:46:00.000-06:00

iLife '06 had the impressive and easy ability to send projects back and forth between the different iApps, so easy in fact it was like playing ping-pong with your project. Adding a custom score? Pop. Send to GarageBand. Dropping it into your blog? Pow. Send to iWeb. Burning it to a DVD?... Sigh. You get the idea.

Among all of the new concepts in iMovie '08, the new Media Browser is one of the most pivotal. iMovie now not only listens to, but talks to other iLife applications through the Media Browser. (For brevity and to sound like an expert, I will be referring to it as the "MB" from now on.) This post covers how the MB works and how to get a movie there.

The Grand Central Station for iLife
The MB operates a lot like its older version. It is used to share media between iLife apps without having to browse through folders to find files. The new MB is much like the old one, with the difference that there is a new iMovie source listed. More importantly, you must export from iMovie to get a movie listed here. Not a big deal, but good to know.

Adding a movie to the Media Browser
Getting a movie into the MB is quite easy. There are only a few things to understand. First, in iMovie go to the Share menu and select "Media Browser..."

Selecting it will bring up this window (Click for larger view):

You will notice that this movie has four different size options available. This is because my source material here is 720p HD. (Pretty high quality.) If your source material is of a lower quality, some of the size options will not be made available. This is because iMovie will not export at a size or resolution greater than your source material. Also notice that the window indicates for which devices a given size is appropriate. One glaring omission here is DVD quality. So you know what size works, standard DVDs can be authored up to 480p quality. Don't worry about this too much, however, since iDVD will scale the video so it fits. Unless hard drive space is too tight, just make sure to always choose the highest quality.

Export may take a long time
Exporting to the MB may take a lot of time, depending on the speed of your computer, the length of the movie, and the quality of the source material and of the export settings. If it doesn't take a long time, it might take a long time. On my older iMac G5, a 16 second movie of 720p video took about five minutes to export to all qualities. That is pretty slow, but my computer is on the slow side too.

Using the MB in other iLife apps
Once you have exported your movie to the MB, you will be able to find it in the MB of iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand. Your list will look something like this:

Notice that your Event Library is also available. This means unedited footage is already in the MB. No export required. Also notice that once you select a movie in the list, all of the available sizes will be listed below it.

As mentioned above, you generally want to select the highest quality version to work with for iDVD. For iWeb, you may want a lower size version depending on how big of a file you want to put on your site. (Note: Publishing to iWeb and publishing to your .Mac web gallery are different things. The .Mac Web Gallery will upload all available sizes and let the viewer choose his or her desired quality.)

Ch-ch-ch-changes
Now that your movie is in the MB, what happens if you make a change to it? Like an ever vigilant guardian of the MB, iMovie will swoop in at the first change to your movie and give you this:

If you decide to make a change anyway, you will need to re-export your movie to the MB. As long as you don't make changes to your movie, the Share menu will also keep track of it. If you have already sent a movie to the MB, the option to do it again is greyed out. Instead of that, the option to remove it becomes available.

I hope this helps you understand the MB, iMovie, and iLife better. As usual, if you have any comments or questions, please fire away in the comments below.

How to add chapter markers

2007-08-11T14:19:00.001-06:00

***There is an update to this post that you can read here:***

How to add chapter markers: an addendum

We all heard Steve say it. "There are some people who still want to make DVDs." Classic. Sometimes I wonder if Steve concurrently lives 5 years in the future through some sort of dimension-straddling thing. It would sure explain a lot.

His statement speaks volumes about why chapter markers are no longer a feature of iMovie. Not living five years in the future and still wanting to make chapter markers? Here's how.

In various discussion forums, people have pointed out that you can still add chapter markers in GarageBand. This does still work and the process will be covered in detail here, mostly because the majority of us never really needed it before.

First, the previous option to send an iMovie to GarageBand has changed quite a bit. There is no longer an option to send a movie straight to GarageBand. Instead, you need to send it to the Media Browser. That is a process covered in this post: How to send movies to the media browser. You will need to send your movie to the media browser before going to GarageBand, and can read about doing it on that post.

Warning! Once you send a movie to the media browser, you will no longer be able to quickly switch back to iMovie to make a quick edit. If you make a change, you will have to re-export your movie. Before you plan on doing chapter markers in GarageBand, you are better off finishing your movie first.

On to GarageBand
Once you have sent a movie to the Media Browser, you will be leaving iMovie for good, so go ahead and close it if you'd like. Launch GarageBand, and when it prompts you for what kind of project to create, create a new podcast episode. (If you have already worked in GarageBand before, it might open an old project when it launches. Just close that project and this window will appear.)

You will need to create a dedicated GarageBand project, which means you will need to name and save it somewhere before you can start working on it. This also means you will want to save this file at least until you have your DVD exactly as you like it. Luckily, there is no export process to move the movie from GarageBand to iDVD. You can jump back to GarageBand, adjust your chapter markers, and send it out to iDVD without waiting minutes for the movie to be re-encoded.

I'm in GarageBand. Now what?
Now that you are in GarageBand, you are ready to add the movie track to your timeline window and get to work. The Media Browser may not be showing right now. You can bring it up by clicking this button:

You can also get to the Media Browser by selecting "Show Media Browser" in the Control menu.

Once you are in it, select the Movies button, then open the iMovie part of your list. Your window will look something like this:

Selecting an iMovie project will show you a list of all the various qualities available for that project.

Because we are sending this to iDVD, choose the highest quality version of your movie. Drag it and drop it into your timeline right into the podcast track. Once you do, you will get this message:

Of course, you aren't doing a podcast, so changing the track to a movie track is no big deal. You will notice that a new audio track has appeared below the movie track. Don't get your hopes up that you can do some detailed audio editing. This track combines all of the audio into one. So unless you get excited by being able to mute all the sound, music, and anything else you added, this track will not do what you wanted.

Now that you have your track in place, you can begin adding chapters. The simplest way to to get the playhead where you want to add a chapter marker and hit the letter "p" on your keyboard. If you would rather click a button, make sure that you have the movie track selected in the timeline, which will give you this at the bottom of the window:

You won't see the red star, but you will see the button. With each added chapter marker, you will notice a yellow diamond at that point in the timeline above. To add another chapter, move the playhead again, hit "p" or click the button again. Rinse and repeat.

Working with chapter markers
Once you have created some chapter markers, you can change their names and their timing. Changing the name is important because those names will import into iDVD. (If you don't like a name, you can still change it in iDVD, but I think setting chapter names is easier to do here.) Setting the timing here is important because you can't simply drag a chapter marker in the timeline to change it. You have to enter the new time in manually. Click on the timecode and set the time you want. You also change the names by clicking on them.

Of course, you can always delete a chapter marker and add a new one in its place. To delete a chapter, highlight the entire chapter marker by clicking on it and press the delete key on your keyboard.

One other important point to make about chapter markers is that if you don't set a custom chapter marker at the very beginning, iDVD will add one for you automatically and will name it "Start". You can prevent this by setting a chapter at the very beginning or you can just delete that chapter once you get into iDVD.

Sending it to iDVD
This is the easiest part of your journey. Go to the Share menu and select "Send to iDVD."

iDVD will launch, automatically create a new DVD project, and place your movie and set up a chapter selection menu just like you used to see when you sent a movie there from iMovieHD.

As is always the case, please share if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments.

Panasonic HDC-SD1

2007-08-11T12:09:00.000-06:00

Official Site
Panasonic
iMovie '08 Support
This camera is officially supported by iMovie '08.

Video Format
AVCHD

Storage Media
This camera uses SDHC cards.

Known Issues

Some users report issues with sound balance on imported video.
Can cause crashing when importing with Perian (a quicktime plugin) installed.

Know anything else about this camera? Have any questions? Please share in the comments below.

Camera Compatibility

2007-08-10T20:49:00.000-06:00

This post is going to be built over time, but here is where you can find out about how well a particular camera works with iMovie '08. Don't see a camera here? Email me or comment with your questions or experience about a camera so I can add it.

AVCHD Cameras:

Panasonic HDC-SD1
Sony HRD-CX7
(Note: All AVCHD cameras require an Intel Mac.)

HDV Cameras:

More coming

Mini DV Cameras:

All Mini DV cameras that work in previous iMovie versions should work in iMovie '08.

DVD Cameras

More coming

Still Cameras with video:

It appears that video from still cameras will work as long as they play in Quicktime. You can find these videos in the iPhoto section of the iMovie Event Browser.

Other Cameras:

Canon Powershot TX1 (coming soon)
Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2
Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1 (seeking feedback)

You can find Apple's official information on supported cameras here:

iMovie '08 Camcorder Support.

How to select an entire clip with one click

2007-08-10T17:17:00.000-06:00

"Gah!", I said. "Why can't I select an entire clip by clicking on it?"

"Double-click? No."

"Double-click really fast? No."

"GAH!"

Well, I was right. I couldn't select an entire clip with one click...yet.
Luckily, the iLife UI engineers weren't out to lunch on this one. If you go to the iMovie preferences, you will find a setting to make the necessary change.

The default for this setting is to select four seconds of video with each click. Notice that the timing for that setting is adjustable. You can also set it so that your clicks will deselect everything. (You would use this if you only want to select clips by dragging.) I like selecting an entire clip with one click because it seems the most intuitive to me. Glad to have that sorted out.

How to add black space

2007-08-09T20:59:00.000-06:00

One of the first things I noticed about iMovie '08 is that you can no longer run audio beyond the end of the video clips. I also noticed that you cannot drag clips apart in the timeline to create black space between clips. How do you drive home the drama without some black space to let the moment sink in? Well, here's one way...

Go to the titles button on the right side of the iMovie window. Pick the Centered title and drag it where you need some black space.

Once you have your title in place, select the text in the preview window on the right. Delete it all and leave it blank so it looks like this:

This blank title serves as an adequate substitute for black space. However, you probably want to adjust the timing of it to fit your movie's needs. Unfortunately, although you can just drag to adjust the timing of the title (which isn't there because you deleted all the text), you cannot drag to get the clip itself to the desired length. To adjust the timing of the clip itself, you will need to choose the "Set Duration..." option. You can find it in the Edit menu...

In the contextual menu you get by right-clicking or control-clicking...

Or you can just hit Command-R.

Once you do, a little window pops down from the top that lets you type in a numerical value, in seconds, for how long you want the black clip to last.

This process will probably take some trial and error, but hopefully you can get the length you want without too much trouble.
In the end, your project will look something like this:

If anyone figures out an easier or more accurate way to get just the right amount of black space, please share it with us in the comments!

Feed on back!

2007-08-09T20:43:00.000-06:00

Before we get started, there will be a tendency for a lot of griping in the comments. I am the first to defend the gripers. When I first started using iMovie '08, I felt like someone pulled the rug from under me. However, I doubt Apple software engineers will spend a lot of time reading this blog, so you need to speak so you can be heard!

iMovie Feedback Page

Go to the above link and pour your heart out. Tell them how you couldn't give your kid's soccer game the energy and excitement of the real thing all because you couldn't slow-mo the last minute score. They will listen. When slo-mo ends up in the next iMovie update, we all have you to thank.

The end of all my troubles...

2007-08-09T20:38:00.000-06:00

Phoenix
Originally uploaded by xroad

The new iMovie '08 reminds me of a an old joke:
When I got married, everyone told me it would be the end of my troubles....I had no idea it was the front end!

And for better or for worse, Apple has released iMovie '08. Like most, I read the articles, watched the videos, and found myself really looking forward to the new iMovie. Then I installed it.

"Why can't I select a clip by clicking it? Hmm, that's weird."

"So how do I extend the song beyond the end of my video clip? What is going on here?"

"WHAT? No slo-mo, reverse, film aging? Where in the world did all of the video effects go?"

"GAH! I can't dip the sound on part of a video clip? This has to be a joke."

Sadly, it was no joke. Mine was one of the many voices that Yoda heard crying out in pain. What a bummer that iMovie '08 comes with such stripped down editing tools. First I was incredulous, then I was confused, then I just got angry. Slowly, as the feeling of betrayal by my beloved Apple, Inc. began to wear off (and as I got tired of crying into my pillow) I came to realize that adventuring into this new iMovie was at least worth the effort.

Setting out, I know for certain that some abilities are gone and no work around will bring them back. I am already learning, however, that with some tweaking, twisting, and pulling, I might be able to eek out a little more of the iMovie I have grown to love. Like a tiny baby Phoenix rising from its own ashes, this new iMovie might turn into an even better version of itself. And so here we are with a new blog and a new outlook on life (iLife, anyway). Please send me your insights, questions, and comments and get our little Phoenix back to full strength!