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.

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.
  

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

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.

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.

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.

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.