Going deeper

Access more post-production tools to give your movies extra content and texture

Much of the time, you’ll use iMovie for putting together fairly simple movies by cutting, trimming, swapping and inserting footage on the timeline to tell a story. This will give you a concise and entertaining film to share with family and friends. However, iMovie has a few more post-production tools for you to call upon if you want to add extra texture to your projects.

As well as the Picture-in-Picture effect we looked at earlier, you can also use cutaway layers to create split-screen effects that display two parallel timeline clips at the same time. Go into the Video Overlay Setting’s style menu and choose Split Screen, then use the Position pop-up menu to arrange the clips side by side or top and bottom. Another slider enables you to make the cutaway clip slide in, share the screen with the underlying clip, and then slide out. The Transitions browser is well worth exploring too, as a few wipes and mixes from one shot to the next also add texture.

If you have a YouTube channel, you may want to make an appearance during the programme in a creative way to help personalize your show. The Video Overlay Green/Blue Screen style enables you to replace a cutaway layer’s blue background with footage from the underlying layer. Above, you can see we shot some “talking head” footage with a large blue card on the wall to create a blue background. We didn’t have enough card to fill the left of the frame, but iMovie’s compositing clean-up tools allowed us to mask that area and make it transparent.