Discover iMo vie
Your guide to Apple’s easy yet powerful video app
>>> Whether you’re new to video editing or you’ve been using a different app for it, prompted by memories of iMovie’s interface being clunky and its toolset being limited, it’s well worth taking a fresh look at the latest, more sophisticated incarnation of Apple’s video-editing and sharing app. It has all the tools you need to import, organize, edit and share your footage as eye-catching and professional-looking projects, with bells and whistles such as music, animated transitions, and captions. Indeed, you can even turn your holiday clips into a slick, Hollywood-style trailer with minimal time and effort thanks to the app’s Trailer templates. You can also share your polished video productions directly to various social networks, including YouTube and Facebook.
Apple has been refining iMovie for decades, so it knows everything you might need. To help you get your movies looking their best, we’ll show you how to use cutaway layers to speed up your editing workflow, insert new backgrounds with compositing tools, and fix production problems such as camera shake and color casts.
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Import to event Choose File > New Event and give it a label that indicates its contents. Pick File > Import Media, browse to a memory card or folder, and select some clips. Pick your new event in “Import To,” then click Import Selected. You can view the imported clips in the event.
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Select a section Preview the clips by moving the pointer over them; they’ll play in the Viewer (right). When you see something interesting, drag to select that section (with a yellow border). Click + to add it to the timeline. Sections you’ve added are shown with an orange line.
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Trim clips With several clips added to your timeline, you can drag from within them to change the order in which they play. This makes editing a video similar to swapping things around in an essay. You can extend or shorten a clip by dragging the trim handle at its start or end.
DTransitions Use transitions to move between clips in an eye-catching fashion. Click Transitions (top left) to access and preview the built-in set of 24. Drag a transition’s thumbnail between clips in the timeline to add it, and double-click it there to change its duration.
ECool ca ptions Click Titles (near top of the window) and add a title by dragging and dropping it from the browser onto the timeline. Edit text color, size and font in the Viewer just like in a word processor. Like other clips, you can move and trim the title’s purple bar in the timeline.
FMake music Music can make clips flow more coherently. Click Audio at the top of iMovie for a rich range of scores you can drag onto the timeline and position precisely. Drag the green clip’s horizontal line down to lower the music volume so that dialog is more audible.