iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Crop, Fit, Rotate

One of iMovie's greatest virtues is its resolution agnosticism. You can combine widescreen footage from your new HD camcorder with standard-def footage from your old DV camera in the same movie; iMovie gracefully handles their different dimensions.

This adaptability also extends to photos. Chapter 7 contains a detailed discussion of cropping video to fit the frame (or to draw emphasis to a certain part of the picture), making it fit the frame by adding letterbox bars, and even rotating it.

Well, surprise, surprise: Exactly the same features are available for photo filmstrips. See the write-ups beginning on Copying and Pasting Adjustments for the full discussion.

Tip

You can crop, fit, and rotate both photo filmstrips and photo cutaways. The process is exactly the same.

UP TO SPEED: Avoiding Pixellated Images

You may have tried adding an image to iMovie and found that it looked pretty rotten. Blurry, pixellated, or jagged images are ugly and quite jarring when they appear in a movie surrounded by pristine video footage.

Sloppy-looking images like these usually result from using a photo file whose resolution is too low to begin with. For example, you might have taken a hilarious little shot with your cameraphone—emphasis on little. Images downloaded from the Web often have very low resolution, too.

iMovie, thinking it's doing you a favor, stretches that photo larger than its original size to make it fit the movie frame, and ugly-looking coarseness results.

If you absolutely ...