Chapter 3. Building the Movie
Whether you work with video on your Mac or in a multimillion-dollar Hollywood professional studio, film editing boils down to three tiny tasks: selecting, trimming, and rearranging clips. Of course, that’s like saying that painting boils down to nothing more than mixing various amounts of red, yellow, and blue. The art of video editing lies in your decisions about which clips you select, how you trim them, and in what order you put them.
You work with those clips in iMovie’s two big storage areas. There’s the Event browser, usually the bottom half of the screen, where all your raw, unedited video shots live. And there’s the storyboard, usually the top half, where you assemble and edit your masterpiece.
At its simplest, then, iMovie editing is all about this three-step process:
Review your video in the Event browser and find the good parts.
Add those chunks to the storyboard, where iMovie plays them in one seamless pass, from left to right.
Add crossfades, titles (credits), music, and effects.
This chapter shows you the mechanics of the first two tasks: selecting raw footage, and adding it to your movie-in-progress. The following chapters cover the last step.
Phase 1: Review Your Clips (Skim + Play)
Video editing always starts with a pile of raw, unedited footage. In iMovie’s case, that’s the bunch of clips in the Event browser. Click an Event’s name to see what video lurks inside.
Filmstrips
iMovie ’11 represents every imported camcorder clip as a filmstrip
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