iMovie: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Create Your Movie

Whether you work with video on your Mac or on a multimillion-dollar Hollywood studio setup, film editing boils down to three tiny tasks: selecting, trimming, and rearranging clips. Of course, that’s like saying that painting a portrait boils down to nothing more than mixing various amounts of red, yellow, and blue. The art of video editing lies in your decisions about the clips you select, how you trim them, and in what order you put them.

You work with clips in two place in iMovie. There’s the Event browser, usually at the top half of your screen, where all your raw, unedited video lives. And there’s the Project pane, also called the storyboard, which is usually at the bottom half of your screen—that’s where you assemble and edit your masterpiece.

At its simplest, then, iMovie editing is all about this three-step process:

1. Reviewing your video in the Event browser and finding the good parts.

2. Adding those chunks to the storyboard, where iMovie plays them in one seamless pass, from left to right.

3. Adding crossfades, titles (a.k.a. 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

Video editing always starts with a pile of raw, unedited footage. In iMovie’s case, that’s the bunch of clips you stored as events. Click an event’s name to see what video lurks inside.

Working with Filmstrips

iMovie ...