iMovie: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Video Chunks: Favorites and Rejects

In iMovie, all your imported footage sits in your Event browser, like paints on a palette, ready to inspire your editorial brilliance. But that blessing is also a curse, because you likely have a huge pile of video to manage—and a lot of it’s dreck.

Fortunately, iMovie comes with two tools to help you sort and manage these vast chunks of video. Working in the Event browser, you can do the following:

• Tag pieces of clips as Favorites, making them easy to find later.

• Flag pieces of clips as Rejects—bad footage you’ll either probably or definitely not use in a project. The “probably” stuff you can just hide from view. The “definitely” stuff you can delete, freeing up space on your hard drive.

This chapter explores these clip-flagging tools and describes the proper way to get rid of bad shots forever.

Mark Clips as Favorites or Rejects

For iMovie’s marking tools to actually save you time, they need to be easy to use. And they are. Marking footage as a Favorite or a Reject is just a two-step process:

1. In the Event pane, select the video you like (or don’t like).

   You can select an entire clip (double-click it), multiple clips (⌘-click each one), or only part of a clip (drag your selection).

2. Flag it.

   To flag the selection as a Favorite, press the letter F key on your keyboard, choose Mark→Favorite, or Control-click on the clip and choose Favorite.

   To flag the footage as a Reject, press the Delete key, choose Mark→Reject, or Control-click the clip and choose ...