OK, maybe it's not movies of your kids, that thing you deeply, desperately want to turn into little QuickTime movies and post on your Web site or pass around on CDs. Maybe it's river rafting, or a groovy hippie wedding, or even those scenes from a bachelor party that warrant very limited distribution. There's probably something you want to capture and pass around in neat, two- to five-minute video packages. For me, it's the kids, and for the amateur moviemaker, there's no better application than iMovie on Mac OS X.
iMovie comes standard on OS X machines. It's one of the perks that makes the Mac a bargain compared to Windows machines. It's even more powerful on a Mac with a SuperDrive, which lets you burn these movies onto DVDs that can pop into a set-top player. But even on machines that only burn CDs, you'll find you can create dozens of small, short (mercifully, short!) QuickTime movies that friends and family can play on their home machines, whether they run a Mac, Windows, or Linux.
Even so, it's probably the least used of the iApps (along with iTunes, iPhoto and iChat) because it requires a pricey peripheral: a digital video camera, which these days starts in the $700 range and goes up from there. But if you're lucky enough to have scored a DV camcorder, or if you're considering investing in one, here's a gentle introduction to the simplest and most portable video-editing environment yet to come along.
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When you click on the iMovie icon, located by default in OS X's tool bar, you'll see there are three areas of the iMovie environment on screen.
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Clips, whether newly imported from a camera or pulled up from an existing project, are stored as tiles in the upper right section of the desktop. A large editing window, with some commands for forward and reverse, occupies most of the left side of the screen. Along the bottom runs a pane with two panels. The one with the icon of an eye on its tab is where you drag the tiles that represent clips, and place them in the order you want them in your movie. Each of these clip tiles takes up the same amount of space, whether that clip is a few seconds or a minute long.
The other panel, with an icon of a clock on its tab, gives you a more proportional view of the movie and the clip length. This Timeline has two rails for adding sound tracks. (We won't delve into adding sound tracks in this article.)
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When you first open iMovie, the environment's there, but you have nothing to work with, of course. You need to import video from a source, in most cases, a DV camcorder.
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The instructions in iMovie Help (command-?) under the section "Importing video from your camcorder to your hard disk" are about as clear and simple as you could ask for, but there are one or two things they don't tell you.
Briefly, you'll want to connect your digital video camera to your Mac using a FireWire cable. I bought a six-foot Belkin Apple FireWire and a Sony i.LINK compatible cable, 6-pin to 4-pin cable, at CompUSA for $25. The end with the smaller connector attaches to the camcorder, the larger connector plugs into the FireWire port on the side of my iBook.
Once you have done that and have set your camera to the right mode (see below), you'll be able to control the tape in the camera with iMovie controls onscreen. You can play, rewind, fast forward, and choose which segments you want to import.
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An indicator in the lower left corner of iMovie's viewing screen indicates whether you're viewing or importing video from the camera, or whether you're working with video that's already on the hard drive.
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Your camcorder needs to be powered up and in the mode for offloading video. On my old analog video camera, this mode was labeled VTR. On my JVC, it's marked "Play/PC".
Offloading video onto your computer will fill up the drive quickly. One minute of digital video footage uses about 220MB. A disk space indicator lives at the lower right of the main pane of iMovie, indicating how much space is left on your hard drive. In addition to the number of megs or gigabytes, this indicator is color coded: green means you have more than 400MB left, yellow means less than 400MB, and it turns red if you have less than 200MB. Since that's good for less than one minute of video, it's obviously time to stop importing and start editing, so you can dump what you don't need.
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As you download clips, they pop into windows in the pane on the right side of the screen--each cut in the action finishes one clip and adds another. I find this makes it a little easier to navigate through clips you want to add or dump.
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Once you've hit the large Stop/Play button at the center of the image window, and stopped the import, you're ready to begin editing. The toggle switch, shown in Figure 4, switches to the iMovie position automatically when you click on a clip on the right.
A good first step is to view each of the clips. This will probably let you discard at least one or two--those mistake clips before your subject was ready or even the occasional clip of the sidewalk or an inside-the-camera-bag shot
Once you've discarded the rejects, you can drag the keepers down to the viewing pane.
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In most cases, you'll want them in the order you shot them, especially for short movies. But it's easy to rearrange them, and that's good knowledge to take back on your next shoot: you can grab your positioning, approach, or closing shots whenever you want them, and frame them around your action back in iMovie.
Once you've lined up your clips, you'll want to edit each one as tightly as you can. Editing involves trimming off the beginning and/or the end of a clip, cutting out a section in the middle, or a combination of both. iMovie differentiates between Trimming (cutting off the ends) and Cropping (highlighting a section and keeping only it)--terms that seem intuitive from photo editing.
To edit a clip, select it down in the viewing pane. It will appear in the large picture pane, and clicking on the big play arrow in the center, of course, starts it rolling (or you can just hit the space bar to stop and start, as in QuickTime). As it plays, a time bar runs just under the image window. Along the top of this time bar is a control that moves from left to right as the video plays. You can move around the clip by dragging this triangle.
Along the bottom of the time bar, you'll see notches; here's where you'll do your editing.
To select a section of a clip, click your mouse at the point of the time bar representing that moment of video. You can confirm that's where you want to start your cut by dragging the triangle atop the bar to the same point; the image window will show you where you are. Then, holding your mouse button down, drag the cursor to the right or left (forward or backward in time). This will highlight a section of the video's timeline in yellow. You can verify that you've highlighted the right section by dragging the triangular cursor along the top of the timeline.
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iMovie's better at clipping off the ends. If you have a 10-second clip and you highlight in yellow the notches from the fourth second to the seventh, and type in Crop, iMovie won't remove that middle section; it'll clip off both ends and keep the highlighted section. Cropping cuts out the parts that aren't highlighted.
To Trim a section, you highlight from the end or the beginning to a point where you want to cut. Then pull down from Edit, and select Clear. Or you can choose Option-x, just like cutting text from a word-processing application.
To remove a middle section, it's easiest to split the clip into two parts, and clip the ends. Select a point in the clip in the midst of the section you want to cut. Command-t splits the clip in two; iMovie renames the second half as a new clip with the original name (Clip 03, for example) followed by a slash and 1 (Clip 03/1).
Sticking with the example of the 10-second clip. If you really want to keep seconds 0-4 and 7-10, you might split the clip at second 6, and then trim off the last two seconds of the original clip (leaving 0-4) and trim the first second of the newly created clip (leaving 7-10).
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iMovie offers a number of basic effects and transitions, but be warned: they take a while to render, can increase the size of your final movie, and some are, frankly, a little cheesy. I've yet to find a reason to use water ripple, for example.
On the other hand, some of the transitions add a little grace to your movie, and titles are a handy way to stamp time and place. Occasionally, I overexpose shots with my JVC camera, so I find the Brightness and Contrast effects can come in handy, too.
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A lengthy exploration of effects and transitions is beyond the scope of this introductory article. But a few caveats should help you get started.
Transitions are simple to understand and easy to apply. Click Transitions in the row of buttons that runs along the bottom of the Clips pane (top right). iMovie offers six basic transitions; I like cross-dissolve when I want a gradual melding of one image to the next. To apply it, simply drag the Transition's icon to the space between the two clips where you want the transition to occur.
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Because transitions and effects can take a long time to render, whenever you can, you should apply them after editing, when your movies are as short as they're going to be.
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It's also easier to apply them one clip at a time, since the degree of effect may vary from shot to shot, and because iMovie will try to apply the effects to all clips simultaneously, chewing up your CPUs for quite a while. You can watch the (painstakingly slow) progress of the effects rendering in the View (Eye) pane.
Once your clips are ordered and edited and any transitions or effects are applied, there are two things you need to get out of here: Save the Project and Export the Movie.
Saving the Project saves your raw digital video files and preserves the iMovie workspace on this project. Clips stay where you left them, so you can pick up the project next time. This is especially handy if you decide you want to make a completely separate movie (perhaps shorter, maybe with a different focus) from the same batch of raw files.
Exporting the movie saves the product of your labor, in a variety of ways.
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By default, iMovie asks if you want to save the edited movie back to DV tape in the camcorder. This may be a handy option if you're using tape as the archive medium for long movies. But personally, after all this editing work, I'm more interested in:
Exporting to QuickTime. This is the big payoff, where iMovie lets you save your movie in a format fit for the Web. The QuickTime format works beautifully here, as it can be posted to your site via a hyperlink; anyone who downloads can view the movie in their browser, or in a separate QuickTime player if they prefer.
It's easy to choose the size of movie you want, based on iMovie's hints about how it will be used, or you can delve into the Expert settings to get even better video quality. In particular, you should choose the Sorenson video codec in the Expert settings if you have the bandwidth or disk space for it. This codec delivers sharper video images, but at a cost: the file sizes can increase three to four times.
The range of iMovie's canned settings is staggering: a five-minute movie can scrunch down as little as 10MB in email format, where the same movie takes more than 700MB in a larger format. The settings include:
Export to DVD format using iDVD. This is really only an option for folks with DVD burners in general, and most likely, the SuperDrive in particular. It's a way to create DVDs that play beautifully in DVD players. Since I don't have the SuperDrive, I haven't tried it out. So I'm going to skip this part and leave it up to any readers who have to tell us about it in the Talkback below.
Whichever format you choose, your reward is a compact, tightened bit of video that tells your story in a format brief enough to hold the attention of your audience. Maybe David Pogue summed it up best in the introduction to iMovie 2: The Missing Manual, when he wrote, "Oh, sure, the baby with the overturned spaghetti bowl is cute--but for 45 seconds, not 45 minutes."
Like any good, modern parent, I'm just trying to find that 45 seconds. iMovie goes a long way towards making it a painless process.
N.D. Woods shoots long videos of his kids and writes about technology from his home in Sonoma County, California.
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