This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Making Basic Edits
To get a better taste of how the iMovie interface gives you the power of video editing, we'll take a look at how to make a very basic edit using a combination of the shelf, the Monitor, and the Timeline Viewer.
Preparing a Clip
In this section, we go through the process of making an adjustment to a clip. To prepare the clip, click on it in the shelf and, holding the mouse button down, drag it diagonally down and to the left into the uppermost row of Timeline Viewer, which is where you add video clips to your iMovie. See Figure 3.13.
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Figure
3.13 Before: dragging a clip into the Timeline Viewer.
After you drag the clip, it now appears on the Timeline Viewer instead of the shelf, as illustrated in Figure 3.14.
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Figure
3.14 After: the clip as it appears in the Timeline Viewer.
Task: Deleting Extra Footage
Now that we have a clip added to the Timeline, we can make an adjustment to it. In our scenario, the adjustment we want to make is to delete some extra footage at the end of the clip.
To delete extra footage:
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Drag the playhead in the Monitor to somewhere close to the end of the clip —to the point just before the clip switches to another scene. See Figure 3.15.
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Choose Edit, Split Video Clip at Playhead (see Figure 3.16) to mark the spot so that iMovie knows where one clip ends and the next begins. In essence, you've just created two separate clips from one original clip (see Figure 3.17).
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Figure
3.15 The playhead in the Monitor and Timeline Viewer.
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Figure
3.16 Splitting a video clip at the playhead.
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Figure
3.17 The newly split clip with both pieces selected.
- In the Timeline Viewer, click the second clip and choose Clear
from the Edit menu. The unwanted footage will be removed.
Notice in Figure 3.18 how the overall length of the new clip is shorter than in Figure 3.14, as shown by the numbers that appear in the upper-left corner of the Timeline.
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Figure
3.18 The remaining clip now expands to fill the entire width of the Timeline.