iMovie represents every imported clip as a filmstrip—a horizontal bar made up of sample frames from the clip and whose length reflects the clip’s duration. You can adjust both how tall the filmstrip is and how many frames of your footage it displays. You make both adjustments in iMovie’s “slider” window. Call it up by clicking the filmstrip icon at the top-right corner of the Event browser. The Clip Size slider adjusts the filmstrip’s height, and the Zoom slider changes the number of frames you see (see Figure 5-1).

Figure 5-1. When you click the filmstrip icon in the Event browser, iMovie opens a “slider” window. Top: The Clip Size slider (left) changes the height of your filmstrip (right). (To see the audio that accompanies a clip, turn on the Show Waveforms checkbox.) Bottom, left: Adjust the Zoom slider to see more frames of each strip. The highlighted clip (look for the yellow border) lasts about 22 seconds, and because you have the Zoom slider set to 30 seconds, you see just one frame of the clip. Bottom, right: When you set the slider to display 1 second of video per frame, the clip becomes, sensibly enough, 22 frames wide.

You can make these same adjustments in the Project pane, but the controls differ slightly. To adjust the height of the filmstrip, click the filmstrip icon in the top-right corner of the storyboard (Figure 5-2). To change the number of frames iMovie displays, use the Zoom slider to the left of the filmstrip icon (Figure 5-2, circled).

Figure 5-2. The Clip Size and Zoom sliders as they appear in the project storyboard. Notice how the Zoom slider (circled, right) lives outside the filmstrip icon this time.

So what’s the right setting for these sliders? That’s up to you, but here are some suggestions:

You’re about to learn two iMovie skills that you’ll use most often in editing your footage: skimming and playing. Practice them, commit them to memory, make them automatic, and you’ll fly through the editing process.

Skimming means moving your cursor across a filmstrip. Do not click or drag the strip, which would mean pressing the mouse button. Just point with the mouse.

The playhead—an orange vertical line the height of the filmstrip—moves along with your cursor. And as you skim, the Viewer plays back the underlying video at high speed—or medium speed, or slow speed, depending on how fast you move the cursor. (You see the same video playing within the filmstrip itself, beneath your cursor.)

Skimming may take some getting used to, because it’s such an unusual computer technique; it’s probably the first time in history that moving the mouse without clicking does anything besides, well, moving the cursor to a new spot. But it means that you can control not only the speed of playback, but also the direction—forward or reverse—in real time, almost effortlessly.

Skimming works anywhere fine filmstrips are found—either in the Event browser or in the project storyboard (Figure 5-3).

Skimming is great for quickly getting the gist of what’s in your captured clips. But unless you’re some kind of cyborg, you’ll find it very difficult to skim at exactly the right speed for real-time playback.

Fortunately, iMovie can also play back clips all by itself, at the proper speed. To do that, use the space bar on your keyboard as the Start/Stop control. Hitting the space bar always begins playback at the position of your cursor, and hitting it again stops playback.

Figure 5-3. When you skim, you move your cursor across the face of a filmstrip without clicking the mouse button. It’s a fast, simple way to find out what’s in a clip without having to sit through a full playback.

Once you master that difficult technique, you’re ready for the real gem: using skimming and playback together. It works like this: Using your mouse, skim your footage, looking for the part you want to watch. When you get close to the right spot, tap the space bar. Playback begins from the precise position of your cursor.

Tap the space bar again to stop playback, move your cursor to another spot, and then tap the space bar once more. This way, you can jump around, spot-inspecting your clips (or even within a clip), without ever touching the mouse button—and without ever having to wait.

There are four other ways to play back a source clip or your movie-in-progress, complete with corresponding keyboard shortcuts. Don’t Remember to Save has the details, but here are the CliffsNotes:

The first selection method is the one you’ll probably use most often: dragging. That is, slide the cursor across some footage while you press the mouse button, just the way you’d select a phrase of text in a word processor.

iMovie indicates which part of a clip you selected by surrounding it with a yellow border (Figure 5-4). A little bubble on the top edge of the filmstrip shows you how many seconds’ or minutes’ worth of video you highlighted. (If you select part of a clip, you can adjust it later; see Adjust a Selection.)

Figure 5-4. You can highlight part of a clip by dragging across it. iMovie shows you what you selected by enclosing it in a yellow border.

In some cases, you may find that all this dragging business is just too much fussiness—you really want to select entire clips from the Event browser. To do that, either double-click the clip or Option-click it.

It’s often useful to select more than one clip at a time. Imagine how much faster you could perform common tasks—deleting clips, dragging them, cutting and pasting them, and so on—if you could work on them all at once.

Selecting clips in the storyboard or Event browser works just like selecting file names in the Finder. For example, here’s some of what you can do:

Once you highlight a portion of a filmstrip, you’re not stuck with that yellow boundary the way it is. You can adjust it in either of these two ways:

As you know, tapping the space bar begins playing back a clip at the position of the cursor. But when you’re making a selection, fiddling with that yellow border, that’s not always what you want to do. In fact, it’s probably not what you want.

A much more useful keystroke would be one that means, “Play just what I’ve selected.” And that’s what the / key is for. (That’s the forward-slash key, the one next to the period key.) Tap it once to play whatever you selected; tap it a second time to stop playback.

To deselect whatever is selected—that is, to remove the yellow border entirely—use any of these three techniques:

Actually, there’s another way, but it involves a little backstory; see the tip on Tip.

By the time you finish building a project, it might be full of all kinds of stuff—video clips, transitions, maps, and so on. In iMovie, you can select all the stuff of one type—for example, all the background images—to make universal changes. For example, you could change all backgrounds from blue to black. To do that, choose Edit→“Select in Movie.” iMovie lists all the elements you can isolate in a project: video clips, transitions, photos, maps, and backgrounds. Pretty handy.

Most people, most of the time, build a movie by reviewing a clip of raw footage from left to right—from beginning to end—and choosing bits, in sequence, to include in their final movie. In such cases, you add a selected clip or clips to the end of the storyboard.

iMovie offers two ways to do that automatically (that is, without selecting the clip and then dragging it to the end of the storyboard, which might be offscreen). Once you select some video in the Event browser, do one of these things:

In either case, the selected chunk(s) of video flies from the Event browser to the end of your storyboard.

To check the result, point to the storyboard (without clicking) just before the spot where the new video has landed, and then press the space bar.

You don’t have to add a clip to the end of your storyboard. You can place it between clips or smack in the middle of a single, continuous clip.

To add a chunk of footage between clips, drag the selected chunk (by positioning your cursor inside the yellow border so that it becomes a handle) right into the storyboard. iMovie previews your insertion point with a blue shaded box. When you find the right spot, release the mouse (see Figure 5-6). The chunk of video slips right in between the surrounding clips.

Figure 5-6. Once you highlight some video, you can drag it to position it anywhere in the storyboard—in the gap between two existing clips, for example. iMovie previews your placement with a blue box.

What if you want to drop a clip in the middle of another clip, splitting it in two with your clip sandwiched in between? If you drop a chunk of video on top of a clip, iMovie launches a floating menu (see Figure 5-7). Its options include Insert, which splits the underlying clip into two pieces and drops your chunk between them (the other options are covered next).

Figure 5-7. Top: To insert a clip in the middle of another clip, drop it on top. Middle: Choose Insert from the menu that appears. Bottom: iMovie splits the underlying clip in two and nestles the new clip in between.

Suppose you’re editing a project that has music in it, and you worked hard to get the timing of the cuts to match up with the music. (Let’s say you worked that hard because you haven’t yet discovered the Beat Markers covered on Edit to the Beat.) But as you preview your masterpiece, you realize that the video part of the clip is just plain dull. You have something much more interesting to replace it with, but you know that unless your replacement is exactly the same length as the original shot, it will mess up the timing of your entire project.

iMovie offers three ways to replace a clip with a better one of the exact same length. Select your replacement footage, drag it to your storyboard, and drop it onto the boring section. In the floating menu that appears (Figure 5-7), select from the following options:

iMovie offers one more way to add clips, by “connecting” them. Connected clips offer many cool tricks, namely cutaways, green-screen effects, side-by-side video, and picture-in-picture viewing. Each of these is explained in detail in Chapter 8 (Reverse a Clip’s Playback Direction).

Figure 5-8. You can replace clips in your project without having to select exactly the right amount of video from a clip in the Event browser. In this example, you’re replacing 10 seconds’ worth of footage. Top: If you selected only 4 seconds of video in the Event browser and choose “Replace,” iMovie adds only that 4-second selection. Middle: If you use “Replace from Start,” iMovie adds 6 seconds of footage to the end of your replacement clip, so that it matches the clip it’s replacing. (The orange line shows you how much event footage iMovie added.) Bottom: If you select “Replace from End,” then instead of extending your selection by adding 6 seconds at the end of the clip, iMovie adds 6 seconds to the beginning of it.

Each time you add source video to your nascent movie, iMovie slaps an orange stripe across the bottom of the original clip in the Event browser, as shown in Figure 5-8. That’s a reminder that you’ve used this segment of footage in your project. As your work proceeds, you’ll be able to tell, with a glance at your Event browser, what portion of the original video you used in your finished opus.

Now, remember that all your edited movies—your projects—draw on the same well of source video on your computer. What’s cool, therefore, is that iMovie memorizes the orange striping for every project. If you used a different set of Little League footage in each of three projects, you’ll see the stripes jump around in the Event browser as you select each project in turn.

You don’t have to save your work. iMovie automatically saves as you go. (It doesn’t even have a Save command.)

You can instantly play back your project to spot-check your work in the Viewer. Since you’ll probably do this a lot, iMovie offers multiple techniques:

You can make the Viewer window bigger to get a more detailed view of your video by dragging the top edge of the storyboard window. But, eventually, you’ll want to treat yourself to iMovie’s IMAX mode: full-screen playback. That’s when all of iMovie’s controls and menus disappear, and the Viewer fills your monitor.

No matter where you are in the storyboard, press Shift-⌘-F to begin full-screen playback of the selected video.

Once you have full-screen playback under way, moving your mouse makes the navigation tools shown in Figure 5-9 appear. They look a lot like the controls you see when you play a movie full screen in iTunes or QuickTime.

Figure 5-9. During full-screen playback, if you wiggle your mouse, you get the navigation tools shown here. Notice the handy Play Selection button on the left side.

Here’s how you navigate in full-screen mode:

Unless your last name is Spielberg or Scorsese—and maybe even if it is—the first place you put a clip in the storyboard won’t always be the best spot for it. Sooner or later, you’ll wish you could move shots around in a film.

You can, if you know how.

Dragging isn’t the only way to move footage around in iMovie; the Copy, Cut, and Paste commands can feel more precise. These commands are also the only way to copy edited footage from one project to another. They’re also a really easy way to insert clips into the middle of other clips.

You already know how to indicate what you want to cut or copy; just use the selection techniques described on Select by Dragging.

Then use the Edit→Cut or Edit→Copy command (⌘-X or ⌘-C). Point to where you want to paste the copied material (do not click), and then choose Edit→Paste (⌘-V). Presto! The cut or copied material appears at the position of your cursor and shoves the rest of the movie to the right.

Almost nobody hits the camcorder’s Record button at the precise instant the action begins, or stops recording the instant an action stops. Life (not to mention animals, geysers, and children) is just too unpredictable.

Most of the time, of course, you’ll leave the boring stuff (Phase 2: Select the Good Bits) in the Event browser before you add a clip to the storyboard. Sometimes, though, you’ll discover—only after you put the clip in the storyboard—that you didn’t get the clip-editing process quite right. Maybe the shots are still too languorous and should be shorter. Or the shots are too quick, and it’s going to be hard for your audience to figure out what’s going on.

In both cases, it would be nice to shorten or lengthen a clip even after you place it in the storyboard.

Fortunately, iMovie is crawling with ways to make these adjustments. They boil down to these approaches:

The following pages cover all four methods.

Trim to the Playhead

If all you want to do is shorten the end of a clip that’s too long, you don’t even need to drag. Just position the playhead where you want the clip to end and press Option-/. iMovie lops the end off the clip right at the playhead.

Tip

This command and many others are available in a floating menu you can call up by Control-clicking (right-clicking) in iMovie. (That’s a two-finger click if you have a trackpad, like the one on a laptop, or a Magic Trackpad.)

Figure 5-10. Top: You’re resizing this clip in the storyboard; the bubble tells you how many seconds you’re adding to the movie. Bottom: This clip has hit the end of the road (or the end of the original clip, anyway), so there’s no more footage to add.

Use the Clip Trimmer

All right, resizing clips in place is a quick, efficient way to make basic changes. But you can’t see what you’re doing until you add or subtract it. What if you can’t even grasp what you’re looking at and wish you could see the entire original clip?

That’s what the Clip Trimmer is all about. You open it by choosing Window→Show Clip Trimmer (⌘-). iMovie displays the original footage in a strip just above the clip you’re trimming. You can see it in Figure 5-11.

In essence, you’re seeing the full-length clip, just as it originally appeared in the Event browser. The white borders indicate which part of the clip you’re using in your movie. You can use the usual tricks to play back the footage, skimming the clip and hitting the space bar as necessary.

Figure 5-11. To open the Clip Trimmer, double-click any clip in the storyboard. In the Trim window, the white borders show which piece of the clip you’re currently using in your movie. The darkened portions of the clip show the rest of that clip’s raw footage. Drag either white line to lengthen or shorten the clip, or drag the clip itself to reposition it in your project.

Your main business here is to readjust your selection by dragging the white border. Make it longer if you want more of the clip in your project, shorter if you want less, just as if you were resizing the clip in place. Or grab any part of the clip, inside or outside the white boundaries, and slide the entire thing horizontally to include an earlier or later portion of the same duration.

When you finish reselecting, click the that says Close Clip Trimmer, or click the big blue down arrow on the clip in your storyboard.

The techniques described in the previous section work well when you want to remove or add footage to a clip. Sometimes, however, you want to split a clip without removing or adding footage. For example, iMovie can only apply video effects to entire clips; if you want only part of your clip to get special treatment, you’ll have to break that portion off into a standalone clip. (Don’t worry; on playback, it still looks like part of the bigger clip.)

Or you may just want to break off one piece of a clip to use somewhere else in your movie. The Split Clip command is exactly what you need. Position your playhead where you want the split to occur, and then choose Modify→Split Clip (⌘-B).

If you change your mind about a split immediately afterward, you can always use the Undo command to take back that step. If you split a clip and change your mind much later, after you’ve done a lot of other editing, iMovie can still accommodate you. Click either part of a split clip and choose Edit→Join Clip; iMovie plays marriage counselor and reunites the clip with its former soul mate, assuming it’s still adjacent. (If something else is now between them, get it out of the way so iMovie can do its job.)

Whenever iMovie encounters source video that doesn’t fit a frame, it can do one of two things:

Figure 5-15 shows what happens in both situations. By default, iMovie crops mismatched video. But you can change that.

Figure 5-15. You can tell iMovie how to handle non-16:9 aspect ratios. Top: To make a clip shot with an iPhone held vertically (giving it a 2:3 aspect ratio) fill iMovie’s 16:9 screen, choose Adjust→Cropping Tool→Crop from the iMovie toolbar (Figure 5-16). Bottom: To see all of the 2:3 clip in iMovie, choose Fit instead of Crop. You’ll see the entire iPhone shot, along with the requisite black bars.

Yes, iMovie’s factory setting is to crop mismatched video, but you don’t have to play along. After all, this cropping could cut off the tops and bottoms of very important things, like Grandma and Grandpa.

To change the way iMovie displays non-16:9 footage, select the clip in your storyboard and then click the Adjust button in the iMovie toolbar. A set of editing tools appears in the Viewer. Choose the Cropping tool (Figure 5-16) and then click the Fit button. Now all of your clip appears in the frame, along with the necessary black bars on either side.

Figure 5-16. The cropping options in iMovie’s Adjust tool. Choose Fit instead of Crop to see all of a clip shot with a non-16:9 aspect ratio. (The Ken Burns style is discussed on page 217.)