September 16, 2020

How To Use iMovie – A Beginners Guide To Using iMovie

In this video you’ll learn how to use iMovie. Most people think that iMovie is amateur bare bones software.  But, iMovie actually has many features that come with much more expensive video editing software packages.

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How To Use iMovie Video Transcript

In today’s video I’m going to be showing the entire world how to use iMovie.

Hey everyone I’m Rodney Goldston and this is Insights for Impact and this channel is all about the entrepreneur that’s you folks equipping you to do work that matters for people who care.

And in today’s video we’re talking about how to do great video for your YouTube channel your video marketing and your online courses all editing with iMovie.

Now if this is your first time stopping by thank you. Please consider subscribing to the channel by hitting the subscribe button and the bell notification so that you get notified each and every time I upload exciting new content.

Now I hear what you’re thinking hey rod iMovie is amateur bare bones software right?

No in fact iMovie has many features that will rival many of the most professional video editing software packages. In fact I’ve used iMovie for years to edit professional videos that I’ve been paid by corporations to do.

So let’s go ahead and hop back on inside and jump right into iMovie and in no time you’re going to be an expert at using iMovie.

So let’s go ahead and get started by opening up iMovie in our menu.

When iMovie first opens we’re going to be presented or you’ll be presented with what’s called a project view so in this view. You’ll notice that there are two tabs here one says media and one says projects.

We’re in the projects view. If you click the media view you’ll see an option with all your available media. But we’re for the sake of this video we’re doing projects so we’re going to go ahead here and we’re going to create a new project.

One important note before doing that is that you could also select any of these other options if you’ve worked on or edited other movies in your iMovie you’d be able to select one of them to continue editing that movie but for the sake of this video we’re going to go ahead here and create a new movie.

So you can click the little plus sign you’ll be presented with two options one will say movie and one will say trailer and again for the sake of this video we’re going to produce a new iMovie.

So once we click that we’ll be presented with this project screen now quickly going over what’s available to you here on the project screen is this this button here will take you back to the previous window we were in this button will show or hide all of your available media this button here once your fit will allow you to import video from your camera or folder on your computer moving down to here this will show you the available media for your project this will show you audio available this will show titles and we’re going to go over these later in the video backgrounds and transitions.

So let’s go ahead and select just something to add into the video clip so down here you can drag and drop video clips and photos from your browser above to start creating your movie you can also drag and drop them from folders on your computer so over here I’ve got some video and media that I’ve stored in a folder over here I could also just simply go over to here and you can do this for any type of media a photo or video and drag it over to the video timeline and iMovie would simply place it there.

Or you could go into your my media tab here and let me explain what this is. So in your media library when you go here you’ll be presented with your media library now in photos this will access any photo that you’ve saved in your iPhoto. So you would be able to go here and you would be able to select from various options from your iPhoto library.

I’ll just simply grab something here this is a wonderful image that I took out in San Francisco a few years ago and I’m just going to go ahead and drop that there.

Now you would also be able to select from other events so if you have other movies saved in your iMovie folder they would also show up here and you’d be able to just grab one select it and then grab it and drag it on over into the timeline for the movie.

So now let’s discuss adding audio.

Now if you’ve selected a movie already uh or movie clip that you’ve created you one it’s to have audio here already but you’ll notice that you can also there’s audio here in this box here you can control this audio here but you can also add audio so you can add audio from your iTunes library as well as if you had audio stored in a folder the same way we went over here and had other media here if you had other audio stored in your folder elsewhere in your computer you can simply drag it over.

So let’s go ahead here let’s select let’s say let’s scroll through. How about this let’s select something from garage band.

So under audio you have your iTunes library you have a sound effects library that you could grab things from as well as things in garage band so let’s just go ahead and grab a sound effect so let’s say I wanted to add this radio tuning sound effect all out let’s grab that one all I would need to do is to grab it and drag it down and it’s going to automatically place it at the bottom of the clip. That’s pretty much it.

So now I can also change the length of time that audio plays so you’ll notice here by going to this information tab so over here at the far right there’s an information tab and this is available for each clip so notice that I’ve highlighted the audio clip we just imported in and when I go to the information tab for that it tells me what the name of the clip is when it was created what time was it was created and the duration that it will play.

Now let’s say I wanted that to play for four seconds all would have to do is put four in there we’d have to double so that particular clip only plays seconds so that’s a great learning point here so what we want if we wanted that clip to play longer what we would need to do is to duplicate it so we’ll go over here and right click it and copy it and then move our cursor to where we want it to play be placed and paste it and then the clip will play again.

So again if you wanted to get any information on a particular clip you would go highlight the clip make sure it’s selected go to the information bar and it gives you information on that particular clip.

If i wanted to get information on this particular video clip here the same thing it tells me what the name of the clip is and the duration of the clip but let’s look at this photo for example because this is a great one because it’s not a particular media type of media audio or a video file.

If I wanted this photo to it defaults to playing four seconds and you can change that in your preferences for your project. But it’s defaulted to playing for four seconds but let’s suppose I wanted to play that particular photo clip for eight seconds so again I would highlight it go up to the information tab and click that and put eight in and now that particular photo will play for eight seconds.

Let’s move on to a title to adding titles so let’s say I wanted to add a title here. To this photo or to any of these clips I’ve.

iMovie comes pre-made with a whole bunch of different titles and you can scroll through them to see many of them.

But let’s say i wanted to do a lower third reveal so once the clip is selected I would then go to the title that I wanted to select and all I would need to do is to drag it to the point where I wanted to drop it.

So let’s say I want to drop it at the beginning of this photo now notice here in the view finder that it’s giving me the option to change what that title says so let’s go ahead in here and I’m going to type San Francisco. If I can spell it bay bridge and that would add the title to that video.

Now if we wanted to see what it would look like in play we would click the play button here and it would play through this video and then once it got to this photo there is the lower third reveal and it will play for four seconds.

Now let’s stop this here now let’s assume or let’s uh take for example we wanted to take that title and play it a little longer as well so instead of four seconds let’s say I wanted it to play the length of that clip so I know the clip I set to eight seconds already so I could go in select the title go to the information button and change that to match the length of the clip I have it playing over and you’ll notice iMovie automatically plays it for a second. So let’s watch it again so let’s move our cursor to the beginning of that photo.

Let’s move it slightly before that so you’ll see so now it’s going to transition to that it’s going to play the lower third title reveal that we put in and it’s going to do it for exactly eight seconds and then move on to the next clip.

Let’s talk about transitions now so let’s say I wanted to add a transition to my iMovie between this first clip and this clip of the San Francisco Bay Bridge I would come back over here to this tab that says transitions and once I click that I’m presented with a whole bunch of standard transitions that come preloaded into iMovie.

Now folks this is so simple all you need to do is select one and the first thing let me point this out is that as you hover over them you’ll notice over here in the viewfinder window it’s going to actually play what that trans what that transition actually looks like. So before you actually select it you’d be able to see what it looks like so you could go up here look at the cross dissolve and it’s going to give you an example of what they’re all going to look like so let’s say you like this let’s say slide right so you would simply select it grab it and drag it to the place where you want it to be placed and then just let it go and now you’ve got a transition. So let’s take a second to watch how that works so notice the video clip is playing and now it’s sliding right into the transition but let’s suppose you don’t like that transition you decide you don’t like the way it looks. You simply go ahead and grab another one let’s try fade to black drop it there and it’s going to automatically replace it.

You come here you click play and you can see what that transition will look like there and you could go through all of them to simply swap them out to see if you like them.

Now let’s add a background really quick. But before I do that I want to point out something really important I forgot to point out earlier. The very first clip that you put into your iMovie will determine the type of movie it is. So for example let’s suppose you’ve got various clips some 4kclip that you’ve done so you did you’ve created some clips on let’s say you’re for your 4k cameras but then you also created some a lower resolution. The first clip that you put into iMovie will determine the type of movie it is. So if you want to save it particularly if you’re looking to upload it to Youtube and you want to save it as a 4k video it’s important that the very first clip you put here is that 4k clip because that’s going to set the standard for the quality of the video.

So let’s go back and look at adding a background. So iMovie again comes pre-loaded with a bunch of different backgrounds and let’s grab something like this blue black background here and we can slide let’s slide it in here in between this transition. And so what would happen here is that once this video of the San Francisco Bay Bridge will play then it’s going to transition to this background screen now suppose we wanted to add a transition between iMove I mean the background screen here and the photo of the San Francisco bay bridge the same as we did in the last clip there we would grab a transition here and we would simply drag it and drop it between the two photos so here we’ve got the San Francisco Bay Bridge that’s going to play then it’s going to get to that transition and now it’s going to go to the background screen.

Now let’s look at adding some words to this background screen. So let’s hover over that and select it and then let’s go to titles and the same way we added the lower third to the San Francisco Bay Bridge let’s say we want to add a title to move to this next clip we would simply grab and title and here let’s grab this reveal title and again if we move our mouse or cursor over this here in the view window it’s going to show us exactly what that title or that yes that title back that title will do.

So let’s grab it and let’s drag it to the beginning of that background and we can simply type over this. Let’s call this sample title and hit the enter button and it places that there so let’s watch it again so now we’re going to go from our photo of the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the transition and then there’s our sample title.

Now one of the easiest things to do particularly if you are using clips from different shoots is that your you’ll notice that your video quality may be different if you’ve used different mics anything could affect the video quality so one of the easiest things to do once you have everything there is to control a and select everything and then Apple has put this wonderful magic wand tool here. If you select it automatically improves the video and audio quality of the selected clips so if you select all of them together it will look at everything and bring everything to the proper level.

So whether that’s the color of your video or the audio is the simplest way to edit all of those things. I use it all the time and I highly recommend that you do the same thing.

So let’s go ahead here and let’s just click this magic wand tool so we’ve selected everything and oops so actually we don’t want to select everything we want to deselect make sure nothing’s selected and click the magic wand tool and it’s going to automatically fix everything that needs to be fixed whether that’s video or audio additionally you can highlight individual clips. And I suggest that you take a look and play with these options here we looked at the information option but this is a video I did and there’s a title there this was for the I think the loan program but you can select changing the white balance and color this will take you through and you can notice here you can change different things you can see this line here is where the level was at before this.

Next I’ll walk you through cropping. Now you may have seen other videos and you’ll notice in some videos where this where the video screen will move in and out that’s called the Ken Burns effect and it’s a really useful tool. So if you wanted to add a Ken Burns effect you simply select your video clip click Ken Burns and what it’s going to do it’s going to start see down here where it says start it’s going to start that clip here and then it’s going to move through the end of the clip and when the clip finishes this is what it’s going to zoom in on.

So let’s take a look at what that would look like let’s move I’m sorry let’s move to the beginning of the clip and that’s a pretty long clip so let’s back out of that one let’s do this one here much shorter clip so let’s say we wanted to do the Ken Burns effect here. We simply go to the crop tool and I can move where I want it to start and finish let’s say I wanted it to start in this lower section here and then move as it goes through the clip to this end. I’ll select that click okay now let’s watch that clip so you’ll notice how it’s starting in the lower left there and it’s finishing in the upper right.

Before it gets to the transition let’s stop it and let’s change it. So suppose we wanted to change we didn’t like the way it moved we could change it so that it starts in the same spot let’s click the end and let’s have it move let’s say just more in a linear direction so you see the little yellow arrow there this tells me the direction that the zoom is going to happen. So let’s say I wanted to move slightly downward and there so let’s drop it there click ok now let’s watch what it does so you’ll see that you’ll notice that now instead of moving it kind of upward and to the right it’s moving a little downward and to the right.

So we’ve covered your media selection adding audio we’ve looked at titles and backgrounds transitions how to crop using the Ken Burns effect and so now let’s look at how to share your iMovie.

Whether you’re going to share it on YouTube or save it as a file and email it to someone or save it as a file to play on some of your other devices there are two places you can do that from one is over here on the file menu you would simply click file hover down to share and it presents you with various options email iTunes YouTube prepare for Facebook, Vimeo file or you can actually save one of your clips as an image file. The other place you can do that is to go here and select this little rectangular box with the up arrow and when you hover over it will say share I normally select that one and what I normally will do is always save it as a file and once I have it as a file I can do whatever I want with it so when I’m creating my YouTube videos I actually save it as a file. And when you click file it’s going to ask you to name it so let’s call this how to use iMovie and you’ll be presented with giving a description I’ll call it an awesome iMovie tutorial you can put tags in it so let’s call it call it iMovie.

The format we want video and audio notice here that the resolution has defaulted to k so you remember earlier I told you that the very first clip that you put in will determine the resolution of the video now if I wanted to only do a 1080p I’d have the option to select those but if I wanted to save it as a 4k video and I had placed a 1080p video first it would not give me an option to change it as a 4k video.

But here’s a quick hack so let’s say let’s just say the 4k video is not the first clip that you actually want to show on your iMovie. When you go to edit your iMovie drop that 4k clip there first and then another clip because you can always re-arrange them. But if you drop the 4k video clip there first you will be presented with the option upon saving it to save the whole video as a 4k resolution video.

So I’m going to go ahead and leave it at 4k here you your quality you can select low medium high best pro custom. Now one quick thing to look at here is that over here on the left it tells you how long this video during this video is and it tells you the size it tells you the estimated size gigabytes.  Now notice that if I change to a 1080p the time of the video remains the same but the size of the video got smaller and that’s because 4k videos take up more space.

Also if I change the quality of the video from let’s say high to low you’ll notice that the size of the video changed as well so I’m going to go ahead and go back to 4k and I’m going to leave it at high and high sufficient for your YouTube videos. Most of what you’re doing unless you’re creating the video let’s say for client you could you could select pro resolution but high is great for me.

And then your compression rate you can select faster or better quality and I always select better quality because who doesn’t want better quality. You click next and simply save it to wherever you want to save it to in your folders.

So I’ve created a folder called how to use iMovie and create a new folder let’s say finish project and iMovie will go ahead and save your file there.

And what’s going to happen is you’ll get this little clock thing here to show the activity. Depending on how much how large the video file is and what else you’ve got running on your computer will show how long it takes and once it’s finished it will show a complete area.

And that’s pretty much it folks. That’s how you use iMovie and if you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up leave me a comment in the comment section below let me know if you have any questions about iMovie or something else that you’d like me to cover and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel so that you get notified each and every time I upload awesome new content thanks a lot for joining in.

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September 16, 2020

How To Use iMovie – A Beginners Guide To Using iMovie

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