Okay, I did a lot of tinkering in iMovie ‘08 and it’s so vastly different that I barely knew how to make an edit point. That’s because there are no edit points. iMovie ‘08 works entirely through nudging and slipping and some splitting. But it’s really confusing if you’re at all used to the previous versions of iMovie.

First and foremost, your action keys are no longer the same. So say goodbye to (command) T for a cut. In order to make a cut you now have to select the clip to the point where you want to make the “cut” and then go to your edit tab and select Split Clip. It looks like this:

As you can see the Split Clip option is not lit in this picture and that’s because this version of iMovie will only allow you to do that with video clips and not photo clips. The movie that I was working on was entirely made of photos from my iPhoto Library.

There is a really good tutorial page on the apple site and that link is here: iMovie Tutorials

You can find a plethora of little quicktimes on how to use editing techniques, lay down multiple audio tracks, sharing your movies, etc. Oh, and there is one way around moving your dialogue if you want to go through the extra work: you can make a sound file of your dialogue and then export it to iTunes. Then, when you have it saved in your iTunes library you can import it back into your timeline as a separate sound file (it will appear as a green sound line in your editing window of iMovie) and then move it to wherever you want. Just remember to adjust the volume on your video clip so that it’s not doubling or echoing the same sound.

Finally, I tried to take an iMovie file and then burn a DVD of it using iDVD. This proved harder than it should have been. There is some confusion as to what iDVD considers your media and so iMovie asks you to go to the Share tab in your top menu bar and then select Media Browser (should look like this):

And then when you select that another menu will pop up and that looks like this:

This menu gives you options to save your project as either tiny, mobile, medium or large (corresponding to how large you want the final format to be and it gives you handy little correspondence icons). Then, when you have it saved as one of these sizes and stored in a place you’ll remember open iDVD and add your movie:

You can do this several ways but I like to get into the menu drop box mode of iDVD and then click on the little + symbol at the very bottom left corner of the page, a new box will pop open on the drop box page and then you simply drag your saved file of the movie into that new box and there you go!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Video Production Tips, Videos.