Learn iMovie Basics By Example

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Learn the basics of using iMovie on your Mac by following along with me with this example. So sometimes the best way to learn how to use an app is by following along with an example. So I want you to get some things ready. Get three to five video clips in any standard format, maybe something that you shot on your iPhone, and save them as files so you have them in an examples folder in the finder. Then also maybe gather a few images and optionally a music file in any sound format. So for instance here I've got a folder that has four mp4 files, an mov file, there's a simple little music file, and two images. I'm going to use this as the content to create a video in iMovie. So as I demonstrate how to use iMovie, use your own files to create your own project. Pause this video as much as you need or even go back a few seconds here and there to follow along so you can learn all of the little skills I'm going to teach you. So the first thing I need to do is launch iMovie. I'll use spotlight to do that and you may see the projects page here, maybe with other projects that you've started. If you're already in a project like I'll go down to this project here and click on the projects button at the top left to go back to the projects level. Now whenever you're working on something that isn't related to previous projects it's a good idea to put that in a new library so you've got a completely separate file that contains all of it. So I'm going to go to file and then going to go to open library and then create a new one and I'll just call this example one and I'll save it. Now nothing's going to change here because it's showing you all projects right now. Instead I'm going to switch to just having it show example one that one library there and I haven't created anything in it yet so of course it's empty. I just have it create new. I can click there or go to file and then new movie and it will prompt me which library do I want to create it in. So I want to put it in this new one I created. Now I've got a completely blank project and I can start bringing in my media. On the left here you're going to see all your libraries and I've got that example one here and then I've got under it I've got different folders or they're just called events where you can put different pieces of media. I'm going to move this over a bit here and I'm going to grab the five video files here and drag them into this space where it says import media and then it's going to place those five video files here and if I want I could rename this. Now I've got these five here but I haven't actually started building anything yet. I've just gathered together five video clips. The actual project itself is shown in this timeline here at the bottom and it's empty right now. In order to add something to it I can select one of these clips. Let's start with this one and notice the two yellow handles on either side. I can trim off some from the beginning and some from the end of this clip to get just the portion I want. I can use this preview area here to help me get to the right start and end spots. Then I can drag that yellow area into this timeline here and drop it in. So now I've got a short segment of this clip in here. I could also click the plus button and simply add the entire clip here to the end. This timeline is getting pretty long. I can scroll back and forth between it but I could also zoom out a bit so I could see each of these clips. I can select this next clip here and I can simply just drag the entire thing in without trimming either from the beginning or the end. So I'm dragging that in there. So now I've got three clips in here. I don't have to always put them in order. If I want this clip to come after the first one I could drag it into the spot between them and you can see how it places it there. Then I could say drag this one all the way to the beginning like that and even after I've dragged it in I can still trim from the beginning and end by simply grabbing the left side like that, dragging to the right, and dragging the right side to the left. I could also add more by pulling out like that. So you have complete control there. Another thing you can do is you can split a clip in the middle. So say if I wanted to use the first part of this clip somewhere else I can get to a portion that I want like say right there. Click and notice it's going to leave a line behind there. I can now go to modify and split clip or command B and it will split this into two pieces. I can now grab one of these pieces and drag it to another location like that. So I'm using this clip in two spots like this. I could have done the same thing by simply grabbing a portion of it like that, dragging it in, and then grabbing another portion like that and dragging that in. I can use the clip as many times as I want. So now I've already done quite a bit here because I've taken five different videos and I've combined them into this one timeline. Let's add some more. In between each of these clips there's nothing. It goes from one clip and jumps directly to the next. But you could have a different kind of transition by clicking on transitions here. Then you have all these different transitions you can try. For instance, a simple one is cross dissolve. If I grab cross dissolve and I drag it to a space between two clips like here, now you could see it indicates that instead of just a jump cut there's a cross dissolve there. And I could play it from that point and you could see how it dissolved from one into another. I could double click on this and I can expand the duration make it say last for one second instead of half of a second. But note that you do have to pay attention to how much time you've got on either clip. A lot of times people find they can't apply a transition and simply because one clip or the other doesn't have enough length to it to support a transition. You can select any one of these so you can do something kind of fancy like this. Just drag it in and replace and now you can see it's going to slide like that. So you can use any one of these transitions. You could also select a clip and then just double click on one of these to add that transition to either end. In fact you can select a clip do command A for all and just double click and it will apply that transition throughout your entire movie. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com Now another thing you may want to do is to add titles and you've got a title section here. Titles can be used in two different ways. They can take over the entire video like opening titles or closing titles. So for instance I can go down here in the list and choose something like this. I could drag this to the beginning and now I've got some opening titles here. So you could see if I were to scrub over this you can see what it looks like. With it selected I could also use this preview area, double click in it, and I could edit the text. Not just what the text is but other things like font, bold, color, and all of that. So with this now taking its place in the main timeline it is a title all to itself. But you could also apply a title over existing video. So for instance I could drag this one called lower third right here and you can see how it appears over the video. I have to drag it and leave it on top of the video there and I could have this be whatever I want. I could even center it like that, change the font, and everything. So I've got two different types of titles here. You also can add backgrounds. So I can say take something like this one and I could drag that in here and it's just this background that's going to fill this space. But by using a background like that I can take a title, drag this up onto it, so the title is now on top of a background. So this is how you can have something more interesting than just a black background with a title. Now let's work with some of these clips here. I select a clip and I look in the preview area. There's a lot of things here I could change. Some of these have to do with color and the light. For instance I could deeply saturate this one or desaturate it with a slider right here under colors. I can go to cropping and I could change from fit which will just show the entire clip to crop to fill and then I could grab one of these corners here and crop in. Now if I were to accept this by clicking the check mark there you can see how it crops it to it. If I were to go back to cropping I could expand this or just go to fit like that to show the entire thing. Cropping is sometimes necessary if the clip isn't the same width and height as your video. You can also go here to special effects and add a clip filter like that and you can see in the preview area these different filters applied. Some of them are pretty extreme like this one and this one while others are basically just playing around with the color. Now in addition to having video clips in your movie you can also insert photos. So I'm going to go back to my media here. I've got those five clips but remember I have those two images here. I'm going to select these two and drag them in as well. So now you can see I've got two pictures in there. I can drag one of these pictures in just like a piece of video. When I insert it in there it's going to be a certain length and I can expand it and it doesn't matter how long or short it is it's a still image it just remains the same. I can select it and I can use the same cropping tools to crop it. In this case the photo is taller than the video frame here so I'm not going to adjust what part of the image I'm showing or even shrink it down to center it on something else. I can also choose fit but in this case since it's a taller photo you'll just see black bars on the left and right since there's no image to include there. That's why cropping is usually the best option but you could also choose Ken Burns to add some movement. Named after the documentary filmmaker this allows you to create a start cropping and an end cropping. You can see the two there. So now if I look over the length of this clip you could see it go from the start cropping to the end cropping which creates a nice movement effect even though the image is a still image. And the nice thing about using your own images is you could use them instead of those backgrounds for things like titles. So I could bring this still image in here and I can move this title onto it. I'll select this background press the delete key to delete it. So now my titles are over my own custom image. This could be a photo or could be a graphic I made in a graphics app. You can also play with sound. This clip here has sound probably all of your clips do and you can use the dots here on the left and right to have the sound fade in or fade out. You can also grab the line and go up or down to increase or decrease the volume. But sometimes you want to add audio like music that isn't part of any clip. That's why I've got this audio file here. We'll go back to media drag in this audio clip and you can see it adds it right here. So now I could drag that in and I could place it just below a clip here or all the way at the bottom where there's this special section for music. Either one will allow you to adjust it so you can get it to start where you want and you can use those same dots there to fade out at the end or in at the beginning and the line to adjust the volume as well. So now to view your project you can just go and click at the beginning to place the line there and then just play it. But this just plays it in iMovie. If you want somebody else to see it or you want to view it outside of iMovie you want to export it. To do that go to file and then share and then choose file and then you can make some choices here and then next and this allows you to save a file is your project. And you can see here I've got the finished video. I could double click on it to open it up in QuickTime player and there's my project. When you're done click on projects here. If this is the first time exiting the project it's going to ask you to name it so come up with a name for it and there you'll see it and be able to actually go back into it anytime you want to continue to work with it. The nice thing about putting this in its own library file is you can just switch to another library and when you're done with that project you know it's completely contained inside of that library that you created. So you can archive this somewhere else to save drive space. So hopefully by following along with me in this tutorial you learned the basics of how to use iMovie on your Mac. Thanks for watching!