Video editing is a powerful skill to possess. Whether you are looking to create a video for a class project, youtube, or anything else, knowing a little bit of video editing skills can take your creativity and project to a whole new level. But where do you begin?
If you want to learn how to edit simple videos, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to use iMovie to edit a quick and simple video.
Before we dive in, if you’re a visual learner, check out this video that will walk you through the entire process of editing a video on iMovie. Step by step.
With that out of the way, let’s first learn a bit about the iMovie interface.
1. User Interface
When you first open up by movies, you will see an option to create a new project. You will then be presented with two options. You can make either a movie or a trailer.
A trailer is just a short teaser for a movie. Trailers are not in the scope of this blog post, so we will ignore that for now and select Movie. If you want to make a trailer later, Don’t worry, everything talked about in this video will apply to trailers as well.
Movies allow us to create an entire video from scratch, which is precisely what we want. So, select movies to continue.
Once you click movies, you will be taken to the project workspace. This is where we will be doing all of our work. This workspace consists of three windows.
- Media library
- Preview window
- Timeline
The media library is where you will find all of the building blocks for your video including video clips, audio tracks, music files and images.
The preview window shows the playback of your entire video. It also displays a preview of your video clips and title cards.
The timeline is where you will edit your audio and video clips, add transitions Etc.
There are a few other buttons you might want to know about. This one adds more room to your timeline.
2. Importing Clips
Import our media by dragging and dropping it into the media library.
Before you start dragging clips to your timeline, it’s a good idea to preview the Clips you want to use. To preview your clips, simply select them, and it will be prompted in the preview window. Click the spacebar or play button to watch the video clip. You can also “scrub” through the clips to preview them.
3. Adding video to your timeline
To create your first video, drag-and-drop an item from the media library into your timeline. You can place your video clips wherever you’d like. Once they are set in your timeline, you can select a clip and drag it with your mouse to change its position on a timeline.
4. Trimming Clips
Need to trim your clip? No problem. Use the blade tool to trim your clips by holding down the Command and B button.
You can also trim a clip by grabbing the yellow handles at either side of the clip and drag them right or left. This will make the video shorter, or in the case of a video you’ve already made shorter, it will make it longer.
Note that video editing on iMovie is non-destructive. This means that you can shorten the video length without fear of losing the actual footage. You can always grab the handle and drag it right, and it will restore any footage you have previously cut.
If you screw anything up, no big deal. You can just click Commands Z, and it will undo what you have just done.
5. Adding Music
Okay, so we got the video down, but if you’re going to make a really good movie, you’re going to need some music, right? So how do you add music to your iMovie video?
You can import music from your iTunes library right in two iMovie. but if you’re like me, you don’t use iTunes, so your iTunes library will be completely bare. If you’re in the same boat, what you’ll want to do is manually import your audio tracks.
You can import MP3 files and other audio formats from a folder right into your iTunes media library just like you would any other media file. You can edit music track length in the timeline just like a video.
Audio files are represented as waves in the timeline. Visual audio waves provide a key benefit when editing; You can place your clips at strategic moments in your music. For example, when there’s a bass-drop, the audio wave will represent that with a big spike.
If you want your video to have a stylistic stick transition right when an explosion happens, you can place your video clip right over that spike in the audio wave.
if your video contains voice over, remember to drop the volume of the music so that it does not overwhelm the narrator or speaker in the video.
6. Adding Transitions
Transitions are when two video clips merge into each other. iMovie offers a number of fun transitions to play around with. While they may not be as robust as a more professional tool like Premiere Pro, these transitions will get the job done.
To use the transition, simply drag and drop.
Try not to add too many transitions. They can easily overwhelm and annoy the viewers, so keep it simple. To maintain consistency within your video, it’s also a good idea to stick to one or two types of transitions.
7. Title Cards
Title cards are just that; text on a screen. They are most often used when introducing something or someone.
Title cards can have a background image, or they can be placed over an existing video. A lower third, for instances of title cards that only takes up one-third of the lower portion of the frame and typically is used to highlight somebody’s name or occupation.
Adding title cards to your video is not just for style. There’s a lot of people that are hearing impaired, and adding a title card overlay helps communicate your video’s message more effectively.
8. Exporting Your Movie
Okay, great, so you have laid out your video clips on your timeline just how you want them, you trim them accordingly, you’ve added some sweet transitions, some visual effects, and added some music. If you’re happy with how your video looks, it’s time to export Your video to a file so you can upload it to YouTube or share it with your friends and family.
On the top right corner of iMovie, there is a share button with four options. Email, save current frame, export to Facebook and YouTube, or export as a file. Most of the time, we are going to want to choose to save to a file. However, selecting the YouTube Facebook export provides you with a couple of useful options, such as the ability to add tags directly to the metadata of that video file and even a description. This will come in handy when you’re uploading the video to YouTube. If you don’t plan to add metadata, Simply select file export and the file will be downloaded to your desktop.
Conclusion
And that’s really all there is to it! By now you should have an awesome video edited from scratch using iMovie. I hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you did, be sure to share it with friends. If you are looking for more “How-to” posts just like this one, click here to check out all the MakerHub has to offer.