Featured Movie Tutorials
Sharing to YouTubeâ„¢ 2:13 
Creating a Movie 3:08 
Importing from a Camcorder 2:39 
Skimming Video 1:53 
Trimming Video 0:59 
Sharing to MobileMe Gallery 1:41 Feedback
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One Place for All Your Video
Enjoy and Rediscover Your Video
Making Movies
Movies
iMovie ’08 makes viewing and working with video as intuitive as enjoying your photos. And now sharing your movies is easier than ever.
Sharing Your Movies
Advanced Techniques
Creating a DVD from Your Videos, Photos, and Music
DVDs
Quickly create a Hollywood-style DVD using an Apple-designed theme that gives your home movie a professional look.
Browse all text tutorials
Assembling a Simple Movie
Adding Clip Transitions
Sometimes the shift from one clip to another can be a little too quick. Rather than jarring viewers with a sudden change, transitions let you move the viewer smoothly by blending the end of one clip with the beginning of another.
To apply a transition:
Inserting Title Cards
There’s a quick and easy way to add a title card with a black background before or after a clip.
To insert a title card:
Use title cards at the beginning of your project to introduce the creators of the movie or at the end of your movie for movie credits.
Sharing a Movie
Emailing a Movie
You can easily share your movies by publishing them on your MobileMe Gallery or YouTube. Or you may simply want to email a short 30-second movie to friends or family. But, be careful: If you email a gigantic movie file, it could take up all the space in your friend’s email inbox. Try to keep any movie file you email under 2MB.
To email a movie file:
Organizing Your Movies in iTunes
It’s easy to organize your own home movies using iTunes. Once you move them to iTunes, you can view them on your iPod or iPhone, or you can watch them on the flat-screen TV using Apple TV.
To organize your movies in iTunes:
Shooting and Recording Sound
Setting Up the Establishing Shot
You’ll always need at least one “establishing shot†that indicates where your movie takes place. This is often a wide shot that introduces your main characters and shows where they’re situated. Sometimes this is the first shot in your movie.
Establishing shots can be very creative. Think about shooting from up high, over your head, or through a window. You can even begin by shooting a sign that shows where your movie takes place.
Framing Your Shots
Pay attention to how tightly you frame your subject. Consider, for example, how large a person or object appears in the picture frame. Wide shots, such as shots of an entire football field or an expansive landscape, help to establish a scene. Close-up shots bring you closer to the characters and usually occur after a wide shot has identified where your movie takes place.
Incorporating Medium Shots
When working with a handheld video camera, it’s common to shoot everything as a close-up. The LCD screen on your video camera is often so small that it makes your subject look boring unless you get in really tight.
Fight this urge and trust that when you see the video on your television or Mac, filling the entire screen with just a face will make your audience a little uncomfortable. The medium shot, showing two or more characters onscreen or one character from the waist up, is the kind of image viewers are used to seeing in TV shows and movies.
Recording Sound
As you start making movies, you’ll quickly discover that it’s more enjoyable to watch poor-quality video with great sound quality than high-quality video with terrible sound. You’ll also discover that most handheld video cameras use omnidirectional microphones. They record sounds from beside, behind, and in front of the camera, resulting in ambient noise that can be very distracting.
To create movies with better sound:
Editing Your Movie
Selecting Favorites
As you review your footage, you can mark favorites, reject footage you know you’ll never use, and organize clips with keywords.
To mark favorites:
When you mark a clip as a favorite, iMovie places a green line at the top of the clip.
Using Keywords
Keywords help you quickly identify clips that share a common attribute.
To assign keywords:
To find video tagged with keywords:
Any finds all the video tagged with one or more of the keywords you’ve selected.
All finds only the video tagged with the combination of keywords you’ve selected.
Include shows the video tagged with the selected keywords.
Exclude hides the video tagged with the selected keywords.
Extending Audio over Cutaways
It’s common to cut from one clip to another and have the audio from the first clip continue to play after the second video clip begins.
To extend audio across multiple clips:
Because you’ve extracted the audio from exactly the part of the clip you split, the audio seamlessly plays across the next shot.
Normalizing Sound Levels
Normalizing audio brings a clip’s audio volume to the same level as all the other clips, keeping volume at a consistent level throughout your movie.
To normalize audio in your movie project:
Adding Credits
It’s easy to add dramatic scrolling credits to the end of your movie.
To add scrolling credits:
Making a DVD
Adding Audio to Your Main Menu
After selecting a theme for your DVD, you can add an audio track to play while your audience views the main menu.
To add audio to the main menu:
Previewing a DVD
Before burning your DVD, be sure to preview it.
To preview a DVD:
Modifying Menu Buttons
It’s easy to change the appearance of menu buttons on the main menu page.
To change the style of a button:
To change the size of a button:
