iMovie walkthrough, part 1

As a follow-up to our iMovie tuto­r­ial meet­ing on Tuesday, I’m post­ing this picture-laden walk­through of the basics of how to use iMovie.

First of all, you’re going to need to go to the edit­ing com­puter in Kelly and Mark’s office — this if of course assum­ing that you are going to use that com­puter. You might have iMovie installed on your own Mac in your own office. In that case, use what­ever you feel com­fort­able using. Note, there are two com­put­ers at the edit­ing sta­tion. You’re after the big, alu­minum one, not the plastic-cased one.

For those of you unfa­mil­iar with Macs, there’s a lit­tle job­ber down at the bot­tom of the screen called the Dock. You may have to hover your mouse down in the bottom-middle of the screen to make it appear. When it does appear, it will look some­thing like this. You’ll need to click on the iMovie icon to start the pro­gram — it’s the on that looks like a blue and black clap­board, sixth from the left.

When iMovie opens, you’ll be pre­sented with the basic edit­ing screen, pic­tured at left. If you’re start­ing a new project and this screen isn’t blank, go up to the File menu and select “New Project” to start mak­ing a new video.

You’ll next need to get videos off of the Flip cam­era and into iMovie so you can start play­ing with them. Connect the Flip cam­era to the com­puter. Go back to the computer’s desk­top and find the icon for the Flip cam­era. Open it, nav­i­gate to the video files, select the ones you want, and drag them into iMovie. It’s as sim­ple as that.

There’s another method too: Go to the File menu and choose the “Import” option. You’ll be allowed to choose a direc­tory from which to upload your video files. Just select the ones you want and click “open” to start the import process.

It will take some time for the videos to be imported. That time will depend on the size and num­ber of video files you’re importing.

When the import is done, you’ll be pre­sented with the basic edit­ing screen again, only this time it will show that you have some video files to work with.

Okay, that’s enough for one post. I’ll fol­low up with another that gets us into actu­ally edit­ing the video files in iMovie.