iMovie walkthrough, part 2

See also: Part One of this enlightening walkthrough.

Okay, now that you've imported some video files into iMovie, your editing screen should look something like this. (Just imagine your own videos there, instead of the random ones I photographed.)

In the second image, I have highlighted and labeled some of the basic areas of the iMovie screen. You can see there is an area for watching the video clips, an area I call the "library" for holding the clips you've imported, an area containing controls and a timeline area (where you'll do a majority of the actual video editing).

What you basically want to do is take videos from your library and drag them down onto your timeline, where you can move them around, overlap them with sounds, and order clips to your heart's content. Remember, video's appearing only in the clip library will not be a part of your video; they have to be moved onto the timeline to be included.

After you drag a clip down to the timeline, it will disappear from the library. This can be a problem if you want to use that clip multiple times or if you want to use part of that clip in one place and another part of it in another place. Here's your solution:

You can cut, copy and paste video clips or portions of them just like you can words in a text document. All you need to do is select that clip and go to the Edit menu and select either "cut" or "copy" (I'd recommend copy.). Then go to the same menu and hit "paste" to paste that clip back into the library (or onto the timeline).

(Alternately, you can use keyboard shortcuts to do this. Just remember than instead of "control-v" or "control-c," on a Mac it's "apple button-c" or "apple-button-v."

After you have dragged a video clip or two down to the timeline area, the timeline area should look something like this.

This image shows a simplified view of the timeline -- it shows only the video clips that you've put there.

To switch to the more useful (and more complicated) editing view, use the button you see pictured at left. Clicking on the right-hand icon, the one that looks like a clock, will change the timeline into advanced editing mode, which looks something like what you see below.

Now that's enough for the second part of this walkthrough. When I return, we actually get to editing.

Related posts:

1. iMovie walkthrough, part 3
2. iMovie walkthrough, part 1
3. iMovie tutorial tomorrow
4. Making your computer play the Flip video files (Mac version)
5. A word or two about licenses