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.