PE1_iMovie

The Lynda.com training series are amazing. I have my own students use the free samplings provided on the Apple website when we begin our units on Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Soundtrack Pro. So I am aware of the potential of the Lynda training series. The videos are always very complete overviews of the software but what I love most about them are the little tips, tricks, and other nuggets of gold that even experienced users of the software can learn and add to their own tool kits. So even though I consider myself fairly proficient with iMovie over the next three posts I will be looking for those little tidbits of knowledge and explaining why I think they are so important.

iMovie Gets Things Organized

Most of my editing experience comes from working professionally as a Final Cut Pro Editor for about 4 years. My typical editing job was taking 25-30 hours of video and film and editing it into a 22 minute TV show. To do this efficiently organization was key. We had a team of tape loggers that would comb through all the footage and gave each and every clip keywords, descriptions and marked clips as good or bad. Needless to say this was a very labor-intensive process. I have never had an editing project in iMovie with an amount of footage that required that much organization, but I was happy to see that iMovie makes tagging, marking favorites, and rejecting clips a fast and easy process.

As with most operations there are a couple ways to do things but I am always looking for the most efficient. In the case of marking favorites, and rejecting clips you should start by activating the Advanced Tools options in the iMovie Preferences. Then you have the most options for your working style than simply being restricted to the slow way. With the Advanced Tools on marking favorites, or clips for rejection is as easy as clicking and dragging. Very cool!

Tagging clips with keywords is also as simple as click-and-drag. I can see how this feature would be incredibly beneficial if iMovie was your only editing option and you had hours of footage on your computer. By tagging footage it allows you to quickly sort clips to find exactly what you need.

Along the same lines as tagging is a feature called people finder. This analyzes your footage for any parts that have good clear close-ups of faces. A great feature if you had to go through hours of shaky home movie footage to find those few good shots.


Overall some great features to speed up your search for usable footage.