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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today’s episode let’s take a look at how to use Cut-Aways in iMovie 09.
So, I love cutaways in video. A cutaway is when you’re talking and you’re on camera and then you describe something so you cut away to a picture, all the same time the audio remaining constant. And then, after you’re done showing the picture you go back to the person talking. So it’s one continuous audio shot but you splice in a new picture in the middle of it. I used it a lot when using iMovie 06, you can do it through some tricks there and then you couldn’t do it very well at all on iMovie 08. But iMovie 09 now adds it officially as a feature. Let’s go and take a look at how to do it.
So here I am in iMovie 09. Now, I’ve got some video here where I’m talking about a picture I took of the city of Denver and I’m going to splice in that picture as a cutaway as I’m talking. First thing I need to do though is go to iMovie Preferences. And in Preferences there’s an option for Show Advanced Tools. I’m going to make sure that is on. Now that I’ve got that on, I’m going to go and select this clip here and drag it into my project. Now right about here is where I start talking about the photo. And I’m gonna go ahead and want to insert that photo here, so I’m gonna drag it from the Finder. Here I am dragging it from the Finder here and I’m actually gonna drag it on top of the video. I don’t have to worry about exactly where it is, I can adjust it later. Drop it in and I get several different items here. The third one is Cutaway, I’m gonna select that. Now when I do, I get it inserted but you can see it’s above the main video here. And I can adjust it: I can lengthen it, I can move the beginning, I can also go ahead and do clip adjustments, video adjustments, and cropping. I definitely want to do cropping. Now over to the right I can see that by default that it’s set to a Ken Burns style thing. So, as I go ahead and play it here I can see the talking and then there it is moving inward in the Ken Burns effect. I wanna go ahead maybe and turn that off. I can set it to fit or crop. I’m gonna set it to crop, there I go, and now it will stay steady. Another thing I can do with Clip Adjustments is I can go ahead and set a fade. So I want to do a manual fade of half a second. So instead of abruptly appearing it will slowly fade in like that and, the same thing, it will slowly fade out. So the audio remains the same, but the picture is spliced in with the video right there and then spliced back out. It’s a very nice effect, you can add as many photos as you want, it’s a great way to do a narrated guide through some of your photos with video of you talking as well.
There are also all sorts of other things you can do with it. For instance, you can take home movies that you’ve got and photos you took on the same trip or with the same event and go ahead and splice them all together, creating say 10-minute video but also showing some of your favorite photos of that event in the same video. So give cutaways a try in your next iMovie project. Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.