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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 using Picture In Picture in iMovie ‘09. So in Episode 238 we looked at how to use Cutaways in iMovie 09, now let’s look at how to use Picture In Picture, which is kind of the next step. Instead of just replacing all the video, and leaving the audio track going, we’re actually going to have video inside of the video, or picture inside of your video, and you can still see yourself talkig and your audio going at the same time. Let’s take a look.
So the first thing you need to do is you need to go into iMovie Preferences, and you need to make sure Show Advance Tools is checked. This is what enables things like Cutaways and Picture In Picture as options. So here I am in iMovie 09, now I’ve got a clip down here and an empty project. I’m going to drag the clip into the project and it appears there. Now I’m going to go ahead and use a photo as an example for Picture In Picture. I’m going to drag it from the Desktop and you can see I’m going to drop it right here on the video in the project. Now I get to choose what to do with it. I’m going to choose Picture In Picture. Now it’ll appear above it, this is the time in which it will appear. So at this point of the video it starts, then it ends here. I can stretch the ends to any position I want.
Now, when I go inside it here I can see over on the right that I have the Picture In Picture appearing here, as a default size in the upper right hand corner. Now I can also go over here on the right and grab one of the corners and drag it to change the size, of the Picture in Picture, and can move it anywhere I want–take any corner down so I can move it to the upper left, to the bottom, anyplace I want. The only restriction is it’s gotta be the same dimensions as my video, so in this case it’s wide-screen video and it fits the same dimensions as the main video. So if I stretch it to fill the whole screen, it’ll fit perfectly Unfortunately you can’t include a Picture In Picture that is a different shape.
So I can also go ahead and with it selected open up the Inspector and I can change some options. Like with cutaways, I can choose a Picture In Picture effect. I can choose it to dissolve, zoom in, or swap in, and I can set the duration and that will basically set the transition at the beginning and the end. So here’s the dissolve for instance, and you can see here at the beginning of the video it’ll fade in. I can go ahead and change that to zoom, and you can see how it works now. You also notice that there are a variety of other options including border, border color–either black, gray, or white–and even a drop shadow. All these can really help the Picture In Picture stand out in some circumstances. Course you can also use video as Picture in Picture, so basically you can have some video in the corner as you, in the mainframe, explain what’s going on in the video. Or you could have you in the corner explaining what’s going on in the mainframe. Or you could use them to do cheap special effects. So basically you can drag a variety of things to use into your Picture In Picture, like a photo off the desktop, or you can drag a photo from the media browser inside of iMovie, or just another video that’s in the Events area of iMovie, into the project area. So that was a quick look at Picture in Picture. Hope you find it useful. Til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.