Posted by Gary Rosenzweig on 11/11/09.
You can follow Gary on Twitter.
Learn how to speed up your video clips and use slow motion in iMovie 09. You can also reverse the direction of a clip.
Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now on todays episode lets learn how to Speed Up, Slow Down and Reverse video in iMovie. So iMovie 09 has all sorts of cool little features like the ability to speed up slow down and reverse video. lets go take a look where those features are and how to use them. As always, lets make sure you have Advance tools turned on in the iMovie preferences, though you don’t really need it for this. Now when you have a project you’ve got some videos down here, you drag one to your project Up here. Now this will play back at normal speed. If you wanna go ahead and speed it up, what you need to do is go to the information for this clip in your project. You can do that by selecting it and pressing I. This will bring up the inspector. In the first part of the inspector is for clip and in here you will see speed. And you have to hit convert entire clip in order to go ahead and control the speed. So you have to wait for that to happen, and once you have that, you have a speed control here where you can speed it up. So lets look what happens if when we speed it up 400 times. Done and play this back and we can see the preview over here and see how it is much faster. Now we can go ahead into inspector again and we can slow it down and put it into slow motion. And then we play it back and put you can see its slow motion. Now keep in mind If you have video that is standard, say 30 frames per second you’re not going to be able to get any more detail there. So you actually see the frames play out one by one when you slow it down enough. But some cameras now have can shoot 60 frames per second. Which will actually create a very nice slow motion effect. Now we can also go ahead and look at the inspector here and see that we’ve have a direction button to reverse the direction of the video. So we can go ahead and say speed that up 200% and do it in reverse. And play that back. And we’ll see there we go. okay other things we should look at when you’re doing this is to go ahead and into the inspector here there’s also a tab for audio. A lot of times when you reverse the video or speed it up, you don’t want the sound to play. The sound will be all distorted. It may be a useful effect if that’s what you’re going for. But if you want to actually get rid of the audio because you want to play music over it or you have another voice over going on, you can go ahead and reduce the volume of the clip using the audio tab all the way to zero.
Now the slider here will take you down to 12.5 percent, 1/8th speed all the way up to 800%. But you can actually go further than that. For instance You can type in the field here 1600 percent. You can go all the way down to any small percent and stretch the video. You can also go ahead and change the time here and change the exact time like I said to say 7 seconds.
Now I find speeding up video is very useful if you have a long sequence when you want to make a video very concise.
For instance when I was showing a video of Mac world expo, earlier this year. I sped up a video of a walk through of the crowd. So you could see how big the expo was but it only took about 30 seconds of video instead of five minutes to walk through the entire floor. Slowing video down could be great for sports Lets say you have a home video of your children playing sports
Like a great soccer play or sliding into home plate, you can create a slow motion playback. Remember you can reuse use the same video more than once in your finished project. So you can show the play full speed and then play back in slow motion.
Hope you found this feature of Imovie 09 Useful. Til next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig
with MacMost Now.
Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now on todays episode lets learn how to Speed Up, Slow Down and Reverse video in iMovie. So iMovie 09 has all sorts of cool little features like the ability to speed up slow down and reverse video. lets go take a look where those features are and how to use them. As always, lets make sure you have Advance tools turned on in the iMovie preferences, though you don’t really need it for this. Now when you have a project you’ve got some videos down here, you drag one to your project Up here. Now this will play back at normal speed. If you wanna go ahead and speed it up, what you need to do is go to the information for this clip in your project. You can do that by selecting it and pressing I. This will bring up the inspector. In the first part of the inspector is for clip and in here you will see speed. And you have to hit convert entire clip in order to go ahead and control the speed. So you have to wait for that to happen, and once you have that, you have a speed control here where you can speed it up. So lets look what happens if when we speed it up 400 times. Done and play this back and we can see the preview over here and see how it is much faster. Now we can go ahead into inspector again and we can slow it down and put it into slow motion. And then we play it back and put you can see its slow motion. Now keep in mind If you have video that is standard, say 30 frames per second you’re not going to be able to get any more detail there. So you actually see the frames play out one by one when you slow it down enough. But some cameras now have can shoot 60 frames per second. Which will actually create a very nice slow motion effect. Now we can also go ahead and look at the inspector here and see that we’ve have a direction button to reverse the direction of the video. So we can go ahead and say speed that up 200% and do it in reverse. And play that back. And we’ll see there we go. okay other things we should look at when you’re doing this is to go ahead and into the inspector here there’s also a tab for audio. A lot of times when you reverse the video or speed it up, you don’t want the sound to play. The sound will be all distorted. It may be a useful effect if that’s what you’re going for. But if you want to actually get rid of the audio because you want to play music over it or you have another voice over going on, you can go ahead and reduce the volume of the clip using the audio tab all the way to zero.
Now the slider here will take you down to 12.5 percent, 1/8th speed all the way up to 800%. But you can actually go further than that. For instance You can type in the field here 1600 percent. You can go all the way down to any small percent and stretch the video. You can also go ahead and change the time here and change the exact time like I said to say 7 seconds.
Now I find speeding up video is very useful if you have a long sequence when you want to make a video very concise.
For instance when I was showing a video of Mac world expo, earlier this year. I sped up a video of a walk through of the crowd. So you could see how big the expo was but it only took about 30 seconds of video instead of five minutes to walk through the entire floor. Slowing video down could be great for sports Lets say you have a home video of your children playing sports
Like a great soccer play or sliding into home plate, you can create a slow motion playback. Remember you can reuse use the same video more than once in your finished project. So you can show the play full speed and then play back in slow motion.
Hope you found this feature of Imovie 09 Useful. Til next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig
with MacMost Now.
Mention this post on Twitter!
Submit this post to Digg.
Check out the free MacMost weekly email newsletter.
Become a fan of MacMost on Facebook.
Your videos are EXCELLENT. Thanks especially for the one on reversing/speeding/slowing clips.