10 iMovie Tricks To Use In Your Next Video Project

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten quick iMovie tips that you can use in your next video project.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content.

So let's jump right into it. My first tip is about background. There are only a few backgrounds included with iMovie. But you can customize them to make them look different than the actual defaults. For instance we can take something like this underwater effect here. Once I've place it in the timeline I can select it and then go to the color correction tools. Now I can desaturated to make it gray. I can apply a blue or yellow tint to it. I can further play with some of the color things here. I can even go to Filters, go to Clip Filter and then apply something like a raster effect to it to make it a little more unique. This will work with any of the backgrounds. The animated ones and also the static ones.

So my second tip is you don't need to settle for one of the default backgrounds. You can bring in any graphic image you want. So, for instance, you can drag and drop a file from the Finder here, put it in, select it and make sure you go to the Cropping tool here and select Crop to Fit so it just fills the frame and acts as a background.

Now you can put titles, or picture in picture, video on top of it. So if I wanted to put a title here I select Titles and then I can select a title, add it on top of this background here  and I get this title text. Now you can choose from a variety of different fonts here. But my next tip is you can actually go further than what's seemingly available here. If you go to the bottom of this list you can choose Show Fonts. It doesn't work for all titles but for a lot of them. Once you go to Show Fonts now you have a complete list of all the fonts available on your Mac. So you can choose something very different than the standard fonts in iMovie.

Now you may want to zoom in on a video in iMovie. It's kind of counter intuitive how to do this. What you want to do is select the video clip then go to Cropping and you're actually going to choose Crop to Fill and crop the video to zoom in. It seems like you're actually just getting rid of the edge here. But that's what zooming in is. You crop it. You get what you want to show inside the cropped area. Hit the checkbox and you've, in fact, zoomed in on that section of the video.

What if you want to put a frame around your video. You can do that by creating a custom background. I've created this just rounded rectangle here. I'm going to set the cropping to Crop to Fill or Fit. It doesn't matter because I've made the graphic exactly 1080 so I can use that as the background. Then I can bring video in and use that as picture in picture on top. So I select that here and I'll make sure I select the video overlay settings here and I'll change to picture in picture. Then here I can adjust the size of this. I can position the playback head right there so I can actually see the frame. Expand it to what I want and now I've got the video framed in there. 

A really cool useful effect that you can use in your videos very easily is called Freeze Frame. So you get to a point in the video where you want to freeze it. Click on there to position the playback head. Then choose Modify at Freeze Frame. There's a handy keyboard shortcut for it as well. You choose that and it inserts this period of time where it freezes on that frame of video before then continuing on. Now you can adjust the Freeze Frame by clicking on these little circles here at the top and you can make it a shorter period of time or longer period of time as well. 

Related to that is Instant Replay. First you want to select an area. So click in your video and hit I for in. Move to another area and hit O for out. This selects an area. You can drag these handles too to adjust. You select an area that you want to be the Instant Replay area like the explosion of this particular firework. Once you have an area selected go to Modify, Instant Replay and select the speed. So let's say have it replay at half speed. Then it will insert that in there. So when you play it, it will do it in real speed and then it will do Instant Replay and it will even show that little title there. If you want to get rid of that Instant Replay title you can select it here and Delete it. You can also adjust using these circles here to adjust the speed. So I can slow it down or speed it up. 

Now if you've got a whole bunch of clips in your video you can select one and go to Filters here and add a Clip Filter for that specific clip. But if you want to apply a Filter to the entire project you can do that as well. Just click on Settings here and there is a button for Filter. Select the filter there and now that filter is applied across your entire project. You can easily turn it off as well by going back to Settings, choosing Filter, and selecting None.

Now if you want to narrate your movie or just have a little bit of audio in a certain spot you can go to Window, Record Voiceover, and just hit the V key. Then you get this little voiceover interface here where you can record. There's some settings here. Like you can choose the Microphone Input and Volume. You can choose whether or not you hear what's being played as you're narrating. So if you were wearing headphones you can actually hear what's going on and then use the microphone to record new audio. So you just start recording. It will give you a countdown. I'll record whatever it is you're saying and add it as an audio track to the video. You Stop it and you've got this regular audio track. You can actually move it around and do things with it just like you would any other audio you've brought into your project.

Now whether it's narration like that or some audio you just dragged and dropped under your timeline here you can fade audio in and out pretty easily. You've got these little circles here and you can click and drag them left and right so have a fade in and a fade out. You can also Option click at any point here on the line in the middle. So I can put a bunch of little points there and then I can drag down to quiet some video here in the middle. So I can add a bunch of points and drag down to create a muted section in the middle that fades out and then fades back in. This also works in any regular video here. You can see I can see the waveform at the bottom and I've got those circles. I can drag those for fade out and fade in. I can Option click and put a bunch of different points here to quiet a section.

So those are my ten tips. I have one bonus tip for you. If you use iMovie a lot and you notice you're running out of hard drive space, some of that space may be taken up by render files in iMovie. These are files that iMovie creates in order to speed up your editing. So you can more easily scrub back and forth and see the video. If you want to clear those out you can go to iMovie Preferences and there's a button here for Render Files delete. So that frees up that storage space. It may slow down iMovie a bit the next time you go back to a project as it regenerates those render files. But if you have a whole bunch of old projects and you're not expecting to go back to them any time soon it may be worth it to clear out those render files.