Add a Camcorder Effect in iMovie With Keynote

Some apps and Final Cut Pro allow you to add a camcorder overlay to make video look like it was recorded on an old video camera. You can do the same in iMovie using an overlay created in Keynote. With this approach, you can highly customize the camcorder overlay. Once you create your Keynote template, you can continue to customize and adjust it for future use.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to add a camcorder effect to your video using iMovie and Keynote.
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So you can add a camcorder effect to your video in a lot of different ways. You can use special apps but those will usually overlay it live and you're stuck with it on the video. You can't really alter it afterwards. Or there are apps that only have a limited number of functions. You can also use a special effect in Final Cut Pro if you own it. But you could do the same kind of thing using just iMovie and Keynote. As a matter of fact you can do it in a way that makes it very customizable.
We're going to start off by going into Keynote. We want to choose a wide theme so it matches the video dimensions and we're just going to go with a black background. I'm going to zoom out to fit everything into the slide and I'm going to delete the default text here. So there are a bunch of different elements that I want to add. I want to add the little squared off corners. I want to add a red record dot and the word record, a date, and maybe a battery level. All sorts of things.
So to add the corners I'm going to go to Shape and I'm going to click the Pen tool. Click once to put a point. Now to put the second point I'm going hold the Shift key down so I have a horizontal line. Then I'm going to draw it to about here. Click again. Then I'm going to hold the shift key again and draw the vertical line. Like that. I'm going to hit Return so I'm finished. Go to Format, Style and then change it to be a 4 Pt line. Now I'm going to drag it to the corner. So I'm going to click off of it and then click it again so I select it as an object. Drag to the corner. I'm going to move it  away from the corner. So I'm going to hold the Shift key and do the right arrow five times and the down arrow five times. By holding the Shift key I'm moving in steps of ten instead of steps of one. So I quickly move away from the edge. Now to duplicate it I'm going to hold the Option key and click and drag. I'm going to drag it all the way to the bottom here and move it away from the bottom with those five Shift up arrows. It already was moved away from the left because I was locking it to the position of the one on the top. I'm going to go to Arrange and Flip Vertically. So now I've got the left side here. I'm going to select both of these, Option drag over to the right and it'll lock to these vertically. But I'm going to Shift left arrow five times so that it's away from there. Then Arrange and Flip Horizontally. Now I have my four corners.
Next I want to do the red record circle. So I'm going to go to Shape. Choose circle. I'm going to drag this off here to the corner. Maybe make it a little bit smaller. I'll hold the Shift key there as well so now it will shrink as a circle. It won't just shrink in the one dimension. Get it to be a red dot to about that size. I'm going to go to Style over here and change the color fill to red. Let's add some text. Click there and I'm going to add the text RECORDING. Go and select it all and under text here I'm going to increase the size. Maybe 50 will be better. Now I'm going to drag this and put it right there.
Now let's add some more elements. I can Option drag the text here and put a copy of it down there. I'm going to go into Text and left justify it. So now I can type and it will come out of the left side. I'm going to put a date. Now I'm going to put a battery here. Now I go to Shape and I don't have to create a battery shape. I can Search for it. There actually is a battery shape there. So I can move this to the corner here. I will maybe adjust its size a little bit. I'm going to go to Style and change its color to white. I can also go here and go to Format, Shape & Lines, Break apart and it breaks apart the outside and the inside of the battery. Under Arrange turn off Constrained Proportions. Now I can drag just one edge of it and make it look like the battery is being drained a bit. 
I can do other things as well. I could create a little video tape icon down there. So I'm going to do a circle, Option drag moves that apart. Select both circles. Go to Style. No Fill. Border is going to be a line border at 4 pts. I'm going to add a line there and move it so it snaps to the top of each circle like that. Change that to 4 pts as well. Add a rectangle to it. Change that to No Fill and a line border. Move it around. There we go. Select All of those and go to Arrange Group. Move this down to the corner here and shrink it a bit. I could have also used Shape and then done record and there's this little camera shape there and I could use that.
Now that I've got all this I want to create an animation. I want to have the red dot blink. That will make it more than just a simple overlay. So to make the red dot blink I'm going to Control click on this slide here and duplicate the slide. On the second slide I'm going to Delete the red dot. So I've got a red dot and no red dot. I'm going to go to the first slide here and under Animate I'm going to set the transition to Automatic and one second delay. This slide will automatically go to the next one after one second. I'm going to do the same thing for the second slide. Basically one second per slide. Now it will blink! Now I select both slides, Shift clicking there, and Command C to Copy and Command V to Paste and I can paste it in. Each time I paste it in I'm adding two seconds here. So if I paste it in for a total of thirty slides then I end up with one minute of video. Which will be fine.
So right now I'm going to make a video that has a black background. I need it to be a transparent background. You can do that in Keynote. So the background for each slide is separate. So I'm going to select the first slide. Go to the bottom and select the last slide with the Shift key held down so it selects All slides. I'm then going to go to Format and I can see here for Slide Layout I've got color fill for the background. I want to change that to No Fill. So basically a transparent background. Now when I go to Export the movie I can export to a movie and I can select Resolution, Custom. Custom resolution I want it set to be 1920 x 1080, like video, and I want it to Apple ProRes 4444. This provides for a transparent layer. You can even see there's a checkbox here Export with transparent backgrounds. It says it only applies if there's No Fill set to the slide and I've set No Fill for all slides. I have that checked off. So now I can Save this out as a video.
So now I have this video overlay. All I need to do is apply it in iMovie. So I can drag and drop this overlay video in. I want to put it above the video here so it works as a cutaway. I don't want to put it inline with it or try to put it on top of it. So I put it above. Now I can adjust it so it starts here at the beginning. I can see it says Cutaway here which is what I want. You can see in the preview it already looks good. It's already overlaid on top of this. If I move the Playback cursor you can see the dot blinks. So now when I play it I get exactly the kind of effect I want. But I'm not done yet.
The next step is to make the video look like it's old camcorder footage. You can do that with a filter. So I'm going to select the main video here and I'm going to go to the Filters here. I'm going to click on Clip filter which is set to None. There's one called Raster which works really well. So I'm going to select that one. Now you can see how definitely it shows that it's just not standard iPhone video. It does look a little bit older. I can continue to work with it a bit. I can click on Color adjustments here and maybe adjust the color a little bit. Desaturate it a little bit. I can play with all of this. You especially want to do this if you're mixing this camcorder footage with regular footage and that way it shows more of a contrast between the two. Now we can adjust the overlay here to match perfectly. If I need more than a minute's worth I could have always Option dragged to create another copy of this overlay here and then had minute number 2 and minute number 3 as much as I need it.
Now even if you have Final Cut Pro or some other app that gives you a camcorder effect this may be better because you can really highly customize this. You know I could put a flashing low battery message over this. I could say surveillance video. I could do all sorts of different things to make this look really cool and fit exactly what I want.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Add a Camcorder Effect in iMovie With Keynote”

Jean-Claude

6 years ago

Love your videos. Clear and useful explanations, no time wasted!

David Watts Smith

I like the full customization available using Keynote for this effect. I do own Final Cut Pro, and when I imported the camcorder effect movie (the one I made in Keynote), the red dot is not full intensity. There are multiple "Blending" options in the FCP inspector, but I could not find one that showed full colors of the overlaid clip.

Using iMovie, the overlaid clip looks fantastic, full red, looks great. Can you find the trick to use this clip in FCP? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

David: I wouldn't choose any blending option. You want the overlay to be normal and at 100%.

Thanks Gary. As you said, blending was not the problem. I kept blending as "normal", then chose "use original/optimized" instead of "proxy" video. The transparency worked as expected. Thanks again.

David: If the issue was using the proxy video, then it should look fine when you export. It is just faster to edit with the proxy video.

Rob

Dang but this is clever.

Michael McIntyre

I'm using imovie 8.0.6 in El Capitan. I have also installed a new HD. However, I unable to use png files for transparency images. Is there a special graphics setting within the new HD? whats your suggestion. Thank you

Michael: iMovie version 8 is a very very old version -- 10 years old! Lots of changes since then. Try it with the current version from the Mac App Store. And make sure those PNGs are transparent too. If you are also using an old version of Keynote, there may be some differences there as well.

Comments Closed.

Add a Camcorder Effect in iMovie With Keynote

Comments: 8 Responses to “Add a Camcorder Effect in iMovie With Keynote”

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