10 More iMovie Editing Tricks For Your Next Video Project

There are many unusual ways to use the features in iMovie to create visual effects and filters that you may not think are possible. Take a look at 10 ideas using titles, transistions, overlays and other techniques.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten iMovie tricks that you could use in your next video project. 
MacMost is supported by more than 500 viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts like on my iMovie course.
So iMovie is definitely the most used video editor on the Mac. You get it for free from Apple. But it doesn't seem to have all the cool effects that you could get with pro level tools. However there are unusual ways to use the features in iMovie to get some special effects that you may not think are possible.
You have a lot of different filtering effects. If you go to Filters here and then click on Clip Filter and you can select one of these. But one you won't find is a blur effect.  If you want to blur your video one way to do it is to go to Titles, yes Titles. If you look under Titles there's one called Pull Focus. Take that title and add that over the entire clip you want to blur. You can see Pull Focus will add a blur and then allow you to have a title on top of that. But you don't need to have a title. You can just select the default text and hit Delete or insert a space and you get no title that's visible and you have a blurred video now that plays over the entire length. If you want to have it unblurred at some point just have the title end and the blur will end. The same thing if you wanted it to start normal and then blur for a portion and then go back. This is an interesting use of Titles and there are other ways you can use Titles as well.
There are three inparticular that you could use without any title. For instance you could use Boogie Lights. Put that over here and you're going to see this special effect play out where all these lights flash. You could simply select the Title text and delete it and now you have those lights play on their own. You can so the same thing with Pixie Dust to have just this Pixie Dust effect play across and then rid of the title text. You could also do it with Lens Flare as well to get rid of the title text there and now you just get a lens flare going across on its own. These are all cool little drop in effects that you could add to enhance a moment in your video.
Now if you want to add a color tint to your video you could do that by taking a background and then overlaying that on top. So there's a bunch of different solid color backgrounds here like for instance this blue background. I could add that actually on top as a cutaway here, extend that over the entire time, select it and then change the opacity here for the cutaway settings. So you can make it semi-transparent. This adds a blue tint to it. So you can see here's the normal video and here's with the blue tint. If the color you want isn't here inside of Background you can make your own graphic. So you can use any image editing app. I made a quick one in Acorn. Purple. Shape I made sure was 16x9 so it would  cover the entire thing. Stretch is across. Select it and under cutaway I can set the opacity and now give it a purple tint. 
For a more daring special effect you can use video as a cutaway and also use opacity for that. So here I have a cutaway that's the video of a city and behind that is the main video. I've got this beach. I can select this cutaway. Change the opacity here and make it semi-transparent. But you could go further than that to adjust things because you could also go and add a filter to that. With that cutaway selected I could go to Filters here and choose a Clip filter and then I could choose something a little different. You're not going to see the result until you select it. So let's go and use this SciFi one here. It creates a different look than if I were just using the video plain.
A better example is to have a subject as the cutaway superimposed on top of a background like here and then this is with a duo tone filter also applied to it. 
Now you can use a background for more than having titles on top of it. You can have a video on top of it too and use the background as kind of a border around the video. So I'm going to drop in this retro background which comes with iMovie. Stretch it out a bit and then go to My Media and drop in a regular video as a cutaway on top of that. It completely covers it at first but I could go ahead and change cutaway to picture in picture and now it's a little image there that I could enlarge and then put in the middle of this background. So now I've got kind of a nice border here around it. I can, of course, also take my own image that I make in an image editing app and use that instead of a background and place picture in picture on top of that to create a border. Here I'm using the paper background that comes with iMovie and putting picture in picture on top of that. I can turn on a border to make it standout and also turn on  Shadow to have a drop shadow cast to make it look like the video is hovering over the background.
Now there is a whole set of really interesting titles and other things in iMovie but you won't find them when you're creating a regular project. Instead create a New document and choose Trailer instead of a regular document. You're not going to create a trailer here. But you're going to steal things from a trailer. So, for instance, you could choose this first one here called Expedition. Go into that. It'll create a trailer for us and if you switch to Storyboard here you'll see that there are these cool little titles in-between. You could see them. I'm not even going to add anything or edit anything here. Instead I'm just going to return to the project screen.
Now I can click here and I can say Convert Trailer to Movie. Then when I do I get a regular movie here but it includes all sorts of things. Like, for instance, here's that title over a black background. So I can select this title, copy it, then go back to Projects, go into my other movie, go over here and paste it and it will appear. You can see it has that special effect there as well. I can still go in and edit the text to whatever I want and it will work. So if you look at the different trailers there are tons of cool titles and backgrounds and even some music that you can take from each one of these. So it's worth it to go through and create a sample project from each one and think about what you can use in a regular movie you create.
You only have so many Transitions here to go between different clips. But you can get creative by using a transition to go to a solid color like black and then using another transition to go to the next clip. For instance we can just do Circle Open between these two and this is what we get. But, if instead we go to Backgrounds, take a black background and stick it right in there you reduce the length of this to something much smaller, so like less than half a second. Then we use another transition like Circle Close here. Now you get a transition that looks like this.
Here's what happens if you use two wipe lefts with black backgrounds in-between. There are a lot of other creative ways to use the same transition with a black background in-between or two different transitions.
Now you can also use a transition on the same clip to create a quick visual effect in a moment. So you select the spot where you want it and do Command B to split the clip. Place the transition right there. So, for instance, you could use a quick cross blur right here and you could see it'll do the cross blur from the same clip to the same clip. Double click on it to change the duration. So you can make it happen really fast for like a quick flash.  Cross Zoom is another good one for this. Or Ripple too. You could actually do Ripple for a longer duration for a different effect. 
If you want to put a quick visual element on your video but you don't want to go and create an entire graphic and then use it as picture in picture you can choose an emoji and put that in a title. The title that works best for this, in most cases, is Centered. So put a centered title here and then use an emoji character then rather some actual text. I'm going to use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji Viewer. I'm going to choose a simple Thumbs Up which you may want to use to get a positive comment to a moment in a video. You can make it much larger so it stands out a little bit better. So let's do like that. I can actually select it and then right justify it to move it to the right or left justify it to move it to the left. If I want to move it down I can have an extra space before it. So I could put it like in the bottom right hand corner or I could have put extra returns after it to move it to the top. So now I get it here, kind of in the bottom right hand corner, and it's just this little extra visual element that appears on the video for a period of time.
Now sometimes you have pretty stable video like this and you want it to actually appear like it was hand held, not on a tripod. You want it to be a little shaky. So you can do that in one of many ways. I've seen people do that with a Ken Burns effect that takes a lot of extra steps. Here's, I think, a slightly easier way to do it. First you want to go and just put a black background on your video and then use your main clip above that as picture in picture. So you're going to extend this so the background is behind the entire video. Select this one. Choose the cutaway type and say you want picture in picture. So now it will be the small picture in picture here. But you can expand that pretty big and you can expand it beyond the edges of the video. See now I made it much bigger than the video itself. So now I can start off with it centered and then add a keyframe where I want. So let's go to the beginning here and let's add a keyframe here. Click to add a keyframe and then just go forward a certain number of frames. So go forward like five frames and hit another keyframe and then you can move a little bit. Another five and move a little more. Another five and move some more. Keep repeating this adding a keyframe every five frames and a slight change to the position of the video until you get to the end. So now you can see the final result is a pretty shaky video. You can do this to actually stabilize very shaky videos if you wanted to. You would just have to position the video in each keyframe very precisely so say some object in the corner is always at the same position. If you did that meticulously you could stabilize a lot of video.

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 More iMovie Editing Tricks For Your Next Video Project”

Gene

5 years ago

Incredible! You are the epitome of a Mac super user!

jasper

Hi Gary—am I correct in thinking that when moving the playhead in iMovie there is no way to slow the playback? I know that you can use right arrow key to nudge forward just one frame at a time, but it would be useful to move the playhead, say, ½ speed with a shortcut. I cannot find anything here https://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.1/index.html?localePath=en.lproj#/movd9d8f91e8 or in the iMovie menu. Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

jasper: Do you mean just for editing purposes? No, I think the idea would be us use the arrow keys if you need to select a specific spot in the video to make a cut or something. It is easier if you zoom in on the timeline.

Comments Closed.

10 More iMovie Editing Tricks For Your Next Video Project

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 More iMovie Editing Tricks For Your Next Video Project”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information