Following a Moving Subject With an Arrow or Circle in iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to get an arrow, circle, or other graphic to follow a subject using iMovie.

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So let's say you have some video footage and you want to be able to point out a specific person or an object in the footage even though it's moving. You can create an arrow, circle, or other graphic pretty easily, bring it into iMovie and animate it so it follows that person along.

I'm going to start over here in Keynote, not in iMovie, because I need to create a graphic, like an arrow or circle, to follow someone. Now you can use any graphics app that can create transparent images. So you can do this in something like Acorn, Pixelmator, or Photoshop or whatever you want. I'm just going to use Keynote because I know it's free and most Mac users have it. I've started here with a blank template. I'm going to get rid of the stuff here and I'm going to change the document size over here to Document, Document and go from widescreen to Customize Slide Size. Now I just need something smallish. A little arrow or something. So I'm going to do 480 by 480, a little square. So I have a square shape now. I'm going to add a shape to it. I can do, say, a circle like this. Then go to Format, change the Border to a line and let's say let's make that line red. Then I can take the Fill and change it to No Fill. Now I have a circle.

But for this example I'm going use an arrow. So I'm going to select the arrow shape here. I'm going to go to Arrange and turn it 270 degrees so it's pointing down and stretch this out a bit so it fills most of this graphic. We'll be able to set the size in iMovie so I'm not really worried about the size here. I just want it to be as big as possible. So something like that. Let's go and change the Style so the Fill color is a nice bright red. To make it stand out on almost any background I'm going to set a border to white. So it's basically a white border around red so it will show up even if the colors are red there. You can see the white will make it show better.

Let's go and Export this as a transparent graphic. There's a couple steps for that. One is click on the background again or click on the slide here on the left. Then go to Format, Slide Layout. Then change the background to No Fill. Very Important! You have to do this or this won't be a transparent image. You'll get a black box with a red arrow in it instead of just the red arrow. Now go to File, Export To, and Images. In here select Format, PNG, and make sure Export with transparent background is checked. Also very important. Then Export this out. So I'll just save it and call this Arrow.

Now we can switch into iMovie. Here in iMovie I have some footage of some soccer players and I want to follow on particular soccer player by having this arrow above her head. So let's bring the arrow in. Here in the Finder you could see I called this Arrow and created a folder called Arrow and inside it are all of the slides. There's only one slide. Just this arrow here. So I'm going to drag that into the timeline here above the clip. So it appears here at the top. Now we want to reposition this so it's all the way to the left and it stretches all the way across the entire clip. Right now it's a cutaway. So you can see how it completely replaces the video that's there. I'm going to select it and I'm going to make sure I click here, the video overlay settings. So make sure that's selected and you see this drop down menu and change from Cutaway to Picture-in-Picture.

Now you'll see it as a small picture-in-picture and it's transparent. Notice the black background isn't there because it exported it properly from Keynote. I just have this nice arrow here. I can enlarge it or shrink it and make it pretty small, like that. I can place it anywhere I want. But if I play this video you could see that the arrow just stays in one place. It doesn't move with the player. Now we have to add that functionality. We're going to do that by using Keyframe Animation.

Let's modify this picture-in-picture layer here. With it selected I want to make sure that I'm viewing the picture-in-picture information. I want to change the Fade In and Fade Out to Nothing so it's there from the very beginning and stays to the very end. I want to select it down here so you can see there's a yellow outline around it. I'll select it here near the left. It's really hard to select the left edge. So I'm going to select it near the left and I'm going to use the left arrow on my keyboard to move all the way to the beginning. Now that it's at the beginning I want to position picture-in-picture to be at a good starting point. So I'm going to have it over this player right here. So that's a great starting point. 

Notice these controls here. These are the Keyframe Animation Controls. If you don't see these, sometimes they disappear, just click here to turn Off these controls and click here to turn them back On and they'll appear again. Now we can click here to add a Keyframe. Now I'm going to use the right arrow key on my keyboard to advance five frames in the video. You could see the players move. I'm going to click here again to add another Keyframe and reposition the arrow. Then I'm going to go four or five frames again, add another Keyframe, and position this just perfectly about her head. Continue to do that about every five frames as she moves through the video. Always adding the Keyframe first and then adjusting the arrow.

Now why every five frames? You could do it every single frame if you wanted to. It would just take a really long time.  Doing it more than five frames really might have the arrow trailing or leading a little bit sometimes. Five seemed about right but you may want to choose something else depending upon how fast the action is happening in the video you are using.

So let's see where we are at so far. If I use these arrows here I can go back to the previous keyframe and you could see it jump back, the video and the arrow, to the previous keyframe. I could go and look at all the different keyframes here. I can go forward to go forward until this button isn't activated anymore. It means that's the last keyframe. So now I can continue to add another one. She's disappeared somewhere back there but we will keep the arrow moving on.

Now with just this so far I can preview what I've got. So I'm going to slide this back to be the beginning here and I'm going to play the video. You can see the arrow follows her until the end of my keyframes and then it just stays there. So now what I've got to do is I have to use these controls. Remember if they disappear just click here and here to bring it up again. Make sure you have this selected. I can use this left arrow here to go back to the previous keyframe and continue. So I'll go five more frames, add a keyframe, and move the arrow. I'll do that for the entire rest here.

So now that I'm all done I can play it back and see the result. Another thing you can add is a shadow with just clicking this button here. When you add that it actually adds a little bit of a dark shadow around the object to make it standout even more from the video behind it. When you're done you could always adjust things. So you can click in here. Go anywhere that you want. Click here and you bring up the Keyframe tools. Use the right and left arrows to go back and forth between all of the keyframes that you've set and adjust any one of them. So if one is a little bit off you could adjust it. You could also add extra ones. So you can see this jumps between these five frames here but there's nothing to prevent me from going to a keyframe and then maybe advancing two or three adding another keyframe in-between those existing two to fine tune a section where maybe the action is happening a  little bit faster.

That's basically how you do it. You can have any single arrow or circle or something follow a subject around in your videos so you can point them out in situations like this.