How To Crop Photos and Videos In iMovie

 Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at cropping photos and  videos in iMovie. 

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Now in working with iMovie it's important to understand cropping. It's particularly important when you're using photos or videos that don't match the screen ratio of your video. Typical video is 16 by 9. However, it's common to have photos taken with a camera or your iPhone that are 4 by 3. When this happens you can't just shoehorn the 4 by 3 picture into a 16 by 9 frame. Instead you've got to decide whether you're going to crop the top or bottom or you're going to shrink the image to fit and have black bars to the left or right.

So I started a completely new iMovie project here and haven't added anything yet. Let's go ahead and add a photo. You can add a photo from your Photos Library or I'm just going to drag and drop it right here from the Finder. I'm going to put it right in the Timeline. Then I'm going to take a look at what I've got. You could see it fills the video here which is fine. But the actual photo which you see here in the project media actually has more to the top and bottom. So I can decide exactly how I want that shown in my video by adjusting cropping. If you select here you can play with cropping. You've got basically two cropping styles you could choose from, Fit and Crop To Fill. Ken Burns is an animation effect that we won't look at right here. So, if I were to do Fit it's going to fit the image into the frame. So you could see it fits the 4 by 3 image perfectly inside here where the height matches the height of the video. But because there's not as much to the left or right in the photo as there is in the video frame I get nothing. Just black bars to the left or right. Crop To Fill will instead crop taking some off of the top and some off of the bottom. So that it fits with in the frame. It doesn't have any black bars. If I accept this you could see it's basically enlarging the photo so the left and right sides now match the left and right sides of the video frame. Then I loose some of the top and bottom. 

So each of these two things has its advantages. Using Fit means your entire photo will be shown. Using Crop To Fill means that the entire video frame will be filled with the photo. But each has its disadvantages too. Fit will leave black bars on the left or right. Crop To Fill will remove some of the photo of the top and bottom because there isn't room for it. Now Fit doesn't really have any options. It just fits it there. But Crop To Fill you can actually drag this up or down to fit different parts of the photo. So if the important bits of the photo are at the bottom you can drag it down there. Or at the top you can drag it there. Or anywhere in-between. You can also drag a corner and crop to an even smaller area. So you can crop all of this out and then get this as a result. Since photos are typically higher resolution than videos it's okay to do a decent amount of cropping and still get very nice looking images. 

Now the same thing applies to videos. So I've got some sample videos here. This one is taken with an iPhone very recently and it actually is a 16 by 9 video as iPhones and most cameras will take now as default video. So the entire video fits in the frame. If I go to Fit or Crop To Fill it's going to give me the same thing. I can still crop to a smaller area if I want but since the photo ratio is 16 by 9 and the video ratio is 16 by 9 it can fit perfectly in the frame. However, you may have some older video, video shot in a different way, that's not 16 by 9. Here's a video shot on an older camera from awhile ago and this isn't 16 by 9. So it behaves just like a photo here. I can use Fit to fit the entire thing and have bars on the left and right or Crop To Fill and crop it just like a photo.

So cropping works exactly the same way whether it's a photo or a video. But you typically run into this more today with photos that are 4 by 3 than videos which are typically shot in the same 16 by 9 ratio that iMovie is using for projects. 

Now if you don't like the black bars you do have another option. Instead of just having nothing back there you can go to Background and select one of the many backgrounds that iMovie offers. So let's go through here and select something like this. I'll drag that in. That's the main part of the Timeline. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag the photo in but not in the main Timeline like after that background. But on top of it. So I'll align this up here so it matches perfectly. So now I want to go to Cropping and I'm going to select Fit. Then check. Then I'm going to go here to the Overlay settings and set the overlay to Picture-In-Picture. Then I'm going to resize it so that it fills the space vertically. It should snap to the top and bottom there. Then I should be able to drag it and have it snap to the center. Now you could see I get the same thing as before but instead of black bars the background shows through so I could make it a little more interesting than black bars. 

Now you don't have to settle for one of these backgrounds here either. Instead I could use an image. So I've got another image here. This one exactly 16 by 9. I'm going to bring that in and use that as the background instead. So now when I bring in the image on top of that I could set it to Fit and then Picture-in-Picture and then I could expand it and center it and I get my own image here on the left and the right. In fact, you could use the same image on both layers. So let me bring this in as the main layer here and as the layer on top. The Picture-in-Picture overlay. What I'm going to do here is with this I'm going to set this one to Crop To Fill. So it's going to fill the whole space. Then the overlay I'm going to set to Fit and I'm going to then change it to Picture-in-Picture, expand it to fit the space, center it and you get this effect here where you have the picture kind of echoed to the left and the right. As a matter of fact you can select it here, then go to the Effects here, do a filter, change it to something else, say Black and White or X-ray or Negative or any of these or perhaps just use the colors here and dim or brighten the colors, change it, tint it, saturate it, desaturate it. That kind of thing to get it to be a little different on the left and right.

You actually see this a lot in TV news when they're showing a 4 by 3 photo. Of course your TV is 16 by 9. So they'll show the photo in the middle and then they'll echo it here on the left and the right with this very technique in order to  fill the entire video frame instead of having black bars. 

Of course another option you've got, if you really want ultimate control of how the images look, is to open up the image first in an Image Editor, Pixelmator Pro, Acorn, Affinity Photo. Whatever you want. Whatever you're used to using. Then create a new image from it that's exactly 16 by 9. Put whatever you want to the left or right. A pattern. A color. Some version of the image or blurry version of the image. Anything. Get the image exactly like you want it to be on video. Export it as that 16 by 9 photo and then use that in iMovie. But, of course, that's going to take a lot of time so it depends on how much effort you want to put into getting your photos to look absolutely perfect in your video.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.