How To Edit Your Video Like A YouTuber Using iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you three iMovie video editing techniques commonly used in YouTube videos.

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So if you watch a lot of YouTube videos you may notice that they all seem to be edited in a similar way. You're going to see quick cuts and you're going to see some different cropping techniques. Let me show you how to make these basic edit and crops using iMovie on your Mac.

Let's create a new project here in iMovie and I'm going to add a single big clip to it. So the idea here is this is one long clip that I filmed of myself just talking about a topic and I want to edit it into a YouTube video. Now some people do one long clip. Some people do lots and lots of little clips. Either way you bring it all here into iMovie into your Timeline to work with it. So we want to adjust the environment a little bit here. One thing we want to do is we want to zoom in a good amount so we can edit with a lot of precision here. So you want to adjust this here to something a little bit towards the higher end.

The other thing we do is want to go to View. We're going to turn off Snapping because sometimes we want to get really close to the edge of a video and we don't want to have it snap to the end. We also want to turn on Audio Skimming. That will allow us to hear the little bits of audio. So we can tell, a little bit easier, where we start talking and end talking. For this particular clip here I'm going to go into the Audio Controls there and click Auto so it kind of normalizes the sound just a little bit. Now it's time to start editing.

Now the first technique I want to show you is the Jump Cut. So basically what people do in YouTube videos is they're not afraid to jump really quickly from one point in the video to another point in the video. No transition. No fade. Nothing in between. So cutting out words, sentences, or even points where you're just breathing in, just cut those out of the video to make it flow from one thing to another. So to make a cut in iMovie all you need to do is position your cursor where you want the cut to begin. So notice here where I've got the line just before I start talking and when I get to the point I want I don't need to click or do anything. I just do Command B. In Command B you could see here under Modify is Split Clip. But is works whether or not you click in the clip or not.

So now that I've split the clip here this part is selected and I can hit the delete key and get rid of it. So now the video starts right when I start speaking. Now let's go and find a portion that I want to cutout. So here we have a portion where I stop talking and I'm thinking about what to say next. I want to cut that out. I do a little false start here and then I really start there. So I want to go right to here and I could see this is when I'm done talking. Do Command B. Then go to this next portion here and get it to just before I'm talking and Command B. Now I have that middle section and I could just hit delete.

If it's not exactly what I want I could do a bunch of different things. One is I could click here and simply drag this line a little bit. Another way to adjust it is to bring up the Precision Editor. That's under Window and then Show Precision Editor or Command Slash. So I usually click on the second clip here do Command Slash. It brings that up and now you could move each portion a little bit just to adjust it to get it perfect. Hit Command Slash again to close it. So here's another place where I want to cut something out. I'll get to here. Command B and then I'll go to here. Figure out where I want to start. Command B. Select that middle portion and delete it. Then test it.

The next technique I want to show you is to Crop and in close. You see this a lot where it's just one video like this. The camera is in the same location. You're in the same location. It's kind of boring having exactly the same shot the entire time. You can fake a slightly different shot a little bit by just cropping in a bit. So this is a little phrase here where I can kind of crop myself in a little closer. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut it just like I'm going to cut it out. Command B here and Command B there. Instead of cutting this out what I'm going to do is go to Cropping here. Hit Crop to Fill. I have to make sure the line here is over the clip I've selected. Now you can see the crop marks. You bring it in a little bit by grabbing the corners and dragging in. You don't want to do too much. Then you adjust it right there however you want. Then hit the Checkmark there and just Return. Now what you get is a slightly closer crop for a limited time.

Now you may think, well wait a minute. If I'm bringing the video in of course I'm loosing resolution, right. Well I filmed this video in 4K. Most cameras that you buy today film in 4K. The current iPhones all film in 4K. I only plan to upload this video at 1080. By importing a 4K video I now can zoom in a little bit without loosing resolution. Resolution is much greater than 1080. So a tiny zoom like that is still going to look really good.

Here's a third technique. That is to zoom in slowly and then maintain that cropping. So the way we're going to do that is to use the Ken Burns effect but with a little twist at the end that most people don't know about. Here at the beginning to talking this is where I'm going to have a cut. I'm probably going to cutout some of this stuff before hand like this till I get to the next subject here.. So I want to start zooming in as I talk and stop at a point and then just maintain that cropping. I'll get to this point here and I'll say this is where I'll stop. I want this to zoom in slowly here and then stay at that cropping here until I'm done with this thought like right here. So I've got these two parts. The zoom in, the close crop, and then I've already put my cut here so that it returns to the regular full frame cropping.

So what I want to do here is select this. Go to cropping. Go to Ken Burns. Here you'll see the start and end boxes. You can click to select the start and end. So here it automatically has to start being full frame and the end being something a little closer. I'm going to get even closer than that. Bring it in like that. So now as I scrub over here you can see it zooming in. The problem is I get to this zoom here at the end and it jumps back to the full frame. I want to have the same cropping that I end with continue for this whole clip. 

The way to do that is to go into the clip here. Do Edit, Copy. Then go to this clip and then I'm going to go and do Edit and then Paste Adjustment and Paste Crop. Now what that does is that it pastes the Ken Burns cropping in there. So I get the zoom in here, then it returns to the original position and slowly zooms in because it's a longer clip. That's not what I want. I want to go back into cropping here and you see Ken Burns. Switch it to Crop to Fill. But before I switch it I want to use this button here to switch the start and end point. Now the start point is the close in crop. Now when I switch to Crop to Fill it takes the start cropping and uses that as the regular cropping. Now I finish with that and what happens here is it zooms in and now it maintains that cropping all the way through the rest of the clip here. 

Now the reason I already split this clip here, created this jump, is I wanted it to jump back to the regular cropping there. If I didn't do that it would use that new cropping all the through to wherever the next break is or to the end of the video. 

Now another thing YouTubers talk about all the time is how to do overlays. A lot of them go to great lengths to use different websites to create graphics and animations and then bring them into iMovie. But it's usually much simpler to just use Keynote. I have lots of videos at my channel talking about using Keynote to do text overlays, transitions, and other special effects. Keynote is really the only tool you need to be able to do these kinds of things. So check those out.