How To Merge Video Clips In iMovie

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. 

Let me show you how to merge video clips in iMovie. 

So let's dive in by first assuming that you already have your clips in a project in iMovie. If you don't I will show you how to do that in a minute. But let's say you have all your clips here in My Media section. You just want to merge them all together in one long video. You can do that pretty quickly by selecting one of these clips just to make sure you've got this area active. Then use Command A for select all. Now drag the clip into the timeline here at the bottom and you'll see it will place them one after the other like this. So now you have a project where all of the clips are merged, one right after the other. Now what you need to do at this point is go to File and Share and then File. In other words Export as a file. Make sure you have it set to the highest resolution for the project. You want the quality to be High and you Compression to be Better Quality. Now go to Next and name the file and Export it. When you're done you'll have the video at wherever it is you decide to Save it and you can open it up and see that all of the clips are in there one after the other. 

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Now I know that some people do this so that they can work with one clip in iMovie. If you want to do that then you would delete everything in the Timeline and then select all these clips again and go to File and then Delete Media from Event. That clears out all of your clips there You can then drag this one new unified video in there and you have all of your clips in there as one long clip that you can work with. There's a problem with this though. You taking a compressed video and recompressed it by exporting it from iMovie. So the quality has been reduced either a little bit or it could be a lot depending upon the quality of the original video. Now this can be fine for just a fun home project. But for doing anything more serious you want to work with the original clips. So while you may like the workflow of having this one long clip to work with in iMovie, stick with the individual clips. Learn to edit that way for the best quality of your final video.

Now let's take a step back and start a project from scratch. So you launch iMovie and you create a brand new project. You make it a movie project and now you have what I showed before except you have nothing here in your media. You've got your media right here, it is named the same thing as your project but it's empty. To get clips in here you can do it one of several ways. One is you can just click here where it says import media. Or use File, Import Media. It gets you to the same place. Then you can navigate to where you have your file. So for instance I have in my Documents folder a Videos folder right here. Then I can select these. I'll hold the Shift Key down and select all of them and I can Import All. When I do I get all of them in here just like at the start of this video.

Another thing you can do is just Drag & Drop files from the Finder. I've got a Finder window here. It has those same files in it. I will select them all and then drag into My Media right here and it adds all the clips. You can also just drag directly into the timeline. When it does it, it adds it to the clips and adds it to the timeline at the same time, saving you a step. I also want to mention that you can select Photos here on the left and it will take you to your Photos Library. It will show you all your photos but you probably want to go here to where it Shows All and select only videos if you know you only want video clips. Select the one that you want and you'll get this Plus button here. You can click that or just drag the entire thing into the timeline. Once you do if you go back to your Project Media you'll see that it is added there as well. You can, of course, mix and match these. Add a couple of videos from your Photos Library, drag a couple of files from the Finder. Use the Import function to go and find some more. If have your clips in your Project Media you can, of course, do what I showed before and select them all and drag them all in. But you can also Drag them one at a time. That allows you to choose the order in which they appear. You can adjust this slider here to shrink the timeline to make it easier to add them, like that. Once they are in this timeline they are not set in this order either. You can select one and drag it left or right to reorder them

A quick tip here. In Photos you can actually add photos as well. So select a photo and drag that in. What it is going to do is place the photo there as a still image for a few seconds. You can then grab the right end and extend the time to make it there longer. You can also Drag & Drop images from the Finder and add them in as well. So you're not restricted to just videos. 

Once you have your clips in here you're also not stuck having the entire clip. You can grab the right side of a clip and drag it to the left to trim from the end of the clip. You can also grab the left side of the clip and trim from the beginning of the clip. You can even do this before you add the clips. So you can select a clip here and then drag the right side and you can see a preview of it over here. You can drag the left side as well. In this area you can see a little rectangle that will be added when you drag a clip to the timeline. Know this too that you can have the same clip more than once. You can also split a clip by just clicking to position the line here and using Command V and it will split the clip into two. You can then take the second half of that clip and move it later or even earlier in the sequence. Any time you want you can select a clip and then use Delete key to remove it. Add it back again by dragging it from up here. 

Now with each of these clips it cuts directly to the next clip. One frame is the previous clip and then the very next frame is the next clip. You can add Transitions pretty easily. Click on Transitions here at the top. You can drag a transition to any spot between any two clips, like that. Now the last few seconds of this clip will transition, in that case using a cross dissolve, into the next one. You can add transitions to multiple clips at once by simply selecting those clips. I can select one here and  Command Click to select others or Shift Click to select a range, or just Command A to select them all. Then instead of dragging the transition double click to add it. When I double click cross dissolve you can see it adds it everywhere. It even cross dissolves from black at the beginning to black at the end. Another useful tip is just to use Command T which automatically adds a cross dissolve transition. So select a clip, Command T will add it at the beginning and end of that clip. Select All with Command A and then a quick Command T will add a cross dissolve to all of them

One last tip. If your videos are of different resolutions, for instance some are 4K and some are 1080, it is very important which clip you add first. For instance, the only clip here that is 4K is this one, with the flag in it. If I were to select all of these and then add them the first clip added is this one which is 1080. If I click on Settings now you can see the that Project is set at 1080. When I go to File, and then Share, and then to File I can only export at 1080. But if I add the 4K clip first then I added the other clips, like this, now if I go to Settings notice the Project settings are now 4K. It follows the first clip added. If I go to File, Share, File then you see I can actually export in 4K. It won't improve the quality of the other clips but they won't be any worse and I'll get that first clip in it's full resolution. Note just because you added that clip first doesn't mean you can now rearrange things. So drag this clip later on and the first is now 1080 but it is the first clip I added to the timeline that set the project as 4K

So that's how you merge a bunch of video clips into one movie in iMovie. How you found this useful. Thanks for watching.