How To Speed Ramp In iMovie

You can use speed ramping to speed up or slow down portions of a video clip, with the change in speed occurring smoothly. This is commonly used in movies to create a better pace for action sequences. You can use it to shorten long portions of your video or highlight bits of action.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to do speed ramping in iMovie.
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So speed ramping is a technique used in feature films where things will speedup during an action sequence and then maybe slow down and then speedup and slow down to pace the action just right. You can use this in your own videos. Okay, so to start I'm going to drag and drop a simple video in here and put it into the iMovie timeline. It's basically video I've filmed of just going through a little hedge maze and it goes just a little bit too slowly. But I could just speed the entire thing up be I think it works better if I show a normal pace and then speed things up to get through the maze and then go back to normal speed at the end.
Normally to speed things up in iMovie I would select the entire clip and I would go to the Speed control here and I could change the speed to Fast or Custom and set the speed there. But I don't want to do it for the entire clip. The way to do it for part of a clip to ramp up the speed and then ramp it down again is to select an area of it. So after a few seconds at the beginning here I'm going to want to start it here. I'm going to hold down r key on the keyboard. This allows me to select a range. So holding down r I'm going to click and then drag, this whole time holding the r key down, and select a large portion of the video.
So now I've selected this range here that's in the middle. Now when I set the speed I'm only setting the speed for that range. So I'll go to Fast and you can see it divides everything up. I've got this little rabbit here showing speed. If I was slowing things down it will show a turtle. I've got points here at the beginning and at the end. I can actually drag those points to speedup the area in the middle there or slow it down some more. So you want to drag the point at the end of the sequence here. I can speed it up quite a bit. Now the entire things is six seconds long. It looks about two seconds at the beginning at normal speed, then two seconds incredibly sped up, and then two seconds at normal speed again. The transition is going to be smooth. It's not going to suddenly jump to the new speed. It will do so gradually. (music). 
Sometimes you can use bursts of speed like this through a long sequence to speed things up. Here's a twelve second sequence that seems painfully slow watching these skiers go down the hill. So I can speed things up a lot by grabbing sections of this and making them much faster. Each one of these frames shown here is about two seconds long. So I can grab about one second in, hold the r key down and grab four seconds in there. Then speed that up eight times. Then I can go another half second and grab another two seconds there and speed that up eight times as well. Now I have two sections of faster speed in here.(music)
Of course you can also use speed ramping to slow things down so you could create a slow motion area inside of an action sequence. So here's some skateboarding video and there are portions in it where it would be nice to slow it down when the skateboarder is up in the air. It's the same technique here you're just going to make it slower rather than faster. I want to get to the point here where he's about to go into the air. Hold the r key down and drag and get to the point where he returns and set that up with speed. But instead of speeding it up I'm going to go and slow it down. I'm going to do it more than 10%. Let's do it 50%. Then I'm going to do the same thing here. Hit the r key. Grab this part of the sequence there and then slow that down as well. (music)
Anytime you're slowing things down it's best if you're using video shot at greater than 30 frames per second. You can do that on any of the current iPhones. Sometimes you want to use both portions that are slowed down and portions that are sped up. For instance if you're filming somebody playing soccer then running down the field may take a long time and you could speed that up.Then show normal speed for a bit and then show them shooting a goal in slow motion.

How To Speed Ramp In iMovie

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