How To Use Basic iMovie Transitions

Learn how to use the built-in iMovie transitions, including lots of tips and tricks.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about using built-in transitions in iMovie for Mac. 
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iMovie has a built-in set of Transitions that you could use to go from a clip-to-clip in your projects. Here I've got a typical iMovie project. I've added some clips here to the timeline. Now, I haven't added any transitions. So if I preview you'll notice it cuts from one clip to the next. Like that. To add a transition I would first click on Transitions here at the top. Then I could see the basic transitions that are included with iMovie. There's this little graphic here that tries to show you what each one really is. But you can actually preview them by moving the pointer over the transition. Then dragging back and forth. See that little yellow line inside the transition where my pointer is. That is showing me the position in the preview. On the right I see what is actually happening larger there. So I can see exactly what type of transition this is. I can see how this one works. I can go down here and I could see how this one works and so on. You should be able to pick the transition you want to use before you ever even apply it. 
Now to add a transition all you need to do is drag and drop. So let's add a basic Cross Dissolve here. I can drag that right to the space between the two clips. You can see there's a little blue box there. Just drag that in. It replaces that bar which indicates no transition with this little transition icon. Now when I preview you can see how it fades from one to the next. Note there's also a keyboard shortcut but it only works for the basic cross dissolve. Which may be what you want to use most of the time anyway. That's why it has a shortcut. So you just position the playback head right where you want the transition. If you look under Edit you can see Add Cross Dissolve, Command T. So let's do Command T and you can see how it adds it there. I can go over here to this next one, Command T and it will add it there as well. So it is really easy to add transitions with the shortcut. You could also select all these, do Command A to select all, and then do Command T. Notice how it adds the transition between each clip and even at the beginning and end. 
Another way to apply transitions is to select a clip and then if you double click it  will apply the transition to either end of the clip. Or if you wanted it to apply just to the transition point don't select any clip but position the playback head right where you want it, double click, and it will place it right there. Now how fast the transition goes depends on how much time you give the transition. If you double click here you could see it comes up with the name of the transition and the duration. So it is going to take one second. So if I want something quicker I could do say .5 seconds. Now that is a quicker fade to the next clip. 
What if you find you're always changing it. That one second is never what you want. You want it to be two seconds or half a second. Well, there's a setting in iMovie Preferences under Transitions right here. You could set a default time. So I could set it to half a second and now every time I add a transition it will add it at that default time. I could still change it but at least my starting time is something I might use more often.  It's easy to go back in here and change it all the time. So if you need to add like 5 transitions at half a second you could change it here and add those. Then change it back to one second after that. Now to change a transition all you need to do is apply the new transition over the old. So for instance, instead of using this fade here if I wanted to use a circle open I could just drag this circle open on top of it and now you could see that circle open at that same time. 
Now if some of this isn't working for you there maybe a good reason. You could be using a theme instead of the default iMovie project. Go to Settings here and then look for Theme. It should say No Theme if you're just creating a movie from scratch. But if you have a theme selected you'll have to turn off Automatic Content in order to use all these different transitions. Otherwise you're going to have to use the Automatic transitions that are part of that Theme. More on that in a minute.
Now when using Transitions a common problem people have is that they will add a transition, let's add this cross dissolve here, and they want to lengthen it. So it is a half a second now. Let's lengthen it to two seconds. Watch the Error Message that pops up. The clips don't have enough media available to change the length of the transition. So what is happening here is that when you applied the transition originally, when you added it, it took away a half second from the end of this clip and a half second from the beginning of this clip. That half second from each clip overlaps now as part of this fade-in transition. To lengthen it you can't simply just change the time, you have to select the right side of this clip and give it some more time. So I'm going to drag it over here. Select the left side of this clip and give that more time. So now there is a lot of extra time at the end of the first clip and the beginning of the second clip. Now you can lengthen the clip as needed. I'll look at an easier way to do that in a bit. 
Now another thing you can do with transitions is use them at the beginning and end. So often I'm asked how do you fade-in or fade-out an entire video. Well just add like a cross dissolve at the very beginning. It's going to cross dissolve from nothing into the first clip. You could do the same thing at the end, like that, and it will fade-out. Or you could use something, like say, Circle Close at the end and you could see it will Circle Close onto black.
Now here's another tip. What if you wanted to have an extended delay between clips. For instance, there's Fade to Black. I can add that here. Look at how it looks here. If Fades To Black and quickly comes in again with the next clip. What if I wanted it to Fade To Black, wait a couple seconds, and then fade in again. Well, you could do that by going to Backgrounds and then adding a background, like of course the basic black background, we'll add that in here as a clip between these two. Now let's go back to transitions and Cross Dissolve to the black background and then from the black background. This, of course, I can stretch to anytime I want. So I'm going to go to say under two seconds there. So now it will Fade to Black and then it is just showing the black background and then it fades back into the next clip. You could use that with any of these other ones as well. So, for instance, let's do Swap on either end of this and see how that looks. Now instead of quickly swapping it will swap out one to nothing and then the next one will come in when we want. 
Now you can also use that technique at the beginning and end. So add a black background to the beginning or the end and fade in from that. You can add 3 or 4 seconds of blank video at the beginning or end of your project. 
Now you do have more transitions in iMovie than just these but you can only use them in a limited way. If you go to Settings here and change the Theme or you start with a new Theme, like for instance, Bulletin Board, then you have these special transitions here. You could see four of them added there at the beginning. But you're also going to get a lot of other stuff that is part of the theme as well. The transitions are automatically going to be applied. So here it is using this special transition that has all of these little clips from other parts of the clip before and the clip after. You can actually move these around to determine what part appears in that frame, what part appears in this frame here, this frame is #3. So you can grab whatever you want from there. Even go to a completely different video with that. These are some really interesting transitions but you can only use them within Theme videos. So if you go to, say, the Bright theme here then it just has this one transition called Transition and it is basically like a flash of brightness across there. Unfortunately there is no way to select it and copy it and bring it into a regular iMovie project. However if you like that one transition and you want to use that in addition to all the rest you can keep the theme as Bright, go into Settings and turn off Automatic Content, and now you can actually get rid of the extra things that are added and even these transitions and then add say a Cross Dissolve here. So this is just a regular Cross Dissolve now but this one is using a special Bright transition right there. So you can more or less have a normal movie now except you have one extra transition in it. 
Alright, so one last thing I want to show you is the Precision Editor. So we looked at before how if you take a transition like this and you want to increase the duration it's going to give you this warning and you have to give it extra time. An easier way to do that is to Control Click, two finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, on the transition and choose Show Precision Editor. You can also just use Command slash with it selected. Then it brings up this Precision Editor where you see the clip before on top, the clip after on the bottom. You see the transition represented in here. Now you can actually see the problem with increasing the time. If I increase the time of this there's no extra space to the right here of this clip or to the left here of this clip to accommodate it. But if I drag this and have the transition started a little earlier and drag this and have this clip come in a little later I've created that extra time. In addition I can also now stretch the transition itself and increase it by dragging rather than typing a time. I could also drag the actual transition around to get it happen in just the right place. I can drag the two clips as well. So this is really kind of expert mode for transitions. Then when you're done close the Precision Editor and it is all set like that. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
How To Use Basic iMovie Transitions

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