How To Use iMovie For Mac In Under 5 Minutes

Learn how to create an iMovie project, edit it, and export in less than 5 minutes with this complete tutorial. In this fast tutorial I take four clips, trim and arrange them, add titles, transisions, music and filters, and then export a finished project. Get up to speed on iMovie for Mac fast.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create, edit, and export an iMovie project in less that five minutes.
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So let's launch iMovie here and then we'll create a new project, make it a movie project, and now we'll bring some clips in. One of the easiest way to bring clips in is to have them in the Finder as files like I have these two on the Desktop. I'll just drag them down here into the Timeline and drop them in. I'll drag the second one here after the first one. You can also bring them in from your Photos Library. Click on Photos here on the left and then you can go to Albums and your Video Album. Or if you're looking at all your photos you can just set it to only show you the videos. Find the videos you want and drag those in as well. So I'll drag this one in here and I'll drag this one after it. 
Now that you have a bunch of clips in here you can trim any clip you want grabbing the start or the end of the clip and dragging it to remove extra video at the front or back of that clip. You can also split a clip in the middle. Just click in a spot and you can see it leaves a line there. Then go to Modify, Split Clip. So now this is split into two halves. Let's adjust the size of the timeline here so I can see all of the clips. If I want to move a clip around I can just click and drag it and move it to another spot in the timeline.
Now let's add some titles. I'll click on Titles here and I'll use this first title here and drag it to the beginning. This will make it appear as its own thing over an empty background. I can then Edit the text in the preview area here on the right. Now you can also add titles on top of clips. So let's add the second type of title here by dragging it but placing it on top of a clip. When you drop it there, that's the point in which the title will start and will appear as an overlay on top. You can see it here in the preview area. You can also drag the end of it to make it a little bit longer if you want it to appear for more than a few seconds. Select it to edit the text. So you get titles by themselves or titles over your video. You can add as many as you need.
Now let's add some transitions. Click on Transitions here and you can drag and drop one of these transitions, like say a standard cross dissolve, just place it in-between a clip here and you'll see it appear. You can double click on it and you can change the duration of that transition. So you can make it a little bit longer than half a second. If you want to preview it just click the position line just before a certain point and hit the spacebar. Then you can see the transition play out here in the preview area. You can use different transitions for different types of effects. Here's a doorway transition, for instance.
Now let's add some audio. Click on Audio here. You can add audio from your music collection, sound effects built into iMovie, or from GarageBand. If you're doing the built in ones you're going to get a bunch of special effects and some music. Then look at the longer ones by time to find music or Sort By Genre and then you'll find the ones that are jingles. We'll add one that's a little bit longer here. I'll take this one and drag it in. You can drag it on top just like a title so it locks in with a clip and appears at a certain point in your video. Or you can drag it to the bottom and you can see it be a piece of background music.
Now we'll see this runs a little bit long so we'll drag the end here and shorten it a bit. Notice there's a little dot there and I can drag that to the left to have it fade out. I can also add a fade out transition here at the end. I'll use Fade to Black and drag it here to the end of this clip. So now it fades to black and the audio fades out.
If you want to change the look of a clip you can select a clip here and you can use either some of the automatic color changes. You can set the color manually or you can use a filter here. If you use a filter you can preview in the preview area just by moving the cursor over the filter. So we can choose this one.
Now let's Exit the project. When I exit the project it will ask me to name it and then we'll see it here. One of the ways to export it so we have a video is to click on these three dots You Share Project and File. Even if you're going to be sharing it on one of these services I recommend that you export as a File and then go to the website for that service and share it that way. Choose File. Then you can choose Resolution. You choose Quality and Compression. Then save it as a file anywhere you want. Now you've got a finished iMovie project.

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Use iMovie For Mac In Under 5 Minutes”

Tom Gifford

5 years ago

I am trying to become one with iMovie. The area that confounds me is that of how iMovie uses Libraries and Projects to save clips. It is not intuitive that (as I understand it), iMovie might save my clips in the Project folder or the Media folder within a Library package and might even copy or move them to another Library package. For example, I think the clips that you dragged in are in the Project folder and the others are in Media folder. How does one understand all this? Any pointers?

Gary Rosenzweig

Tom: See https://macmost.com/understanding-imovie-projects-and-events.html

Hank Sidney

Thank you - very useful tutorial.

Bradley Smith

Possibly too fast. Very hard to follow. Split into 2 clips may be more useful? Currently, it would leave a newbie dumbfounded.

Jacqui

Thanks for the short tutorial. I can easily repeat the video as I complete each task in the movie.
-j-

Comments Closed.

How To Use iMovie For Mac In Under 5 Minutes

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Use iMovie For Mac In Under 5 Minutes”

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