How To Use iMovie’s New Backgrounds

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at iMovie's new backgrounds.

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So last week Apple introduced iMovie Version 10.2.4. In addition to fixing some bugs it also introduced a new feature. A new set of backgrounds that works differently than the existing backgrounds. So to use backgrounds in iMovie go to Backgrounds and then you'll see Maps and underneath Maps you'll see different backgrounds. Most of the backgrounds here have been around for awhile. But there's a new set starting with Abstract. You can see these are a group that are in alphabetical order. Abstract, Checkers, Circles, and then all the way to Triangles. Then there's a bunch that are gradients. Gradient White, Gradient Gray, all the way to Gradient Pink. These are the new backgrounds.

At first they don't look like anything special. For instance let's add Abstract as a background here. Backgrounds are useful because you can put things like picture-in-picture and cutaways above the background. So you can have text on a background or titles, or you can have a bit of video or a picture only on a portion of the screen and this background behind it. Using these backgrounds is pretty straight forward. You just drag and drop them to add them. So besides some new patterns, what's really new here? Well, these new backgrounds have something in common. 

If you use one of them and you have it selected you'll see a new button here, Background Settings. Go to that and you'll see the background and you'll also see two color chips here. Each background can consist of two colors. You can set those colors. So this is not a red abstract pattern. This is a pattern using two colors. Just white and red are the two default colors. But I can change them. So I can click here and this brings up the Color Picker. I can use anyone of the regular Color Picker modes. So I can pick a new color here using the color wheel. You can see how it changes the background. Click this one and I can set that color. So you can use a combination of any two colors for these. So going to this Checkers one you could see I could go in here and there are the two colors. If I want to change one of those colors I could easily change it. 

Now the first ones here are all patterns. So here's the Circles pattern, here's this one called Cubes, there's Diagonal Lines, there's Dots, Mosaic, and Triangles. But under those are all these gradients. So if you choose a gradient here you still get the choice of two colors but it's going to blend them across the background. So here in this pattern, color one is strongest to the left and color two is strongest to the right. So if I click there to select and change the color you could see how I could create my own gradient. The interesting thing about this is that it means a lot of these are essentially the same. But each gradient is subtlety different. For instance, notice how a lot of these gradients go left to right. But this one goes top to bottom. So you can start with gradient blue but you could actually set it to any two colors that you want and the gradient will go from top to bottom instead of left to right. 

Now you can use these backgrounds the same way you used previous backgrounds. If you're not familiar with some of my tips and tricks that I've taught in the past you can use backgrounds as either cutaways or picture-in-picture. So, for instance, let's go and use the Abstract background here but put it on top of this video. So it's another layer here. Now it simply replaces this layer. I can go here to the video overlay options and I can set it to cutaway or split screen which could be useful. I could put titles over the left side now and use this as the background for the titles while a video shows on the right. I could also do picture-in-picture which means I can now have this as a box that I place anywhere I want. But the most useful way to use backgrounds, of course, is cutaways. You can set the opacities so there is a blend between the background which is on top and the video underneath it. Now thanks to the fact that I could go to these background settings here and change the colors there's a lot I can do using these new patterns and gradients as overlays to existing video. For instance let's use Circles here and you see I could change this to be a cutaway that's semi-transparent and then change the color to something else. Brighten it up. Maybe change this to something darker and create some quick visual effects. 

Another interesting thing that you could do is you can set an overlay to be a green screen and typically with the regular background that wouldn't matter because the regular background just don't have that much green in them. But now that I could actually change one of the colors to make it green I can then go to the cutaway, change it to green screen, and you could see the green area of this background is now transparent. Also don't forget you can use video effects on backgrounds as well. So, for instance, let's take Abstract again and I can select the Clip Filter here and I can select one of these Clip Filters. So let's use Blast for instance. You can see how the outside is darker. You can even use these with the gradients. So the Clip Filter here, like Vignette, will change the gradient to that. Or I can use Raster on top of this. 

So the important thing to know about these new backgrounds is that each of them uses two colors. You can change those two colors which means that that combined with some of the things we already knew how to do in iMovie adds a bunch of new tricks that you can use in your next video project.