11/5/10
5:53 am

MacMost Now 473: iMovie 11 Video Effects

iMovie 11 offers a variety of new special effects, most of which are shortcuts to existing features. You can quickly implement slow motion, instant replay, rewind, freeze frames and filters.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On todays episode let's look at some of the new special effects in iMovie 11. So you can find a variety of new special effects under the clip menu in iMovie 11. So, for instance, let's look at this clip here and start with a slow motion sequence. So we wanna pick out this section here, the slide and change that to a slow motion. Here, we can pick the speed. Just do it at 25% and what will happen is it will instantly just basically take that section here and slow it down. And then go back to normal speed, we can just watch the entire sequence here. Which is the quick way to insert slow motion into your video. So the next thing you can do is you can also pick out a segment in here and set it for an instant replay. So we'll select instant replay here, and speed and kind of similar to what we had before. If we watch the video now you see it can go full speed but then you see the entire thing and then it does the instant replay. So here you see the slide and then it plays it back. In addition you get this title here. This instant replay title, which you can edit to be whatever you want so just set it to replay for instance or you can remove it completely by selecting it and hitting delete and you still get the effect of the replayed slow motion here and then back to normal. Another thing you can do is you can do fast forward and you can basically do the opposite of what you did before. Just sort of speed up whats there so we can select the entire thing and select fast forward and say do 4 times. And all it does is basically change the speed here of the video. Matter of fact, if we bring up the inspector here we can look at the speed here and see if the speed has been changed to 400%. So nothing really new there. Just a quick way to do that. There's also the rewind which will take the section you have selected and duplicate it but put it in reverse so you can watch it. You see it for the first time there and then it's going to quickly rewind it and then you see it again. That's an interesting way to highlight something in your video. There's an interesting one here, the Fade to dream which takes the video, splits it where you had it selected and inserts a dream filter to it. So you can watch it here, it fades quickly to that dream filter. So the interesting thing about this effect is that you can select that area that was created and go into it and look at the video effects and notice that you can change that to any video effect that you want. So for instance, if you wanted to change it to a black and white, that's all you need to do and now I've got the same thing going on but it changes to black and white for that segment. So you can use these quick little fade to's and substitute your own filter not just one of these three. Now here's one that can highlight the specific moment like where the base is tagged right there. You can select special effect and then flash and hold last frame. And what this will do is it will stop the motion right there, transition quickly to a flash, freeze it and do a cropping effect. In this case Ken Burns, where it goes back to normal so you can watch it there and then the video continues. If you select that and hit c for cropping you can see there's the exact Ken Burns effect. You can actually customize it or change it to a fit or crop instead. Now we can watch it here. So you can also manually set a lot of different effects. Going into the clip inspector here and then you can select a video effect and there's a whole variety, these are really filters more than anything else. And then you can also change the speed to 800% or all the way down to 12.5% switch it to forward or reverse for the clip. You can even set a specific duration so, for instance, if you wanted this to be exactly 8 seconds long you could and it will figure out the percentage for you. So there's a look at some of the video effects that you can quickly implement in iMovie 11. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 42 Responses to “MacMost Now 473: iMovie 11 Video Effects”

Enterpriser1701

14 years ago

Gary,

Is there a way to layer video effects, for example, can I put a film grain effect with a vignette effect? I think one way is to just export the clip with one effect than add that new clip to the project and add an effect to that clip. Just wondering if you can select two or more video effects without having to go through all that trouble.

Thanks!

Comments: 42 Responses to “MacMost Now 473: iMovie 11 Video Effects”

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