iMovie Cropping

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at cropping videos and photos in iMovie.

So I am using iMovie version 10 here and let's take a look at how cropping works. A lot of people get tripped up by this. So in this example here I've got a bunch of clips. You can see these first few clips are in 16 x 9 format which is the same format as my project and it is the format that most people use for video now. 

But I have an older clip here that is 4 x 3 and you can see there it almost looks square compared to this. So you are going to see a difference when I try to bring these into the timeline. Let me go and just bring this into the timeline here and I will then bring this in after it. You can see that they both fill the area here but it is definitely cropping here. You can see that the top and the bottom compared to when I just look at the clip here, now I look at it in the project, it is clipping off the top and the bottom to stretch it so that the size of the video stretches all the way across.

Now I have some choice when it comes to this. I can select this here and go to adjust and select cropping. You can see it already is indicating that it is doing some cropping here. You can see exactly what part of the video is going to be visible in my project. 

Now if I want I can drag this up and down. So I can move it. So say if it is more important and I see the video at the top or more important that I see the bottom. I can even drag the edges here so I can focus on a certain portion of the video. Of course, if I want, I can drag it to be larger than the area here and that is going to give me black bars on the left and right because there is simply no video there for it to show. So if I select this as being what I want then I close the adjustment window there and I can see that I've got those black bars and that is how it is going to show this video. So it is kind of my choice. If I want to show see more at the top and the bottom I'm going to have to have black bars on the left and the right because there is simply nothing else there to show.

Back in the cropping options I do have the option to say Fit. What Fit will do is it will make it fit so the entire video is visible which is going to give me the maximum black bars on the left and right here in order to make sure that the top and bottom of the video fit in place.

I can also, of course, choose the Ken Burns effect which will allow me to animate from one to the other. So I can animate from a starting position to an ending position here and as I scrub across the bottom, after I close the adjustment here, I can see it. You can see it going from one cropping to another cropping.

Now you are going to run into this whenever you use a 4 x 3 video like this one in a 16 x 9 project but it is going to happen even more commonly when you go and try to bring in a photo because photos, in general, are not 16 x 9. So let's bring in a photo here. I'm going to bring that in and it is going to, by default here, my project is going to assign the Ken Burns effect. 

But let's change that. We can either do Fit which is going to create black bars on the left and right or you can do crop as before and then we can adjust the cropping.

Now this works a little bit better with photos because photos are usually a much higher resolution than video. So even if I decide to crop and pick a smaller area there I'm going to end up with pretty good quality because there is plenty of pixels for it to choose from to zoom in on that spot. But there is no way for me to show the entire image without having black bars. That is just not possible. If I choose Fit it is going to show those black bars because in order to get the top and bottom it is going to have nothing on the left and right to show in that space.