iMovie Cutaways

Cutaways allow you to place another video on top of the current one and then return to the original later. You can have cutaways fade in and out and make them semi-transparent. Cutaways come in handy when you want to show something on top of the video while the audio from the main clip remains playing.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at using Cutaways in iMovie.
I'm using iMovie version 10. We're going to look at using Cutaways.
Cutaways are when you have one video. Like here we have this one clip inside of my sample movie. I want to cutaway, temporarily, to something else.
So let's select this second clip here. Instead of adding it to the end or the beginning, I'm going to add it on top. What will happen is, it basically automatically creates a cutaway, where I start off with this one video and then it cuts away to this other video which completely replaces it. Then when it is done it cuts right back. So you can do lots to customize this. 
The first thing you probably want to do is to select the cutaway and maybe trim it a bit. So I can reduce it there. I can drag either end like that. So I can have a quicker cutaway. 
Now I want to have a nice transition. So I want to go to Adjust and right here in the cutaway I can set a Fade for a number of seconds. If you notice you can see the curve right there of the fade-in and fade-out. I can actually drag the top there, like that, so I can set it. Now you've got it instead of breaking right into it, you can see it fade into the cutaway and then fade back.
You can also make other adjustments. For instance you can make the entire cutaway semi-transparent. So kind of in this case more like a dream type of thing. But it would make more sense in other instances.
Now anything you use in the normal clip here, the main one in the timeline, you can use here. You can adjust the volume by dragging this up and down. You can use these color adjustments. You can use cropping. All sorts of things. There is  stabilization. You can use audio effects. Everything that you put normally in here, even video effects, you can put inside of the cutaway.
You can only have one cutaway at a time. But you can have a cutaway span more than one video. So let's take another video here and add it to the regular timeline down here. You can see it can cutaway to something, so fade into this, continue with the cutaway, and when it fades back it fades back into this other video down here.
Now you may have noticed the audio effect of lower volume of other clips. This is where you really want to use that. If you have audio here and you want to fade from this, you want this volume to fade away, let this volume dominate, and then return to the main volume afterward. So you want to select that, lower the volume of other clips, and then you can adjust by how much. So this kind of does a lot of things that you could do manually by changing the sound curve, it will do them for you automatically just with this check box.

Comments: 7 Responses to “iMovie Cutaways”

Charles Szasz

11 years ago

Excellent tutorial!

Mark Anthony

Great video please keep them coming .
Thank for all your hard work ;-)
Whooo buddy

Stuart

Great video! Thanks for the info!

connie

Thanks for another great tutorial. What version of imovie are you using? Do you have a favorite version?

Gary Rosenzweig

Watch the beginning of the video where I mention the version I am using. It is the new one for Mavericks.
I don't know how to answer the question about favorites. I always use the latest version of software. But I primarily use Final Cut for video editing now anyway.

Linda Lyn

Very interesting thank you for another great idea.

Richard24

Thanks for sharing...

Comments Closed.

iMovie Cutaways

Comments: 7 Responses to “iMovie Cutaways”

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