MacMost: iMovie

Learn how to use the built-in iMovie transitions, including lots of tips and tricks.

By default every time you create a new iMovie Project it just adds on to your one and only iMovie Library. This makes it difficult to manage and archive your iMovie projects over the years. Instead, create a new Library each time you want to start a new project.

If you want to trim some time from the beginning or end of an audio file, you can quickly and easily do it with built-in macOS apps or free Apple-made apps you can download from the App Store, or a free third-party app. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

Instead of using the limited title options in iMovie, you can build almost anything you want in Keynote as a presentation. Use text, transitions, builds and animations to make your title sequence. Then export as a video to use in iMovie over a background.

You can use iMovie titles to add static frame or scrolling credits to the end of your video projects. There are some tricks to being able to edit the text effectively and to add backgrounds and more.

You can add music to your iMovie project from a file, from iMovie itself, or your Music library. Once in iMovie, you can adjust it, fade, apply effects and more. But be careful when adding music to make sure you take into account copyright.

The Ken Burns effects adds movement to your still images in your video projects. But picking a start and end crop area inside the photo, iMovie will move the photo over the duration of the clip. You can use more then one Ken Burns effect in consecutive clips in creative ways.

You can use QuickTime Player to select a portion of a long video and save only that portion to a smaller file. This comes in handy when you want to only use a small section of a video in iMovie or Final Cut Pro.

When you add a photo to an iMovie project, the photo will rarely fit right into the video frame but will instead be cropped, removing some of the top and bottom of the photo. Understand why that happens and learn how you can adjust the cropping or switch to make the whole image fit in the video with black bars to either side. Also learn about alternatives to black bars.

When you export from iMovie you get to choose from several quality and resolution settings. Here's how to make the right choice, a balance between quality and file size.

You can easily add sound effects to your iMovie projects with the built-in effects that come with iMovie. You can also drop in any other sound, including ones you record on your own. By modifying sounds effects with iMovie's tools, you can make generic sound effects work in almost any situation.

iMovie 10.2.4 intriduces some new backgrounds that are comprised of two colors and can be customized to use any two colors you like. You can use these as standard backgrounds, but also as overlays mixed with a variety of iMovie tricks to create special effects.

You can create an object pass or masked transition with iMovie by using a few other free Apple apps to help. After a few minutes of work, you can get a unique transition not usually achieved with iMovie.

If you'd rather not use your own voice to narrate a video, you can use a Mac-generated synthesized voice instead. The best way to do it is to use a simple Terminal command to create the audio file and then bring that into iMovie.

To make the audio in your iMovie projects better, try keeping the audio from a previous clip around for a short time while the next clip starts. You can also have the audio from the next clip start while still showing the previous one.

While iMovie's title options are limited, you can create almost any sort of text caption with animation in Keynote and then easily apply it to your iMovie project.

You can create a cinematic text reveal using just Keynote and iMovie on your Mac. By using a shape mask in Keynote, you can place some parts of an image on top of your text and other parts behind it. You can also mask titles with a green screen to then use in iMovie on top of actual video footage.

Learn how to take a series of video clips and build a fun montage video to post of social media or share with friends. In this special live episode, watch Gary experiment and build a video piece by piece.

iMovie is Applke's free tool for combining, trimming, editing and producing video content on your iPhone. This quick tutorial will teach you how to use iMovie's main features in just 5 minutes.

If you need a clock or countdown timer in your iMovie video, you can create one in Keynote and export it to use in iMovie. You can manually create each second as a slide, or use this simple script to add all of the slides automatically. In iMovie you can adjust the size, color and even reverse the overlay to count down or up.