MacMost: iMovie

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.

If you want to have an arrow, circle or other graphic follow a subject or object in a video in iMovie, you'll need to first create the graphic, and then use picture-in-picture and the keyframe animation tools in iMovie to guide the graphic throughout the video action.

There are many ways to control audio from your video clips or effects and music you bring into your projects. Learn how to control volume throughout the track, apply effects and more.

You can use images as video overlays for iMovie on your iPhone or iPad in the same way you do it for Mac. The Keynote app for iOS is a great way to create these images, which must have transparent backgrounds. Switching between Keynote and iMovie you can add text, shapes, lines or almost any sort of overlay image easily.

If you have vertical video shot on an iPhone that you wish to edit on a Mac in iMovie, usually this means cropping the video into horizontal format. But by using a trick in iMovie, you can both edit and export true vertical video.

Instead of creating graphics in Keynote and overlaying them in iMovie, you can bring video into Keynote and overlay multiple special effects, then export a new version of the clip. You can even animate the video itself.

YouTube videos use jump cuts and cropping to create fast-paced interesting videos from simple video recordings. You can do these editing techniques in iMovie on your Mac.