Unlock iMovie’s Hidden Power With Overlays

Hi. This is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using overlays in iMovie. 

So iMovie is one of the simplest video editors out there. That's always has been its purpose. To be really simple and easy to use so you can merger a bunch of clips together, add a few effects, and produce a video. But there's one feature in iMovie that goes beyond that and attempts to add some of the pro level features to iMovie but without a ton of different controls to learn. That's overlays. 

What overlays allow you to do is to put a second video on top of the first but in a few different ways. Let's start off here with an empty iMovie project. I'm going to drag a video into the main timeline here. Now typically what you would do with another video is you would add it afterwards and then it would go from one video to the other taking two clips making them into one movie. But instead if you put it on top of the first clip you can add it as an overlay. The first one down here, the one that appears slightly larger, that's the main timeline and you can continue to add more videos after it. The clip above it, that's the overlay. Notice there is a little line that links one to the other so when you move the clip in the main timeline the overlay that is linked to it stays put. Now, the most basic thing that the overlay does replace the video below it. You can see here I have the line before the overlay appears I see the main clip and the main part of the timeline. Then the overlay replaced it. Let's shorten the overlay here and you can see that beyond where the overlay is looks back to the main clip. Now this is really handy if the main clip includes the audio you want to keep like perhaps you're narrating this or maybe it is a video of you talking. Now the overlay is the visual part go to that video but yet you still hear the audio from the main timeline. You hear both but you can always lower the audio here in the overlay. Or with the main clip selected you can go to audio of the main clip and select lower volume of other clip and adjust it there. So even if you've got more than one overlay on top of this one, like you keep going to various different clips while the main timeline is just this one video of you talking the audio of the overlays will lower automatically. 

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Now when you select the overlay you can click this special button here that gives you the ability to change the overlay. So you've got some various settings here. The main one is to choose what type of overlay it is. There are actually four different kinds. So far we've been looking at the default simplest one, Cutaway. It simply cuts from the main timeline to the overlay video and then back again. You can change the opacity so you can have it be semitransparent, if you want. You can also change the Fade. Notice you see the Fade dot here and you can adjust those as well. You can even hold the option key and then have one be longer than the other. So you can have it fade in and then fade out. Now the non-obvious thing here is that you don't have to use a video for the overlay. You can use a photo. So if you just want to show the photo you can drag the photo in, just like you would drag in a video here, adjust the timing and this is just a static photo here. It has the same controls as before. It is just not a video. Sometimes having a video on the timeline and then a series of photos as overlays is a really good way to make a scrub.

Now let's look at the second kind of overlay, that's a green screen. Now if you shot the video in front of a green screen, like here I shot myself in front of a green screen, I use it everyday, then you can cutout the green part by setting a cutaway to be a blue screen. It will automatically figure out what is behind you, whether it is green or blue, and cut it out like this. You can adjust the softness, you can cleanup, by using this tool here and cutout portions of what's behind you. For instance if you can see a bit of my desk showing in the bottom left corner I can actually cut it out so it doesn't show anything here. You can also use the Erasure tool here to further refine the green screen by selecting areas that are kind of showing through and to make sure to erase those. Even though it doesn't show a Fade here you do have it in the timeline. So you can have the green screen fade in like that and then fade out again.

Now the third type of overlay is the Split Screen. So I'm going to add back this video here and it will appear as a cutaway but I'm going to change that to split screen. You can see I see the middle of the main timeline on the left and the middle of the cutaway here on the right. But you can change this. So you can be right instead of left. You can be top and bottom or bottom and top. You can also have a slide effect. Now you see if you adjust the timeline you get to slide in the overlay and then it will slide out as well. 

The most powerful type of overlay is the Picture-In-Picture overlay. So you start off the same way. Bring the overly in. I'm going to select it and then change it to Picture-In-Picture. Now I've got a ton of options. So the default one is to actually place the cutaway as a small video at the top right corner. But you can drag it anywhere you want. So you can put it in the top left corner if you want. You can also drag any one of the corners to enlarge or shrink it like that. You've got a lot of other options as well. For instance you can add a border around it. A thicker border. You can add a shadow. You can take a new color and you can set a Fade In and a Fade Out. In this case I'm using the default dissolve. You can use the dots here to adjust it as well as set the time right here. So it can dissolve in like that. But there is so much more you can do. For instance you can animate it. You can move it around. It doesn't have to stay in one spot. So you select the Picture-In-Picture here. Now it's got to be set to the Standard Dissolve here. You can't use one of these other ones. We'll get to those in a minute. But you can use one of the borders, the shadow, and all of that. You can see the key frame controls here. So you can position the playback head where you want it. I'll start here and I'll click the key frame there to set the key frame. Then I'm going to move somewhere else, like here, and I'll put another key frame there. I'm going to move this somewhere else like the bottom right corner here. Now as I scrub between these to these you see it goes to the position indicated by the key frames. You can easily use these controls here to jump to the specific key frame. So you can change them or remove them like that. Like with all the other cutaways you can use a photo or a graphic for this. I'm going to bring in a graphic here that I created from Pixelmator Pro that is just transparent. It has no background so it appears as a cutaway here. But if I change it to Picture-In-Picture now it appears here at the top. You're going to want to make sure that you're cropping it so it fits, like that, for this cutaway. Now you've got this nice little symbol which is kind of cool. You can kind of add it popping onto the page. Use an arrow, a thumbs up, some other little indicator. Anything you want. Make a graphic in your favorite graphics app as long as it is semi-transparent you can use it as an overlay like this. But you can also use it with key frames. So I can do a key frame here and then I can move the graphic to here and then add another key frame, like that. Now animate between those two key frames. So you can have this be basically something that follows along using multiple key frames, a path that can be a circle, an arrow, or a box that basically covers part of the image and moves around based on the key frames you set. With a little work you can do a lot of good stuff using semi-transparent graphics as Picture-In-Picture overlays and multiple key frames. 

But there are other modes for Picture-In-Picture overlays. For instance if I were to change from Dissolve to Zoom then what happens here is the Picture-In-Picture zooms in from out of the frame, like that. I can also use Swap. That is Picture-In-Picture but sending to Swap right here. What it is going to do is it is going to take Picture-In-Picture and swap it with the video behind it. Now preview doesn't really show it very well but when you Export you will see the real result. So here is the resulting video and you can see it is done exporting this correctly putting the main timeline video as the Picture-In-Picture and the Picture-In-Picture as the background.

Now here is some extras. Using an overlay, let's use green screen here as an example, and you can apply another effect to it. As a matter of fact you can use all the color adjustments, cropping, everything here on this overlay. So I'm going to apply a simple clip filter like this and you can see how it affects the green screen video but not the video that is in the main timeline. Here's one I'm going to put in that's going to be Picture-In-Picture. You can do the same thing here. You can go in and apply an effect to it, like that, and you can see the effect is only applied to the Picture-In-Picture part. Also if you want to use any of this but you don't actually have another video behind it you've got backgrounds. Go into Backgrounds and find a background. Keep it something really simple. For instance I'll just use a gray background here but I can now put any overlay over that. So I can say put this video here over it and change it to, say, Picture-In-Picture and you can see it appears on top of that background. Or maybe more usefully I can put a green screen here and I can apply the green screen effect to it as a cutaway like that. So you don't always need to have a video behind. You can use a photo that you've got. Maybe a graphic you've made up.  Or you can use any of the backgrounds that come with iMovie as a background with an overlay on top. 

Now you've got all these different techniques and combining them other videos that you've got, graphics that you made in a graphics app, you can really do a lot in iMovie without needing to go to a more advanced app like Final Cut Pro. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.