MacMost Now 645: Using Chapter Markers In iMovie 11

Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at chapter markers in iMovie. So here I am in iMovie with a simple project, just a bunch of clips that are strung together. Now, I can add chapter markers to this by simply going up here to the upper right-hand corner of the project area. You can see there is comments and chapters right here, these are the two things you can drag into your project. Let's drag a chapter marker like this and let's stick it here at the very beginning of the first clip and I'm going to name this something. Let's name it sunset and then I can just continue to just drag chapter markers as I need them; so I wanna, in this case, put one for every clip, just like that. Make it nice and simple. There now I can also do the same thing here with a comment and a comment looks just like a chapter marker. The only difference is it's just for notes. So you can type anything you want there and it won't actually appear in any video you export or used in any other way. For both chapter marker and notes, you can click here and see a list those comments, those notes and chapter markers, and jump quickly to one that you want. So the comments are very useful for that. So what happens with chapter markers? Well, various things depending on what you do with your video. So, for instance, if we just simply share this, let's just do a plain export movie and if we use any of the options here except for the smallest, expect for mobile, we'll get a video that has these in them. So let's actually just expect a medium size movie to the Desktop and take a look at it in QuickTime Player. So here is the file and I've opened it up in QuickTime Player. Now I can play the whole thing through, can scrub through here and you see I have the different sections. But I could also look here at the chapters and see that, not only does it have them by the names that I called them, but it puts a still frame image next to it so I can quickly jump to anyone I want. Now how about using those chapters as part of the DVD creation. Well, if you still have iDVD, which you should have if you have a slightly older Mac, it doesn't come with newer Macs, you can go to share and then iDVD and it will take the video that you're created and export that as an iDVD project and open it in iDVD. So now it's opened iDVD for me and it has this movie in here. Of course I didn't really name it anything so I can just now switch to the map view, which is this button here, and you see that it includes, in the map here, all of the chapter markers that I've created right there with the little previews of it. So if I were to run this, just a preview here, I can actually go to scene selection and see that they are all there and I can choose a scene and jump right to it. Now with iDVD not being available anymore, you may use one of the many DVD creation tools available on the Mac App Store. I'd imagine some of them support these chapter markers, I'm sure you can check the documentation and see. Chapters markers are also supported by anything that uses the QuickTime playback engine. So for instance, you saw it work in QuickTime Player, it also works in iTunes. It will work on the iPhone and the iPad when you play back videos as well. And it'll even on Apple TV and those will appear as chapters inside the video when you play them on your Apple TV. There's look at chapter markers in iMovie '11. Hope you found this useful. Till next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.