What You Can Do with iMovie in iLife ’11

2 of 7 in Series: The Essentials of What You Can Do with iLife '11

Using iMovie in iLife, you can edit video clips and enhance them with Hollywood-style transitions and special effects. iMovie enables you to balance the audio with the video, add music from your iTunes library, add photos and clips from iPhoto, and create videos you can be proud of. You can even use the automatic iMovie features and themes to create videos that look like movie trailers and TV news segments.

You shoot the video, but that’s about all you need to do with a video recording device. iMovie can

Import video: iMovie enables you to import from a wide variety of devices — from HDD, DVD, and flash memory cameras and recorders that connect to your Mac by USB (Universal Serial Bus) to DV and mini-DV tape camcorders that connect by FireWire (also known as IEEE 1394 DV terminal). You can instantly use video clips imported into iPhoto from a digital camera or an iPhone or iPod nano.

You can even record directly into iMovie by using the iSight camera that’s built into current iMac and MacBook models.
Organize video clips: iMovie helps you organize all your video clips from these different sources into a video library organized by event. For example, you can group all video shot for a single event, even if the video clips come from different sources and were recorded in different formats. You can also find people in your shots by using iMovie’s people finder.
Create a movie using editing tools and effects: You can assemble these clips, along with sounds or music from iTunes and photos and clips from iPhoto, into a project for editing into a single video. iMovie provides the basic, no-frills editing tools you need in order to put together a video from a set of clips and adjust the audio so that it sounds better. You can pick out the good parts of clips, snip out the slow or boring parts, trim the beginnings and endings of clips, and shuffle scenes around to your heart’s content.

Bring to life photos from your iPhoto library with pan and zoom effects. Sprinkle a glittering trail of fairy dust over a festive scene, or add haunting visual effects such as fog and ghost trails. When you’re finished with your finishing touches, add the end credits, rolling commentary, and opening title.
Share videos you’ve made: Pending a Hollywood distribution deal, you may want to share your video with friends using MobileMe, let all your Facebook friends view it, or even publish it on YouTube or Vimeo. You can even send a clip to CNN iReport or create a video podcast for the iTunes store. iMovie makes sharing and publishing videos a snap. And don’t forget that this is Apple: You can, obviously, play your new video in iTunes on your Mac and on your iPad, iPod, or iPhone or on Apple TV.