PE2 iMovie

Well, I’m immersed in iMovie! If you’ve read my previous PE1 iMovie post, then you know that my greatest source of frustration with iMovie has traditionally been the video editing. Generally, I end up using shortcuts in Screenflow and Quicktime to do quick and dirty cuts. Now, having watched the “Editing Video” segment on the Lynda.com tutorial, I feel much more confident doing advanced editing in iMovie. 

A screenshot of my work in iMovie

I realize now that a lot of my initial hesitation was due to my lack of familiarity with so many of the terms used in the iMovie interface. I had no idea, for example how the stabilization feature worked in iMovie. Before, I was also very tied to the notion of having a timeline with which to build a movie. Seeing my movie as simply a collection of clips was counterintuitive to me. Even worse, iMovie wrapped my clips; the default view did not show them organized in a linear fashion! I tried working around this by using the single row button in the project window. Initially, I worked in iMovie exclusively using this view, since it felt more like other video editing applications with which I was familiar. Now, having taken the time to play around in the iMovie, I must confess that I feel equally, if not more, comfortable working with the clips in default layout.

Finally, I was previously unaware of all the different methods available for sorting clips. I love the video clip tagging options and people search tools. (Maybe a future version of iMovie will take a page from iPhoto’s book and do facial recognition…dare to dream!)