PE1_iMovie

I thought I knew enough about iMovie until I started watching the Lynda.com "iMovie 11 Essentials" training videos.  I was blown away!  It was 3 hours and 28 minutes of learning new and exciting things about a program I have now been using fairly consistently for the past four months of this graduate program.  I wish I had watched this training in month 1 of this program because it would have helped immensely on the video projects we were asked to do.  Looking back at my videos, I shake my head.  I'm not saying I am an expert quite yet.  I have some new skills to try out, but iMovie 11 editing features are something that requires practice to master.  Maybe that will come with time.  My mastery of iMovie will probably come as I am graduating from the program.  Well, at least my students will be excited! 

I started doing a project that was supposed to look like a movie trailer.  I had this funny idea of making a "Cats! The Musical" movie, with "Crazy Cat Lady Productions" as the distributor.  Well, I couldn't figure out how to insert pictures into the movie. As you can see from the screen shot, all of those tools are grayed out.  I went back to some of the tutorials on Lynda.com, but I couldn't find a solution to my problem.  I still don't know why the buttons were grayed out.  I will have to do some additional research to find the reason.  Maybe one of my classmates will know, and suggest a solution?  Maybe it was the kind of template I was using?  Since this is a movie trailer, the format would not allow me to use still photos?  Hmm...

Another important lesson I learned was getting my clips just right, or the editing process.  Before watching the training video, I thought I knew what I was doing in this arena, but there was more to it than what I was doing.  There are advanced tools you can use to mark the clips as favorites, and delete the useless clips by marking them as rejected, thus deleting them.  The advanced tools make editing and organizing easy and quick.  I was happy to learn about these tools, and I got to work "favoriting" and "rejecting" many of my videos. 


The last of the most helpful clips of the training video was when the trainer, Garrick Chow, was explaining how to import from sources other than a camera or iSight.  I thought it was interesting to learn that iMovie can work with clips that are emailed to me or found on the internet.  As long as the clip is one of about four specified formats, iMovie will have no problem working with it.  I took this to mean that I could get clips from another student's Viddler site or YouTube, and include it in my movie.  I assume this would be copyright safe if I made sure to get permission from the student or source.  This new knowledge could make my perspective movie about cats a little easier because, as we all know, a person can spend hours searching cute and funny cat videos on YouTube. 

Here is an example: