PE3_iMovie

By the end of the iMovie tutorial videos, I learned so many amazing things I would have never figured out on my own.  Some of my favorite lessons were extracting audio from other clips, editing to the beat, and making a photo slide show to the beat of the music selected.  These are not easy tasks to master, however, and will require a great deal of practice and failure before I feel really comfortable.  I will probably have to go back to Lynda.com and watch the entire 3 hours 28 minutes of videos again at some point.  This program incorporates iMovie into many assignments, so mastering iMovie is a necessity.

With the first of my favorite lessons, extracting audio from other clips, the instructor showed us how to easily get ambient noise from one clip to use in another clip that might have something profane or distracting.  I can attest to the profanity, unfortunately, because this is proving to be a somewhat tedious and frustrating process.  Also, in my original idea for a brief movie, I was working with my cats.  These beasts are not season actors, and were not cooperating with me.  None of them hit their mark, and they didn't even know their lines.  Several times, as the camera was rolling, a certain word or words that shall not be named flew from my mouth.  So, pulling some ambient noise from another clip or project would have been a useful tool.  Unfortunately, I just did not have enough good footage to use to make my Cats! The Musical movie.  This shall be a work in progress, though, so stay tuned for that little gem.

  Here the instructor extracted some ambient sea and seagull noise from one clip to put where he originally had some loud, distracting truck noise that took away from the scene.









Another helpful tool I learned was editing to the beat.  This looked really easy, but when I tried to practice the lesson, I had little success.  I think what happened was I did not have a very beat-heavy piece of music.  I wanted to keep the music I had originally selected, so I just chalked my failure up to experience.  This is going to be a very useful tool next time I have photos that I want to make into a slideshow.  Summer IS calling, so this might be something I practice in the near future.


Now I am going to let you see what I ended up creating with my new knowledge.  I don't think it accurately portrays the amount of new knowledge I gained from the iMovie Essentials tutorials, but failure WAS an option in this case.  I think as long as I learn from my failure, then it really isn't considered failing.  At least I know what I did wrong, and how to fix the shortcomings next time I use iMovie.

Lastly, I want to present to you my certificate of completion I received for successfully completing the training.  I highly recommend this training if you want to get better at using this amazing program.  Every Mac has this program, and every Mac user can figure out the basics.  Lynda.com helps you go further than just figuring out the basics.  Lynda.com presents the training like a layer cake.  It keeps building and building until, at the end of the training, you have this monstrosity of a cake lingering in front of you.  This is a good metaphor for many reasons.  First and foremost, you could not possibly eat the entire cake in one sitting.  Yes, I watched all of the videos, but I have not even attempted to eat or digest everything.  It will take several sittings to tackle this one.

(FYI--I finished all of the videos on  June 11, but did not watch the very last video until this morning when I realized I did not put the certificate in my blog.  Thus, I am making these edits now.)