Editing your first fan video with iMovie.
Importing your video clips into iMovie:
Now that you've made your clip(s), it's time to fire up iMovie. Make a new iMovie project. Choose to Create a new iMovie project. You will be asked to find a spot on your hard drive to save the iMovie file. There will be a little drop-down arrow with the text "video format." (See illustration below.) You will be given several options: The most likely setting for your project will be "DV Widescreen." (This is assuming that your video is 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, which it very likely is.) If your video is in the 4:3 aspect ratio, choose regular "DV."
Most likely your fan video will be in the DV Widescreen format.
Then a new iMovie project will load. Go to "File >> Import" and choose your video clips. Importing it will take a little bit of time. I found that on my G4 Mini, no matter what the file size (500 MB, 5 MB) a clip which was approx. 1-2 minutes in length took about 5 minutes to import. If you have a slower Mac, it'll take longer than that. An Intel-based Mac (which I have now) is much faster.
It's not the purpose of this particular tutorial to instruct you on how to use iMovie. It's pretty intuitive so you should be able to make a "bare bones" little video without too much instruction. For this tutorial, we're more concerned with learning proper techniques for retaining a sharp picture and clear sound, so that your finished, web-ready video will look as good as it possibly can. There's nothing more heartbreaking than working on killer idea for a fan video in iMovie, only to have to scrap the whole project because the end result is blurry and abysmal! Better to learn these methods sooner rather than later.
You will enjoy learning more about iMovie in the future, and fortunately, there are an abundance of iMovie tutorials on the web, as well as some excellent books. (I'm sure I'll write an iMovie tutorial soon as well.) For now, I'll only touch upon one very important feature in iMovie that you'll always want to be using—the ability to lighten the video picture.
Almost always, a video clip ripped from a DVD ends up being too dark. You shouldn't leave it that way—it needs to be adjusted. There is a way to lighten the picture in MPEG Streamclip (and I've used it more than once) but you're guessing on how light the end result will be. Better to know exactly what you're getting by editing lightness/darkness/contrast within iMovie.
In the above screencap, I have a clip in the iMovie timeline which needs a little tweaking. I select the clip, then go to Editing, then Video FX, then choose the "Gamma Adjust" setting under "Quartz Composer." In order for the entire clip to be lightened or adjusted, both "Effect In:" and "Effect Out:" (circled in red) must be at 00:00. Adjusting the "Power" slider bar will make the clip lighter or darker. After selecting the "Apply" button, iMovie will take a few moments to "render" (convert) the clip over using the new settings.
CAUTION: iMovie 6 has, alas, a "bug" in it where some filters will make the video picture strange and slightly "blocky." Don't know why this is. I have found that the Gamma Adjust filter is not one of the filters affected, so it should be safe to use. Look carefully at the filter preview and if you see everything get "blocky," then do NOT apply that filter.
Three clips were added to the timeline and edited in iMovie. Put a fork in this movie, it's done! Now it's time to get the video out of iMovie and convert it for the web.
A note about importing clips into iMovie 6: Try to keep them all ripped from the same source (preferably ripped and converted by you) and by using the same settings. If you various clips from different sources, you may have aspect ratio problems.