iMovie Tutorial: Swap & Basic Tools

Video Transcript

"iMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I am in no way affiliated with Apple. Okay, in this clip we're going to be looking at a few of the tools you have on your iMovie window before we actually get into editing. Now, the first one I want to look at is the swap tool, and you can see it over here to the left. It's two arrows going around each other, and basically what when you click this tool it will swap your event window with your project window. Let's do that to show you what I mean. I prefer this method because it's very similar to the way a professional video application would be laid out, such as Final Cut Pro. They usually have what's called a time line down towards the bottom of the screen, and your source figure is usually up in this area here. So, for the for the remainder of these video series this is the way we're going to have it laid out, but you can experiment with it back and forth to see which one you prefer. The other thing I want to show you is both the event library and the project library in the bottom file left has a tool that allows you to hide this window here. You really don't need, once you have, once you're working on your project you really don't need this window open here, so you can hide that by pressing that window and that just gives you a lot more space. And you can do the same thing down here in your project window. So this is the way I would usually start to lay out the video before I I actually start editing. The other tools are very self-explanatory. They're just standard play playback tools. Both the event library and the project window will have play buttons. If you hit the play button from wherever your cursor is video will start playing in the viewer. Hit the play button again, it'll stop, and similarly, once we start building our project we can use this play button here. You can also hit the space bar to start playing. The space bar will stop it again or you can double click, and that will start playing the video from wherever you double click. Clickin' it once will stop it, okay? So, that's just some ways you can start playback in your video. Now, the only other thing I'd like to look at in this particular clip is your frames per thumbnail control that you'll see down here. It's a little slider control and you'll see right now it says 5s, which means five seconds. That means that each one of these little thumbnails that you see is five seconds long. Now, if you increase that you see, you see how the thumbnails become fewer and you could go all the way to all where your entire source video is now contained in this one thumbnail, so you'll be playing around with this control actually a lot. A lot of times you'll have it to the one second or even smaller level so you can really fine-tune it, and then when you want to view a larger area you can bring it up. Now, this control is exactly the same here. Once we start building our project you'll be playing with this control over here to determine the size of your thumbnails."