iMovie Tutorial: Create a Still Frame

Video Transcript

"iMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I am in no way affiliated with Apple. In this clip, we're going to create a black still frame to use in our project. It's always nice in a project to have some black at the beginning of your project and fade up from black. It's pretty common and conventional in video editing. Now, the easy way to do this in iMovie is to find a black portion in your in your source video. Now, if you put your cursor into your source video here you'll notice that I have some black video right at the beginning. Now, in order to create a still frame to use in our project we put our cursor over the black video and we right mouse click. We go down here where it says Add Still Frame to Project. Now you can see a still frame jumped into our project window here. Now, if you look at this still frame, you can see over in the corner it says 4s, and that means it's four seconds long. The reason it's four second long is that's the way it's set in our preferences. Now, we can change this duration, and the easy way to do that is there's a little clock symbol within this thumbnail. If you click on that clock symbol it brings up a window and it allows you to set the duration. Right now, we're only going to apply it to this particular still frame. If you had a number of photos and stills in your project you can set a duration for all of the photos at once. Right now we just have one, so we're going to leave this selected as it is, and we're going to change this to ten seconds. You notice how it shows now that it's ten seconds long. It's kind of a nice time I think to start a project with some black. Now, you can do this with any other frame in your in in your source video. You can actually create an entire project of just still frames. Now, there's a frame down here I kind of like of the Boston Harbor kind of skyline as seen from the boat. This is a nice still. I might, I might like to use this to fade some titles up over, so I'm going to create a still frame out of this frame as well. Now remember, we put our cursor over the frame, get it centered to where we like it; that looks good, right mouse click, hit Add Still Frame to Project. You can see it jump into our project. This is four seconds of course, because' that's how our preferences are set, and we're going to change this to ten seconds as well. Okay, that's how you add a still frame to your project. It can be black or it can be any other frame that you'd like as part of your source video. In the next clip we'll talk about how to animate these still frames a little bit; add some motion to them."