iMovie Tutorial: Add Transitions

Video Transcript

"IMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I am in no way affiliated with Apple. In this clip we are going to add a transition. Basically we're going to put a transition between the black clip and the skyline clip. We're going to use a cross dissolve transition, which will give the effect of the skyline fading up from black. Before we do that, let's go into our project properties again. Under File, Project Properties or, as I said before, you can hit Command J. Let's take a look at this. Under the transitions here, there's a selection box for Add Automatically. I usually leave that deselected. Basically, if you have this selected, each time you add a clip to your project, it'll insert a transition between it, and the transition that defaults is cross dissolve. That's the transition we want, and we can see that it says the duration is zero point five seconds, and this will apply to all transitions. Okay? So let's just leave that set. Now, there's three ways that you can get to your transitions. You can come over here, and this is your transition tool, and you can click this and it shows you your transitions. Or, you can go to Window, Transitions or hit Command 4. So let's go there. Now if you hold your mouse over the transition, it'll give you a little preview of what it looks like. Okay, and you can experiment with these. There's a number of transitions here. For the most part, I tend to use the cross dissolve quite a bit. It's the most common transition in video, other than the straight cut. So in order to put the transition between these two clips, we're just going to take it from here and drag it right to the middle here. Now let's play that back. Hit our space bar to play and you can see how it fades up. I think it's actually a little bit too quick. I'm going to select that transition in the project window, come up to Edit, and where it says Set Duration, you can also hit Command R. It says it's half a second right now, we're going to make it two seconds because we want a nice gradual fade out for the beginning of our video. And we're going to apply this to just a selected transition. For the most part, I probably wouldn't use a two second transition but I like to have a longer one in the beginning as a fader. So let's try that. Let's hit the space bar. Great. That looks nice; that's a nice gradual fade from black. So that's an example of how you'll add transitions and we'll be adding transitions all along this project as we continue."