iMovie Tutorial: Select a Clip

Video Transcript

"iMovie is a registered trademark of Apple. I am in no way affiliated with Apple. In this clip, we're going to begin selecting footage in our source video here to use within our project. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is let's get rid of this title window so it gives us more room in our project window, and let's just take our cursor here and just click anywhere in our in our source video. You see this little yellow box up here. Now if we center this box... You can move this box by going to the top of the box. You see a little handle, and you can move it back and forth, and this box basically indicates which video footage you're selecting. So let's move it here, and you can see if we move it at the beginning of the thumbnail. Now, if you look at our thumbnail, our frames per thumbnail selector switch which we already talked about, it's set at five seconds, so each one of these little thumbnails is five seconds, and this box roughly covers almost all of it. It's actually four seconds big; this box, and that's the default for iMovie. You can change that by going into iMovie Preferences. You can see here where it says Clicking in event browser selects is set to four seconds. I'm going to change this to the maximum which is ten seconds because I'm going to be grabbing bigger sections of video for this project. Now, when we want to get rid of this box; we've changed our mind, we don't want to select this video simply just just click anywhere outside the box and it'll disappear. So, let's go back up here again and click on it. Now you can see if we move our box to the beginning of the thumbnail it takes up exactly two thumbnails, which is ten seconds long, so this box is selecting ten seconds of footage. But you're not stuck with just ten seconds of footage. You can obviously alter this box to whatever to whichever length you like. And the way you do that is there's little handles at the beginning and at the end, and you can just hold your mouse down over one of the handles; say the ending handle, and drag the box to select any length of video you want. Now, we want just the vows to appear at this particular scene, vows and rings, so I'm going to set the end point to right after they kiss each other and there's some clapping; right before the camera gets a little shaky, and I'm going to set the beginning point to right at the beginning of the vows here. So, that's how you would select some video footage that you would later want to use in your project, and in a future clip we'll talk about fine-tuning this so we can move this box and really trim it on a frame-by-frame basis."