This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Make a Magic iMovie
If you want to make a movie quickly, without fussing over finely tuned editing, you can let iMovie compose the movie for you. You specify the title, transitions between scenes, and a music soundtrack. iMovie does the rest—imports the video and creates the movie. You can even choose to automatically send the finished movie to iDVD where you can create a custom designed DVD that will play on any DVD-enabled computer or almost any consumer DVD player.
- Connect a video camera to your computer with a FireWire cable. Set the camera to “Play” (some cameras call this setting VCR or VTR).
- Open iMovie and click “Make a Magic iMovie” in the project selection window (shown below-left). If iMovie is already open, from the File menu, choose “Make a Magic Movie….”
- In the “Create Project” window (above-right), enter a project name and choose where you want to save it. Click the “Create” button.
- In the dialog window (right), enter text for an opening title in the “Movie title” field and select the checkboxes of the options you want to use in your Magic iMovie.
- To add a music soundtrack to your movie, click the “Choose Music…” button. The “Choose Music” window opens, shown on the following page.
- Drag songs you want to add to your movie to the right side of the “Choose Music” window, set the volume, then click OK.
- Click “Create.” iMovie begins the process of importing video from the camera and adding transitions or music if you specified them.
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Important HD information: Even though iMovie can edit HD (High Definition) movies, current DVD specifications do not support HD content, which means you can't burn an HD movie to a regular DVD. However, two new and competing DVD technologies will be available very soon—Blue-ray Disc (also known as BD) and HD-DVD (High Definition/High Density DVD). These new DVDs not only support HD video, they hold much more data (approximately 25 gigabytes for a single-layer Blue-ray Disc). Of course, this means you'll also need a new DVD player to play Blue-ray or HD-DVDs. Fortunately, the new Blue-ray/HD-DVD players will probably be designed to play both traditional and second-generation DVDs.
For more information on iMovie, visit our Digital Lifestyles Reference Guide or Macintosh Reference Guide or sign up for our Digital Lifestyles or Macintosh newsletters