iMovie Tips

Here's a montage of tips for getting more out of iMovie.

Moving Clips from the Timeline
On occasion, you may want to remove a clip from the movie but keep it on iMovie's Clips pane to use later. If you're working in the clip viewer, this is easy: simply drag the clip back to the Clips pane.

But the more powerful timeline viewer, where you're likely to be doing most of your work, doesn't let you drag clips back to the Clips pane. Here's a workaround: In the timeline, select the clip you want to move to the Clips pane, and choose Cut from the Edit menu. Then select any clip on the Clips pane and choose Paste from the Edit menu.

Copying and Pasting Clips
Speaking of the Edit menu, it's worth noting that you can make additional copies of a clip by copying it to the Clipboard and pasting it into the Clips pane or the timeline. If you want to experiment with different effects or cropping schemes, select the clip and choose Copy. Next, select another clip on the Clips pane and choose Paste. iMovie makes a copy of the clip and puts it on the Clips pane for you.

You aren't consuming vast amounts of disk space with this technique - rather than duplicating the actual clip's footage, iMovie simply creates a reference to it.

Moving Clips Faster
If you need to move a clip a significant distance - say, from the end of a project to the beginning - you could just drag it and let the clip viewer scroll automatically. But there's a faster way. Drag the clip from the clip viewer into any empty box on the Clips pane. Scroll through the clip viewer to the new destination, and then drag the clip from the Clips pane back into the clip viewer.

Hacking iMovie's Preferences
iMovie relies on a preferences file whose entries govern numerous aspects of iMovie's operation. By editing this preferences file, you can customize iMovie.

The useful modification you might make is to put Ken Burns out of work. If you'll be importing several photos and don't want to apply the Ken Burns effect to each one, you can turn the effect off by editing the preferences file.

For iMovie 3, the preferences file is named com.apple.iMovie3.plist. To locate it, first quit iMovie, then go to your Home folder. Open the Library folder, then open the Preferences folder.

Before making any modifications to the preferences file, make a backup of it: select the file and choose Duplicate from the Finder's File menu. Stash the duplicate someplace safe, such as in your Documents folder.

Open the preferences file using a text editor such as TextEdit, included with Mac OS X. To disable Ken Burns, use TextEdit's Find command to locate the following entry:

<key>Option autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills: %d
</key>
<true/>

Change the word true to false. Save the file, and start iMovie again. Test your work by dragging a photo to the timeline.

If you edit the preferences file incorrectly and cause iMovie to start misbehaving, either replace it with the duplicate you made or simply throw it away. The next time you start up iMovie, it will create a new file.

Jim Heid, MACINTOSH ILIFE, page 148. © 2003 Jim Heid Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. To buy this book, visit www.peachpit.com

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