Using iMovie to create your rough cut

At this point, you should have your portable hard drive with your interviews and perhaps even a few useful still images. Now it is time to start the editing process.

We are going to use iMovie for this class. This is a very easy-to-use video editing program on the Mac.

The first thing you are going to need to do in iMovie is set up your PROJECT.

It is important that you set up your PROJECT on your portable hard drive. To make sure you do this, follow the following steps.

1.) Make sure your hard drive is plugged in!
2.) look in the upper left-hand corner of iMovie, and you will see a button called Project Library - click on that.
3.) Here you will see all of the drives on the computer and the various projects that they have on them.
4.) Scroll down to your portable drive and click on it. It should highlight in blue.
5.) Right click (Option-click) on the drive and you will see a selection for "New Project..." - click on that.
6.) Name your project. Make sure the Widescreen (16:9) option is selected and the


Give your project a name, and make sure the Widescreen (16:9) setting is selected and the "Automatically add:" box is UNCHECKED

You have now successfully created your project on your portable hard drive.

NOW you need to add your films to iMovie in an "EVENT" but you are NOT going to do this by using the FILE --> NEW EVENT command.

Instead, do the following:

1.) To create a new event, go to FILE --> IMPORT --> MOVIES
2.) It is very important that you fill out this dialog box correctly:

A) Make sure the "save to:" drop-down box has your hard drive selected.
B) Make sure you are not adding to an existing event (unless you mean to do so.) If you have not yet imported your movies into iMovie, you want to create a new event.
C) Name your event
D) if your files are in the .mov format (Quicktime) - all files that are from me will be in Quicktime .mov format - you can deselect the "optimize video" file. If you have any other format - from the Flip for instance - you will need to check "optimize video" and make sure Full Size is selected. This will take longer.
E) When you import the files, select "move" instead of "copy" files. This will move the file into your iMovie Event Folder.

3.) Once you have imported all of your films into your event, you are ready to watch them and make editing choices.