How do I use iMovie...?

I've been on PCs my whole life and just recently started wanting to switch to Macs after I finally used one; so I got a nice 13 inch white macbook today. I love it; I'm simply trying to figure it all out, because it is fairly different from the PCs I'm used to. My biggest dilemma: For my cross country team every year I make a slideshow, made of still pictures, that I play to music, normally 3 to 4 songs, and I like to sync the pictures to the music (so the pictures change when a drum is hit or something like that), and though Movie Maker annoyed me, I knew how to do that using it. I've been tinkering with iPhoto and iMovie but I can't figure out how to do the equivalent of that...they'll make slideshows for me, or let me use video, but all I want is still pictures that I can adjust the length of and put where I want and things like, to put them to different songs. Anyone able to instruct me? Am I even able to easily do that with these programs?
Thanks. :]

WhiteTiger said:

I've been on PCs my whole life and just recently started wanting to switch to Macs after I finally used one; so I got a nice 13 inch white macbook today. I love it; I'm simply trying to figure it all out, because it is fairly different from the PCs I'm used to. My biggest dilemma: For my cross country team every year I make a slideshow, made of still pictures, that I play to music, normally 3 to 4 songs, and I like to sync the pictures to the music (so the pictures change when a drum is hit or something like that), and though Movie Maker annoyed me, I knew how to do that using it. I've been tinkering with iPhoto and iMovie but I can't figure out how to do the equivalent of that...they'll make slideshows for me, or let me use video, but all I want is still pictures that I can adjust the length of and put where I want and things like, to put them to different songs. Anyone able to instruct me? Am I even able to easily do that with these programs?
Thanks. :]

Click to expand...

Strange you should brings this up. Within the last couple days I started playing with imovie 08 for the first time. I think I'm getting addicted.

I had never done anything like that so at least you probably have the basics of editing going for you (I didnt know what a transition was).

I created two different "projects" exactly as you describe. Slide shows of pictures with the music in the background.

My first project took me 3 hours to make a 4 minute show because I didnt have a clue what I was doing but the second project took me about an hour 'cause I had figured out how to do a lot by then. The "Ken Burns" effect is really cool and makes a boring picture come-to-life.

You can change the length of time a picture is displayed by selecting it and then right click to bring up a menu that says "set duration". You can also set the duration of the transitions. That's what I was doing to time the pictures to the music. There might be a different way but I dont know yet.

Now that I have messed with imovie quite a bit it seems pretty easy but I dont have anything to compare it too.

I've read that imovie HD (or imovie 06) was arguably the best imovie version because of the thousands of plug-ins that were available (Star Wars type text scrolling for example). Imovie 09 seems to have a lot of stuff put back in that 08 eliminated but I havent bought it yet.

Heres some tutorials that I wish that I had found a couple days ago:

http://www.woopid.com/gvideos.php?gid=96

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-in-imovie-08-/

Imovie ?08-?09 Video Tutorials

http://www.woopid.com/view_video.php?viewkey=80425155

You can also watch the tutorials at Apple - iLife - Find out how to use iLife applications on the Mac. and you could try this manuals.info.apple.com/en/iMovie_HD_6_Getting_Started.pdf and, if your local library has it, the 'Missing Manual' series is pretty good - iMovie: The Missing Manual - O'Reilly Media

I've used it a couple of time to produce slide shows with video clips, stills and background music and found it pretty intuitive. Enjoy

Okay, thank you, the tutorials helped a lot, but not in one area. When I'm making a still frame slideshow, and I try to change the duration of the clip, I'm having problems with that. I click on the clip and the yellow duration marker (or whatever it's called) appears, and I drag it shorter, but the picture duration in the slideshow doesn't actually get shorter, the yellow just covers a smaller part of the picture, but the picture still plays for 4 seconds even if I tried to make it play for only 2. Am I missing something obvious here? Help?

Also, I know I can double click and enter in a number for the picture to last, but it will only do whole seconds. When I'm syncing pictures to music the clips almost all the time have to be 3.14 or 5.43 seconds or something like that, but whenever I enter that into the little duration box it just defaults back to a whole number. Is this avoidable?

WhiteTiger said:

Okay, thank you, the tutorials helped a lot, but not in one area. When I'm making a still frame slideshow, and I try to change the duration of the clip, I'm having problems with that. I click on the clip and the yellow duration marker (or whatever it's called) appears, and I drag it shorter, but the picture duration in the slideshow doesn't actually get shorter, the yellow just covers a smaller part of the picture, but the picture still plays for 4 seconds even if I tried to make it play for only 2. Am I missing something obvious here? Help?

Also, I know I can double click and enter in a number for the picture to last, but it will only do whole seconds. When I'm syncing pictures to music the clips almost all the time have to be 3.14 or 5.43 seconds or something like that, but whenever I enter that into the little duration box it just defaults back to a whole number. Is this avoidable?

Click to expand...

Dragging the ends of the yellow box doesnt adjust the length of the clip from what I found.

And yes, I noticed that if I change the duration of a picture to say, 3.75 seconds it might actually put it at 3.33 or something so your not losing your mind.

What version of imovie are you using? I've read that 08 is kind of "crippled" compared to versions 06 and 09. It's looking like I need to go get version 09 if I want to have more control.

That "missing manual" sounds like a great thing. I might go to Barnes and Noble today and see if they have it.

This video shows how to use "beat markers" in imovie 09. It makes it look super easy:

http://dustinizattphoto.blogspot.com/2009/09/time-to-music-in-imovie-09-using-beat.html

This section of the forum might answer more questions as well: Movies and Video - Mac-Forums.com

Oh my gosh that looks amazing!! I'll try it out thanks so much!

Cool! Glad we figured it out. Thanks for asking the question 'cause I was learning at the same time.

One thing else I found off another site was something about turning on "snap to beats" first (see the attachment). That makes it so that when you drag your pictures in they actually position themselves to the beat markers you created.

That is an excellent feature in 09 and I didnt know what I was missing with 08.

Guess I'm going to be heading to the Apple Store.

Another good tutorial:

http://www.unlockingimovie.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

Boy, that looks good too. I'm so excited right now. Hahaha. Thanks so much, and glad my question helped you too. :]