As projects continue to grow, Apple Customer Support has strongly suggested that we graduate from iMovie to Final Cut. Personally, I wanted to challenge myself to exhaust everything I could learn on iMovie before moving on to Final Cut. One of the immediate advantages we would gain moving over is Final Cut could handle the larger volumes of media we are experiencing now. Projects include more than just photos and music. With the ease of taking video clips with our phones and smaller video recorders, the volume of video clips being added to our projects has jumped significantly. To continue operating at the iMovie level, I will share a couple of work arounds that help extend the life of this wonderful software.
Downloading DVDs into iMovie can prove to be difficult if not transcoded into an .m4v file. There is also Handbrake and Video Monkey to help with transcoding. These are not as dependable…we get about 50/50 success rate using them. The challenge in downloading DVDs can be length of the DVD or memory left on your computer. It can take significant time to download and the drag on the computer can start to affect your software capabilities. A wonderful work around is to not download the entire DVD but instead trim your desired section. Here are the following steps:
- Open using Quicktime
- Edit ~ Trim
- Move the yellow bars to the desired section
- Trim
- Share to iMovie ~ it will be put into a Dropbox
- Restart iMovie and Dropbox will show you have a clip to import
- Title the section and it will appear as an Event
- Do this individually for each DVD so each section has a title reference
If you have an external hard drive, we actually have a couple, eject them while working because this can put a drag on executing these steps. We recognize this was a bit more technical blog but we hope it helps you in building your own iMovies.
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Related articles
- Apple releases minor updates to iMovie, iPhoto, and Garageband for iOS (9to5mac.com)
- Apple Updates iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and Cards (phonescoop.com)
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