The 20 iMovie Tricks You Should Know

Since it's creation, Apple's mission has been to empower the masses to create whatever the hell it wanted to make. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company made it it's business to become synonymous with the word "creative". However, Apple didn't want the only creative people to be ones who cashed checks off their talent. It wanted everyone to create. That's why it released programs like iPhoto and iMovie for people who didn't want or need to master Adobe Photoshop or Final Cut Pro.

If you ever played around with iMovie you know it's a straight forward video editor that lets you splice clips together with a little background music and some simple titles. Well, that's what it used to be. The program which was released in 1998 as a Mac OS 8 application, and now comes free with every new Mac, has gone through many revisions, adding tons of features along the way. Now in it's ninth iteration, iMovie '11 is pretty damn powerful. But to wrench the most out of the little video editor that could, you should take a look at the 20 iMovie Tricks You Should Know.

Before iMovie ’11, if you wanted to import movies you shot on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you had to use iPhoto to do so. Not anymore. Now, to edit video clips you shot on your phone, all you need to do is:

Apple may have gone with Twitter for its mobile platforms, but the latest iLife suite pairs up with Mark Zuckerberg’s network quite nicely. If, for whatever reason, you want to use photos from your Facebook photo gallery, you can now do so.

For whatever reason, iMovie marches to the beat of its own drum. Instead of presenting the video timeline in one long line like most video editing programs, iMovie presents your clips in stacks. Not a big deal, really, but we prefer the traditional format. If you do, too, you can switch it up.

For iMovie ’11, Apple updated the Inspector with new features that gives you greater functionality without having to dig through menus. You must make sure your preferences are set in a way where you edit a clip rather than play a clip when you click on it. The new Inspector allows you to change the speed of the clip without having to process or convert the video. You can also reverse the video with one simple click. Pretty powerful.

iMovie 2011 makes it easier than ever to keep track of all the stars of your production. If your video only has two or three people in it, you can skip this tip, but if your videos include your whole basketball team, pay attention. The People Finder feature analyzes all the video clips in a project and identifies clips with people in it.

15. Side-by-Side Screen Editing

Sometimes you need to simultaneously watch two clips at once. It happens. In iMovie ’09 you were able to do so by playing one video clip inside a larger one. For 2011, Apple gives you the option to watch two videos side-by-side.

This one’s straightforward. One of the most time consuming parts of making a video in iTunes is creating title cards for each clip. With iMovie ’11, all you need to do is select the clip with the title card you want to use for the others, go to the “Clip” menu and select “Duplicate Last Title”. From there all you have to do is edit the text in each one and you’re golden.

Here’s a tip that may only be useful to those who have worked heavily in Apple’s professional video editing program, Final Cut Pro. You can’t get the same exact functionality of the more expensive sibling, but you can at least make it look like it simply by going to the “Window” file menu and clicking “Swap Events and Projects”. Your Event Library will now be on the top, and your Timeline will be at the bottom

If you plan on editing a ton of clips in iMovie, you can bypass the tedious process of importing each clip one-by-one by putting all your videos in the iMovie Drop Box folder. Located at ‘~/Movies/iMovie Events” you can dump all your footage here and the next time you open the program it will ask you if you want to import the videos.

You don't need to make a foreign film to want to add your own subtitles to your project. Maybe you've shot a flick starting OJ Da Juiceman and you want to make sure everyone understands his verbal ferocity. Whatever the reason, here's how you do it.

Granted, the fonts that come with iMovie aren't bad, or unsightly—they're actually quite nice and clear, pretty good for on-screen text. However, if you want to personalize your flick by using fonts not found in the program, you can do that as well. Just make sure it's legible.

Voice overs can go two ways: They can add a personal touch and help with the narrative, or they can drag a movie down into the duldrums. If you feel like your movie can benefit from a guiding hand voice, you can add them easily in iMovie.

Footage captured and edited on your iPhone via iMovie or any other program can be exported quite easily to YouTube or Vimeo, but at a resolution of only 720p. Not shabby by any means, but iMovie ’11 ups the ante by allowing you to export to YouTube in 1080p. When you go to the “Share” menu and click “YouTube” you will see the option to export at full HD

Step up the quality of your video by using one of the many new One-Click Effects present in the “Clips” menu of iMovie ’11. At your disposal is the ability to throw in an instant replay, make everything move in slow motion, speed up everything, fade the action into a sepia tone, a hazy dream-like image, or to Black-and-White. iMovie’s mission is to make it so everyone can make video that doesn’t look like it was made by them. With these new instant visual effects, it moves one-step closer to making that a reality.

Now a days, most people shoot video either on their phones or digital still cameras. If you’re using the latter, you may notice some shakiness caused by the CMOS sensor found in most consumer digital cameras. iMovie ’11 can help you alleviate the teetering and tottering via the Inspector menu.

For those equipped with a MacBook Pro or a desktop Mac with Apple's MagicPad, you can swipe your way through iMovie with great ease thanks to newly implemented multi-touch features.

In the past iMovie would allow you to add cool visual effects to your videos, but you were never able to mess with the audio. Now you can add effects like Echo, Cathedral, Muffled, and change the pitch of the audio up or down.

When making a new movie, you have the option to use any of the pre-made iMovie transitions. But if you want to get a little fancy and customize your transitions, you can. It just takes a few more steps.

Before iMovie ’11, editing your audio was impossible. Maybe Apple thought people using its consumer video-editing suite wouldn’t be concerned with fooling around with the way their movies sounded. The folks in Cupertino, Calif. finally smartened up and gave users the ability to adjust the audio levels.

Previous versions of iMovie allowed you to use a green-screen effect—recording video in front of a green background and superimposing it into another video—but that lead to a few problems. Mainly, green objects being cut out of a video. In iMovie ’11, you can now also use a blue-screen effect. Here’s how it works.