How To Use Shutterstock Templates With Imovie

In our concluding lesson we looked at building a straightforward iMovie project—the kind of motion picture you might throw together of the family gathered over a holiday repast or, in warmer times of the year, frolicking in the gush of an untended hydrant. Such movies allow you to piece together as much textile as you similar, which can be great if you're the creator of Star Wars four – 6 Legomania! and less terrific if you're the poor sap subjected to 90 full minutes of Infant's First Bath!

Fortunately, iMovie 10 likewise offers you a style to create videos that are necessarily limited to a running time of but over or under a minute. They're called trailers and, like the endless movie trailers we've seen in theaters and appended to DVDs, are heavily templated. Here's how they work.

Previewing the trailers

To create a trailer choose File > New Trailer, press Command-Shift-N, or click the Create button in iMovie's toolbar, and choose Trailer from the menu that appears. The resulting Create window presents 29 trailer templates, including Activeness, Coming of Age, Vacation, Romance, and Travel.

iMovie 10 packs a ton of trailer templates.

Select any template, and a Play push appears over its thumbnail. Click that button to encounter a preview of the trailer that uses Apple-supplied footage. Each template has its own visual style and title style, along with a unique musical score.

Beneath each template is a Cast Members entry, which gives you an idea of how many "main characters" the template supports. You'll also see the trailer's length beneath each thumbnail.

Working with a trailer

Double-click a trailer (or select a trailer and click the Create button), and the Trailer Editor pane opens at the lesser of the iMovie window. Inside the Trailer Editor are three tabs—Outline, Storyboard, and Shot Listing.

Outline: In this case, "Outline" is a cute proper noun for "title data." Hither you enter the time and date of your flick, as well as the information that will appear in the Cast, Studio, and Credits screens. With some templates you'll additionally see a Video Style pop-up card. Click it, and you can choose Normal, Film Noir, or Black & White.

Yous enter title and credit information in the Outline tab.

Storyboard: In the Storyboard tab y'all enter interstitial text (for instance, "Pow!" "Intrigue!" or "Meanwhile…") and identify clips or stills to make full the video slots within the template. Filling these slots couldn't be much easier.

Each slot indicates its length and the kind of shot it is—a close-upwardly prototype of ane of the characters (your child, for instance) or a landscape, wide, medium, group, or two-shot (a shot that shows two people in the frame). To add a clip, move to the Browser pane, find the notwithstanding or clip you'd like to utilize, and click it at the point where you want the clip to begin. It will automatically occupy the slot, and it volition last for exactly equally long as the slot allows.

When the electric current slot is filled, the next is selected. Continue selecting and clicking to make full the remaining slots. Should you wish to preview your piece of work, merely place your cursor before the beginning of the starting time slot (which is likely the studio credit) and printing the spacebar. The trailer will play in the Preview pane.

Shot List: This tab gathers together all the video slots and categorizes them by type—Action, Closeup, Group, Landscape, Medium, Two Shot, and Wide, for example. This arrangement is a convenient way to confirm that the kind of clip you've used to make full a slot matches the slot blazon—that you really take put a head shot, rather than, say, a broad image of the Grand Canyon, in a close-up slot. You can also preview clips past scrubbing your cursor over them.

Go a better thought of how your clips measure upwardly in the Shot Listing tab.

Editing trailers

Even though yous've plunked a clip into a video slot, you take the option to replace or edit information technology. To replace a clip you can simply drag another prune over information technology in either the Storyboard or Shot List tab. Or, if you like, select the slot and click the Remove icon that appears in the top-correct corner of the slot.

As you lot hover your cursor over one of these filled slots, y'all'll discover 2 other options. Click the Audio icon, and yous tin turn on the audio track for that clip. (By default, clip audio is muted.) In this case both the prune's audio and the music soundtrack that accompanies the trailer will play.

Click the Adjust icon that appears in the bottom-left corner of the clip to reveal the Clip Trimmer. I'll discuss the Clip Trimmer in greater particular in our next lesson; for the time beingness, sympathise that it helps you make finer adjustments to a clip'due south length. The process involves choosing a different starting betoken for the clip past clicking that location within the Clip Trimmer, after which the clip adjusts accordingly to fill the slot. To close the Clip Trimmer, click the X that appears to the left of 'Shut Clip Trimmer.'

If you'd like to perform the same kind of edits that you can in a regular iMovie project, you lot must convert the trailer to a movie. Simply choose File > Convert Trailer to Motion-picture show, and iMovie does exactly that, placing the resulting motion-picture show in the Projection pane at the bottom of the iMovie window.

iMovie x has no Relieve command because projects save automatically as you lot work on them. Given that, feel free to click the small X that appears in the top-left corner of the Trailer Editor pane to close it. An entry for your trailer will announced in the Browser pane when you select the event that holds the trailer. If y'all'd like to proceed working on it, double-click it to open the Trailer Editor.

You share trailers exactly equally you share whatever other iMovie project. Click the Share button in the iMovie window or choose an option from the Share submenu inside the File menu, and proceed equally I outlined in our last lesson.

And that'due south largely it—an easy way to create some great-looking (and blessedly short) movies suitable for family and friends.

Next week: Exploring iMovie's editing options