iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Playing the Movie Track

The Monitor window isn’t limited to playing clips; it can also play the Movie Track. That’s handy, because one of iMovie’s best features is its ability to show your movie-in-progress whenever you like, without having to compile or render anything, as you sometimes do in more expensive editing programs.

Playing the Whole Movie

To play back your entire Movie Track, make sure that no clip is selected in the Clips pane. You can accomplish this feat in any of several ways:

• Click anywhere on the iMovie window except on a clip.

• Choose Edit → Select None, or press Shift-

  

  -A.

• Press the Home key, which in iMovie means “Rewind to beginning."As a timesaving bonus, the Home key also deselects all clips, as though it knows that you want to play back the entire Clip Viewer now.

  Tip

  On recent desktop Macs, the Home key is above the number keypad. On recent laptop Macs, you simulate the Home key by holding down the Fn key (in the lower-left corner of the keyboard) and tapping the left-arrow key.

• Click the Home button, which is beneath the Monitor window just to the left of the Play button. Once again, iMovie deselects all clips in the process of rewinding.

You can tell at a glance when you’ve succeeded in preparing the Movie Track for playback by the appearance of subdivisions in the Scrubber bar (see Figure 14-11). When you tap the Space bar, iMovie plays your movie starting from the ...