iMovie® '09 & iDVD® '09® For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Managing Events

In This Chapter

• Naming your Events

• Organizing your Events

• Archiving Events

Events are the building blocks of iMovie. This chapter is all about how to manage Events: what they are, how to name them, organize them, and even how to archive them when you think you no longer need them.

Figuring Out What Events Are

In Chapter 2, we talk about the Event Library, iMovie's organizational structure that contains all your video clips. However, in that chapter, we don't get into exactly what an Event is, partly because an Event is whatever you want it to be. By default, as we show in a number of the screenshots in Chapter 2, iMovie suggests that footage shot on a single date be an Event (iPhoto has the same default for the images you import). Setting one day to equal one Event is, in our opinion, a pretty good default setting.

But if you want your weeklong Caribbean cruise to be an Event, you could designate the footage shot that entire week as a single Event. On the other hand, if you have a couple of kids in Little League who both have games on the same day, you probably want each game that you record to be a separate Event. iMovie's "each day is an Event" default works well enough for many situations, but you're free to override it whenever you want.

Naming Events

When you import video, iMovie suggests a default name for the Event — a combination of the words New Event and ...