iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Phase 2: Select the Good Bits

The reason you're reviewing the clips in the Event Browser, of course, is to find the good parts—the highlights, the pieces you want to include in your finished movie. Once you've selected a chunk, you can drag it into the storyboard to make it part of your movie.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: The Mighty Undo

As programs go, iMovie is a forgiving one. Its Edit → Undo (⌘-Z) command is an unlimited Undo command, meaning that you can retrace (undo) your steps, one at a time, working backward all the way back to the moment when you opened iMovie. (You can even unimport a clip from your camcorder!)

There's an Edit → Redo command, too (Shift-⌘-Z), so you can undo your undoing.

Selecting comes in handy for other purposes, too. As you'll read in the next chapter, you can designate part of a clip as either a Favorite (a snippet you know you'll want to come back to later) or as a Reject (a worthless shot). These steps, too, require that you first select the piece of clip that you want to flag.

Since selecting is such a critical step in iMovie moviemaking, Apple made sure you had all kinds of different ways to make a selection. The following pages review them one by one.

Select by Dragging

The first selection method is the one you'll probably use the most often: dragging. That is, slide the cursor across some footage while pressing the mouse button, just the way you'd select text in a word processor.

iMovie indicates which part of a clip you've selected by surrounding it with a yellow ...