iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Automatic Transitions

If you're really in a hurry to crank out your edited movie, like the now-legendary Apple programmer who wound up writing iMovie '09 so he could whip out highlight reels without hand-tweaking everything, then you're in luck. You don't have to bother placing transitions one at a time. Using the Automatic feature, you can tell iMovie to put the same, identical, fixed-length transition effect between all clip seams. Figure 5-8 shows the idea.

Figure 5-8. The Automatic feature takes your rough edit (top) and inserts identical transitions everywhere (bottom), masking the divider between every pair of clips.

This feature is OK if all of this is true:

• You choose a nontacky transition effect, like the cross dissolve.

• You set the duration to something short, like 1 second.

• You're creating a highlight reel, a sequence of shots that aren't intended to tell a story.

If you're not careful, these frequent transitions can get annoying or cloying, and they'll lose their impact in a hurry. You should also note that turning on the Automatic feature removes any customization you've done using the individual-transition feature described on the preceding pages. All of your duration adjustments are wiped away.

Tip

There is, however, a way to turn all of these automatic transitions into individual transitions that you can edit separately; see Adjusting the Automatic Transitions.

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