iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Video Effects, Slo-Mo, Green Screen, and Picture-in-Picture

It's a funny thing that we'll take pristine HD video and make it look old and grainy. On purpose. But video effects, like the popular Aged Film effect, create a mood that can't really be communicated in any other way.

That's why so many people were outraged to find that iMovie '08 came without any built-in video effects. You couldn't even slow clips down or speed them up. These newfangled boxes we call computers were supposed to make advanced video effects easy, not nonexistent. To make matters worse, you couldn't install new effects into iMovie '08 in the form of plug-ins from other companies, as you could in the old iMovie. A lot of people swore off iMovie '08 altogether as a result.

If you're reading this book, it may even be because you've heard the good news about iMovie '09: Apple brought back all of those missing effects. Slo-Mo is back. Reverse motion is back. Aged film is back. Apple even added new effects that iMovie has never had before, like Picture-in-Picture and Green Screen. (Still no plug-ins, though.)

And maybe best of all, you don't even have to wait for the software to render (process) an effect. Everything described in this chapter is immediately viewable in your project. This new state of video effects in iMovie is pretty compelling, even if it took a detour to get here.

Video Effects

What iMovie calls Video Effects may be better described as video filters. They don't insert lightning bolts or ...