iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Fast/Slow/Reverse

Whether you're mimicking Chariots of Fire or Buddy Hall, you can add a lot to your movie by changing the speed of your footage. Slowing a clip down emphasizes the drama of the moment. Speeding a clip up conveys urgency, depicts the passage of time, or just makes it funny.

Another new iMovie '09 trick is changing the speed and direction of your footage. Actually, since the old, original iMovie had these features, you could say that Apple is teaching a new dog old tricks.

Changing a Clip's Speed

To make a clip play back faster or slower, double-click it to open the Inspector panel. In the middle of this panel, you'll see one of two things:

• Convert Entire Clip. Ordinarily, Apple hides ugly technical underpinnings from you. If you want to play with the speed or direction of a clip's playback, however, you come face-to-face with one unfortunate technicality: iMovie can't adjust the speed or direction of a clip unless, as it sits there on your hard drive, it happens to be in a particular file format. (It's the aforementioned Apple Intermediate Codec [Importing Old iMovie Projects] format, in case you're wondering.)

Note

The Convert Entire Clip conversion step isn't necessary if you're editing footage imported from an AVCHD camera (AVCHD, MPEG-2, and Other Such Jargon). That's because iMovie has already converted your footage into the same format it uses for fast/slow/reverse.

If you see the Convert Entire Clip button, click it (Figure 6-3).

Note

When iMovie says Convert Entire ...