iMovie '11 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Introduction

iMovie is video-editing software. It grabs a copy of the raw footage on your camcorder or camera and lets you edit it easily, quickly, and creatively.

That’s a big deal, because over the years, home movies have developed a bad name. You know what it’s like watching other people’s camcorder footage. You’re captive on some neighbor’s couch after dessert to witness 60 excruciating, unedited minutes of a trip to Mexico, or 25 too many minutes of a baby wearing a spaghetti bowl.

Deep down, most people realize that the home-movie viewing experience could be improved if the video were edited down to just the good parts. But until iMovie came along, editing camcorder footage on a computer required several thousand dollars’ worth of digitizing cards, extremely complicated editing software, and the highest-horsepower computer equipment available. Unless there was a paycheck involved, editing footage under those circumstances just wasn’t worth it.

Then along came iMovie, the world’s least expensive version of what Hollywood pros call nonlinear editing software. In the old days, your recorded footage sat on a videotape, and you edited it in linear fashion—you rewound and fast-forwarded through every frame of the tape to get to the parts you wanted. Nowadays, there’s no rewinding or fast-forwarding; you jump instantly to any piece of footage you want as you put your movie together.

The world of video is exploding. People give each other DVDs instead of greeting cards. People watch each ...