iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

File Menu

As in any Mac program, the File menu serves as the program’s interface to the rest of the Macintosh world. It lets you open and close movie projects, import or export still frames, import QuickTime movies and audio files, and quit the program.

New, Open, Open Recent, Close Window

After you’re finished working on a movie document (which iMovie calls a project), you can take any of theses paths:

• Begin a new movie project by choosing File → New Project (⌘-N).

• Open another existing project document. To do so, choose File → Open Recent (for quick access to a submenu of the movies you’ve most recently edited) or File → Open (⌘-O). In the latter case, the standard Open File dialog box appears. Navigate to, and double-click, the project you want to open.

• Choose Close Window (⌘-W) to close the project window without actually leaving iMovie. If this is the last remaining open project, the Create Project dialog box appears (see Section 4.3.3).

Make a Magic iMovie

When you lack the time to do a decent editing job, Magic iMovie can throw something together for you quickly. Details appear in Section 4.8.

Save Project

This command (⌘-S) preserves any changes you’ve made to your project, exactly as in a word processor or any other program.

iMovie saves such changes fairly quickly. It doesn’t actually store any changes to the video clips you’ve captured; instead, it just makes a list of the changes you’ve made, which gets stored in the relatively tiny project document.

Note

The Save command also ...