iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Window Menu

This window is fairly standard in Mac OS X programs. Its commands let you minimize iMovie (hide its window by collapsing into a Dock icon), or bring all iMovie windows out from under any window that’s covering them up.

The one potentially puzzling command is Show Full Video Resolution. It’s a reference to the fact that you can resize iMovie’s window by dragging its lower-right corner. But as you do so, you make the Monitor window grow or shrink proportionally. As a result, the Mac has to work harder during playback (to compute the shrunken or enlarged playback image), and you may not be seeing all of the quality of your original digital video (DV) footage.

This command, then, makes the entire iMovie window snap to its preferred size, bigger or smaller than you’ve got it now, so that the Monitor window itself is 640 x 480 pixels (or whatever the true resolution is of the format you’ve chosen; see the table in Section 9.2). On a big screen, this may mean that the iMovie window gets much smaller than you’d like it; now you don’t have nearly as much timeline to work with. But at least you’re now seeing the video at its optimal size.

This command is dimmed if your monitor’s resolution is set to 1024 x 768 pixels (the standard size for iBooks, among others)—iMovie needs a bigger playground for this particular feature—or if the window is already exactly the right size.