iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Magic iMovie

Nobody disputes that music, titles, and crossfades make movies look a heck of a lot better. But let’s face it: Millions of people wind up taking camcorder movies, and then never looking at them again. Editing and spicing up those movies is great, but it’s work. And it takes a lot of time.

In an effort to solve that problem, iMovie HD offers something called the Magic iMovie—a completely automated movie-assembly feature. You literally connect the camcorder, choose File → Make a Magic iMovie, choose the music and options you want, and then walk away. Without any further attention from you, the program rewinds the tape, creates an opening title, imports all the footage, adds transitions between shots, backs it all up with music that you choose (at a volume level you specify), and, if you like, hands off the result to iDVD for quick burning to disc, complete with scene-selection buttons for easy navigation.

Magic iMovie is ideal, in other words, in situations like these:

• The alternative is leaving the video untouched on the original tape. The simple grace notes added by Magic iMovie—even adding an opening title to identify the footage—make the movie much more watchable than the unedited original.

• You’ve just captured footage of something—a wedding, a graduation, a school dance—and you want to put something together quickly that you can play at the reception immediately afterward.

• You realize that Magic iMovie can serve as a starting point, with a lot of the grunt work ...