iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Tricks of the Timeline Viewer

Everything you’ve read in the preceding pages has to do with the Movie Track in general. Most of the features described so far are available in either of the Movie Track’s incarnations, the Clip Viewer or the Timeline Viewer.

But the Timeline Viewer is more than just another pretty interface. It’s far more useful (and complex) than the Clip Viewer.

Many of the Timeline’s superpowers have to do with audio. Soundtracks, narration, music tracks, and sound effects all appear here as horizontal colored bars that play simultaneously with your video. You can read about these features in Chapter 8.

Some of the Timeline’s features, however, are useful for everyday video editing—that is, if you consider playing footage in slow or fast motion everyday effects.

Zooming

The Timeline Viewer has a scroll bar, whose handle appears to be made of blue toothgel, that lets you bring different parts of your movie into view. But depending on the length and complexity of your movie, you may wish you could zoom in for a more detailed view, or zoom out for a bird’s-eye view of the whole project.

That’s the purpose of the slider shown at lower left in Figure 5-9. It adjusts the relative sizes of the bars that represent your clips.

If you drag the slider handle all the way to the left, iMovie shows the entire movie in a single screen, without your having to scroll. The clip bars may be almost microscopic—you may not even be able to see the thumbnail picture on short clips—but at ...