Chapter 1. Introducing iMovie
Whether you’ve been an iMovie fan since the program debuted way back in 1999 or you’re taking your first foray into editing home movies, you’ll be impressed by iMovie’s features and your ability to edit video on both your Mac desktop and any iOS device you have.
In brief, iMovie is video-editing software that grabs the raw footage from your camcorder, camera, phone, or computer and lets you edit it easily, quickly, and creatively. In this chapter, you’ll learn the many ways you can use iMovie (some of which may surprise you) and take a look at the iMovie workspace.
The iMovie Revolution
Over the decades, home movies have gotten a bad rap. Do some random browsing on YouTube and you’ll find all kinds of offenders: unending shots of cats sleeping on sofas, high-school plays filmed from the back of the auditorium, and random vacation moments where the camera shakes enough to simulate an earthquake.
Most people know that you can improve home movies by editing out the bad parts and concentrating on the good, but until iMovie came along, that was an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. You needed several thousand dollars’ worth of digitizing cards, complicated editing software, and the highest-powered computer equipment available. Unless you were getting a paycheck at the end of the process, editing your own movies 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 ...