iMovie: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Events

In the last chapter, you learned that iMovie stores your raw footage in Event libraries, the repositories for the clips you’ll use as you build your movie. Now that you’ve imported some footage, it’s time to learn how you (and iMovie) work with events as you craft your film, and how you handle everyday housekeeping for events—to rename, merge, move, or delete them.

How Events Work

iMovie stores two types of files in an event: source material and projects. Source material includes everything you need to create your movie, like the raw footage you imported earlier, along with any songs and photos you want to use (you’ll learn how to import those in Chapters Chapter 11 and Chapter 12). A project is your movie-in-progress, described in Chapter 4.

Right now, your events include the individual clips you imported in the last chapter. To see what an event looks like, go to the iMovie Library (under Libraries on the left side of the iMovie window) and click an event name. iMovie displays all the clips inside that event in the Event browser on the right (see Figure 3-1).

iMovie starts out sorting your clips by date, oldest to newest. You can change that sort order by choosing View→Sort By and then selecting from the submenu (Figure 3-2). You can sort your footage by date, clip name, or clip duration. With any of these options, you can reverse the sort order (oldest to newest, reverse alphabetical, or longest to shortest) by choosing Descending from the same submenu.

Figure 3-1. When ...