iMovie: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Projects

In iMovie-speak, a project is a movie you’re editing. You’ll actually edit your movie beginning in Chapter 5, but this chapter reviews the basics of how projects work, how you manage them, and how you customize your workspace before you start editing. Think of this as learning how a car works before you learn how to drive it.

The Concept of iMovie Projects

The way you build a video in iMovie is pretty neat, technically speaking: You select the footage you like from your raw material and then add it to your movie-in-progress.

While it may seem like you’re copying video from an event library to your project, that’s not the case. Behind the scenes, iMovie works much more efficiently—when you choose a clip, iMovie doesn’t move the clip anywhere, it simply points to where it is on your hard drive. Then, when you play back your movie, iMovie instantly reads the clip from its place on your drive and displays it in the playback window, just as though the clip were physically embedded in your project. In effect, your project is a list of instructions telling iMovie what video to play when.

Historically speaking, this was a big leap forward from the old days of iMovie. In iMovie HD and older, projects showed up as icons on your desktop. In reality, they were cleverly disguised folders, and inside, you’d find all the gigantic movie clips you used in the movie. This was convenient in one way: It made projects fully self-contained, so you could, for example, easily back up a ...