Chapter 13. Movie Trailers

From iMovie’s beginning, its raison d’être has been to take your otherwise boring home movies and make them shine with excitement and professionalism. Features like transitions, themes, video effects, titles, editing to a beat, and the Ken Burns effect give your movies a sleek veneer with very little effort on your part; if you attempted the same tasks manually in high-end editing software, it’d take a lot more time and effort than it does in iMovie.

iMovie’s movie-trailers feature is another gigantic leap forward in letting you create awesome movie previews with just a little extra work. In fact, iMovie’s trailers represent a merger of all the things that iMovie has done well for a long time: It combines titles, music, transitions, and artwork to give you professional-looking previews made from all your own footage. And iMovie does all the hard work for you!

A trailer is the “Coming Attractions” preview you see before a feature film, or the TV ad that touts “Transformers 7: Hybrids Gone Mad.” It tells you enough about a movie so that you want to watch the whole thing. Trailers have become a form of entertainment all their own. For almost a decade, Apple, Yahoo, and other Internet bigwigs have dedicated entire websites to trailers for upcoming movies. Major studios even shoot footage just for a movie’s trailer.

iMovie’s trailers are 1- or 2-minute videos that look exactly like Hollywood previews, complete with swelling music, animated credits, and fast intercuts ...

Get iMovie: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.