iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Editing Digital-Camera Movies

To edit your camera-captured movies, open iMovie (the video-editing component of your iLife suite). Click the Photos button so that you can see all your iPhoto pictures—and all your iPhoto movie clips. Drag the clips you want right into your timeline. (Or, if iPhoto is running, drag the movies’ thumbnails right out of iPhoto’s window and into iMovie’s timeline or Clips panel. )

The end.

All right, there’s a little more to it—like learning how to use iMovie—but that’s a different book. The point here is that you can incorporate movies from iPhoto’s library in whatever iMovie project you have open, ready to edit as you would any other clips.

Tip

Want a great way to organize your camera’s movies all at once? Create a new smart album as described in Chapter 5. Set it up so that the pop-up menus and text boxes in the New Smart Album dialog box say “Title” “ends with” “.mov” (or “.avi,” depending on how your digital camera names its movie files). You’ll always find all your movies safely collected in this self-updating smart album.

Editing Digital-Camera Movies in QuickTime Player Pro

If learning iMovie seems like overkill for some little project—if all you want to do is combine a few into one longer flick, for example—you can get by with nothing more than QuickTime Player Pro.

Suppose, for example, that you want to combine two movies called Clip A and Clip B. Open both of them by double-clicking their thumbnails in iPhoto.

Then follow along with this quick refresher ...