Select and add clips to the timeline - iMovie Tutorial

- (Narrator) As I previously mentioned, the idea behind using the Event Browser is to quickly locate among all the not so great stuff. The good footage that you actually want to use in your own iMovie project. But in order to add the good footage, you need to be able to select the footage. Let's take a look at a brief overview of this process. So let's say I want to create a movie project using the trail running footage I imported earlier. To create a new project. I'm going to go back out to the main projects view. I click the create new button and choose movie. That takes me into my new project. Now you can start working with this project right away, but I like to go back to projects in order to make iMovie prompt me to name my project. I'll call this Appalachian Trail Running. Now click okay. So back here in the main projects view, I can see my new project and I'll double-click to go back into it. Now you don't necessarily have to do this each time you create a new project, but it just makes me feel safer knowing that my project is named and saved right away. So I'm back here in the main iMovie project window for my new project. You can see its name here at the top of the window. And the project timeline is currently empty. We have no clips in that timeline. So the way we build our project is by selecting imported footage to place into the project timeline here in the AT running event I can browse my footage by skimming my mouse over the clips, and they show up in the viewer on the right to watch a clip in full motion. I just press the space bar and the clip starts playing from wherever my mouse is at that moment. And as I previously mentioned if you want to watch a clip from the beginning. Place your mouse over it and then press the backslash key on the keyboard. (indistinct) - This is the Burn Hazel Bridge Road entrance to the Appalachian Trail here in central Pennsylvania. My destination today is Boiling Springs, PA. - So let's say I wanted to start off this movie with this footage of me introducing the video. So I need to select it by dragging across it. Now, first I'm going to come back up here to the gear menu and set the zoom back to five seconds where I previously had it in my other project. This allows me to be more precise with my selections. So now we can see this clip here. So again, I need to select the portion of a clip I want to use by dragging across it. This is a lot like selecting texts in a word processor. Now, when you click on a clip in the Event Browser. The default action is to select the entire clip. If you only want to select a portion of the clip, you can hold down the R on your keyboard and then click and drag. All right, so I'm going to place my cursor Right before I started talking right about there. I'm going to hold down R on my keyboard and start dragging to the right. Then I'll select to the right before I run off screen here right about there. Now, once the footage is selected there are a couple of different ways to add it to your project. One way is to click the plus button that appears on your selection or you can use the keyboard command of E to add the selection to the movie. Now that command is actually found under the edit menu, add to movie or E. Now when you have an empty project like this. It doesn't matter whether you press E for add to project or W for insert. However, once you have clips in your project, you should know that E always has the selection to the end of your video while W inserts the selection wherever the play that happens to be. So, for example if your playhead is sitting in the middle of a clip. Pressing W we'll split that clip and place a selection at that point more on that later. Now, lastly you can also just drag your selection right into the timeline. So there's the first clip of my project. Now notice here in the original footage in the Event Browser the portion that I used has an orange bar under it. This lets me know at a glance that I've used this footage in a project. And the really nice thing is that I can now do whatever I want to the clip in the project. And it won't have any effect on the source video in the Event Browser. Now I'm also going to come up to the view menu and turn off audio skimming, because I don't really need that again right now. So think of the clip in the project browser, as an individual copy of the video in the Event Browser. Only it's not really a copy because it's not taking up any more space on your hard drive. iMovie just keeps track of all the things you're doing to this instance of a clip and displays it accordingly. Now, viewing your project down here is pretty much the same as viewing the content in the Event Browser. By default each clip that I dragged down is represented by still images that I can skim over, but I can also use the zoom slider here. If I want to see more stills or fewer stills, every couple of seconds, and I can skim through the video just by moving my cursor over it. I can also play back the video by pressing the space bar. - We're Springs, PA which is about 10 miles in this direction. So I'm going to get going. - And similar to selecting clips in the Event Browser. To make a selection in the project timeline. I can't just drag over the clip. If it's selected, you can see that just moves the clip. So again you can hold down R and make your selection that way or alternately you can click and hold down for a second and then just drag to make your selection that way. Without holding down the R key you can also play back at full screen by coming up to the viewer and clicking the full screen button here, and then just press escape to leave full screen. Now notice also that below the thumbnails, we have this blue bar this is the audio wave form which is basically a visual representation of the audio in the clip we'll be working with audio in its own chapter later on. Now, if you find it distracting you can click settings and uncheck show wave forms. I'm going to leave that on for now though, because seeing where the audio starts and stops can help make editing a little bit easier. All right, so viewing your project involves the same controls and options as viewing your raw source video in the Event Browser. Now, again I'll be getting into much more detail about assembling your clips into a project in the chapter on editing. But for now that's the overview I'd like you to have about the project timeline and dragging clips, into it from the Event Browser.