In this video, you're going to learn the basics of editing videos with iMovie. And if you're a total beginner, this is perfect for you. Now, most people struggle with the concept of editing videos for YouTube, or even just for fun. It's hard to know where to start. It's confusing. It takes time to learn. And most people, when they hit a roadblock, they just give up on their video project. But I'm guessing your project is important. So I'm going to let you in on a little secret, the concepts of editing videos, it's relatively the same across all video editing apps. Just a matter of knowing where all of the right buttons, tools, and features are. So before spending hours or even days trying to trial and error your way through learning iMovie by yourself, make sure you watch this full video and the complete iMovie series here on my channel. So if you're new here, my name is Meredith Marsh. And this channel is dedicated to helping your side hustle thrive with video so that you can become the boss of your own future. And it really just comes down to taking the right steps and the right direction. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Now we're going to dive into iMovie. Now iMovie is an app for your iPhone and your iPad, but for this video, I'm covering iMovie on the Mac. So the first time you open up a movie on your Mac, you're going to have this blank screen here. This is your "projects" menu. If you've never used it, you won't have any projects here and we're going to actually create one. So you're going to hit this big plus button over here in the top left-hand side, you have the option to choose trailer or movie. The trailer option allows you to create a sort of a predesigned Hollywood trailer kind of look, it's a little bit hokey. So we're actually just going to choose movie here. Now from here, you're going to have to import your media. So the video files that you have on your hard drive, you can import them from here. Or if you have photos and videos in your actual photo library, you could import them as well. So for me, what we're going to do is actually hit this down arrow right here to import media. This is going to open up a window here where I can select where I want to import my media from. So I have some video files from, um, a video that my kids recorded of them making slime. So I'm actually going to use these and we will import all of these. I'm going to hit import all on the bottom-right. So now we have our files here, um, right inside of iMovie. And we can get started working on this project. Now, one thing to note here is that unlike most video editors, I movie actually saves your project as you go. You don't actually have to save it. But one thing you're going to want to do is if you hit this "projects" button over here to go back to our projects menu, it's going to ask you to name your movie. So I'm going to call this slime. And now you're going to see that you have this movie here in your project. So anytime you open a movie, it'll be here for you. All you have to do is double click. So before we get started with the actual editing, I want to show you around the iMovie interface, because a huge part of learning how to edit videos is figuring out where things are, what the buttons do, and how to actually make stuff happen. So up here in the very top-left, you already know where to go back to your projects and menu. You also have these options over here to hide or show your menu and your media files. And then this little down arrow up here is what you can select. If you want to go ahead and import any other video clips to your project. So on the left-hand side, you have your project media, you have your libraries. So all of the video files, audio files, any titles you create, anything like that is all going to be over here on the left-hand side. So you can select this, uh, my media here. It's going to show you all of the media. So for example, we have some files in here that are still images. Um, so you can see the little camera icon up in the very top left of this yellow outlined clip. This is a still image. So I have four of those. So it's showing me my still images and my video files. I have not imported any audio, any background music or anything. So there's not going to be anything there. And so moving on down this huge gray part under here is your timeline. And that's where all of the editing magic is going to take place. We'll get to that in just a moment. So there's nothing here yet. That's totally fine because we haven't started editing yet. And then over here, this big black box on the, almost the whole upper-right side half is your preview window. So this is where if we select a clip over here, you can see what it is. You can see what's going on. So you're previewing this clip. And then above that, you have this menu here, which is an important menu because that's where a lot of the functions and features that we need to implement. That's where we find them. And if you just hover your mouse over these, you'll get an explanation of what each of these things does. So this little magic wand over here will automatically improve the video and the audio quality. Um, we're not going to mess with that quite yet. This one here is going to open up our color balance so we can either decide to let iMovie automatically balance the color, or we can go ahead and change it ourselves. We'll get into that stuff a little bit later. This little paint palette here is to adjust your, um, your saturation, your color temperature, and your exposure. And then you have the cropping tool. The next one over is the, um, anti-shake feature to stabilize a shaky clip. And then you have volumes, so you can edit your audio noise reduction and equalizers. So again, more audio editing. And then we are able to adjust the speed of the clip, add a filter to the visual of the clip, and then also, an audio effect filter as well. And then this little eye icon gives us some information about this clip, like the file name when it was recorded, how long it is and those kinds of things. Moving on to the bottom-left of this preview window, we have a heart and we have an ax. So if you have a video clip over here in your media section, that, you know, you definitely want to include this in your final video. Then you can hit this little heart button and add it to your favorites. If you decide that there's a clip that you don't want to include in your final project, you can hit the X button and you can reject the selection. So you can see over here between these two clips, we have the one that has been favorited with the heart has a green line. So you can think of green as being "go". That's a good thing. And the one that we have rejected, let me make sure that you can see this. It has a red line and here in the middle, you have the play button so you can hit play, and it will just simply play the video for you. You can actually see it. You can also hit the space bar to play and pause these clips. And if you want to do it really quickly, all you have to do is just select a clip and I'm not clicking on anything. I'm just using my mouse to drag from the left of the clip, to the right of the clip. And I'm doing it as quickly or as slowly as I want to. Um, so that I am essentially what this is called is scrubbing through a clip. I'm just doing it quickly to do a really quick preview and find exactly what I'm looking for, or make sure that this is in fact, the right clip that I'm trying to preview. And this button over here in the bottom, right of the playback window. If I hit that, then my video is going to go full screen and we can preview this clip in full screen. And then all you have to do is hit the escape button on your keyboard to go back and last but not least a very important button that you're going to need in order to complete this project is this share button in the very top right now, let me make sure that you can actually see all of these menu items. There we go from here, you have a couple of different options to export your video file, and I'm not going to go too in-depth here because we don't have anything to export yet. And I have a complete tutorial. Step-by-step on exactly what to do to export your iMovie file so that you can upload it to social media and save it on your computer. So the file option over here is the one that I would recommend and suggest that you use rather than the email, YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo option. So now that we have our iMovie interface tour out of the way, and you know where everything is now, we can actually start editing this video. And there's a couple different ways that you could go about doing this. What we want to do is get the clips that we want in our final video, down here into the timeline. So for me, a lot of times, what I might do is select one of these clips and then hold down the command key on my keyboard while I select more. And then I'm going to click and drag these down to the timeline, just like that. And so we can actually, let's zoom in on our timeline a little bit. And so we can go through here and we can figure out what we want to keep, what we want to get rid of. One of the things that I really like to do is to focus on the things that you want to keep in your video, rather than trying to look for all of this stuff that you want to delete from your video. And you can zoom in on your timeline and out using your keyboard. If you hit command and then the plus button to zoom in or the minus button to zoom out. So some clips here on the timeline, there's a couple of really important functions that you're going to need to know. The first one is trimming your clips. So you can see here how we have this one clip. And if you're a very visual person, you can think of this in like lengths of masking tape, for example. So you can see this first clip here is a little bit longer than the second clip. The second clip is a little bit shorter, and these are like lengths of tape. Like this one over here actually really short. And the easiest function here is to trim the clips. So I want to make sure this clip is selected. And if you hover over the very tail end of your video clip, you're going to get this little bar with the two arrows going left and right. And if you click and hold and then you can just drag this over, then you are actually trimming this clip. Now, if you do something and you decide, Oh, that's not what I wanted to do. No problem. Just command Z on your keyboard, and it's going to undo that for you. It works the very same on the front end of a clip. You can trim it going in this direction. Now, if there's a section here in the middle that you want to cut out, let's say you want to cut from here all the way back to here. We need to do something other than just trimming the ends, right? So this is where you would split your clip. So right here where this vertical yellow line is, if I want to split my clip right there, all I have to do is right-click. And it's going to give us a little menu here, and we're going to say split clip or do a command B on our keyboard. So if I come over, let's say right here, I can do command B. And now we have taken this longer clip and you can see how we have split it into three different sections. So I could either trim the ends of these, if I wanted to, or felt like that's what needed to happen. I could just select it and hit delete on my keyboard and it will go away completely. And if I wanted to, I could actually move these clips around. If I click and drag and bring this over here, I can drop it down, back down into the timeline and move things around in whatever order I wanted. So I could split this along clip into multiple small sections, wherever I wanted to. And then I could move these around however I felt like whatever order made sense. Now, if you make a bunch of splits and trims and you reorder everything and then you decide, oh shoot, I messed up. I didn't really want to do that. If you come up here to the original clips, they're still in your media section, right? And you can see that you have these orange bars at the bottom. So you can see which parts of these clips are actually in your movie. And you can decide, well, actually I want to redo this whole section. You could drag this back down to your timeline. And then you have the whole video clip here that is unedited, and you can essentially start from scratch. So don't be afraid to play around with things. Don't be afraid to press buttons, try things, um, split your clips, trim your clips, because you can always go back and redo something. If you decide that you didn't like what you had done. Now, I told you that there are a couple of different ways that you can add clips to your timeline. So what you might want to do is actually like, let's say we know that we want a part of this clip, but we don't want the whole entire thing. And yes, I can see this as upside down. We're going to switch that around in just a minute, but let's say I just wanted from about here to right here. So this clip is not down on our timeline yet. So before we added to our timeline, all I have to do is almost like we're trimming it. So if I go here and then I bring this one into right here like that. Now, I have this middle section selected and I can click this, drag it down to the timeline. And it will only drag that part that I had selected. So that's another way that you can go through your clips and then add them to the timeline. And then again, you can see here with this clip, I have that orange line down there at the bottom. So that's a signal to me that I have added a little part of that clip to my timeline. So you can keep going and add what you want to your timeline, make your trims and your splits, reorganize everything. If you feel like you need to, you may not even need to do that. And what you are essentially creating is a rough cut, like a rough draft of your video. My recommendation is to get everything down on your timeline that you know, you want to have in your video before you go messing with any of the other features and functions like any of the color correction or cropping or slow motion and fast forward, or your transition so that you have a good foundation of your video that you can start from before you spend time messing with the bells and whistles. Now, I want to show you how to add transitions between your clips. But first I told you that we would fix the fact that these clips are actually upside down. So I have this one selected here, and I'm going to come up to this crop tool right under cropping. And I'm not going to mess with any of these things quite yet. But what I can do is rotate these clips either clockwise or counterclockwise. So if I hit this twice, now our video is right-side up. And all I have to do is hit this little blue check Mark here, and it's going to apply that to this clip. And then we're ready to go. Actually all of my clips happen to be upside down so we can actually select them all and rotate them, hit that blue check Mark. And now all of my clips are now right side up, which is pretty handy. Now, depending on the look that you're going for with your video, you may or may not want to add transitions between your clips. So what the heck are transitions, transitions are things that you can add in between your clips when you're going from one clip to another. Now, personally, for me, when I'm editing my YouTube videos, I don't usually have any kind of fancy transition at all, but you may want to incorporate those. So let me show you how those work. I'm going to zoom in on my timeline here. The probably the most, um, the most used and the most sort of gentle transition is a crossfade. So this is what it looks like. You're fading from one clip to another clip. So if I select this and bring it down here, and you can see that it's giving me a little space between these clips to add it to this timeline. So this is going to transition from this butter slime sign over to this. So you can see how one is fading out while the other is fading in very slowly there, just as the scrub over this actual transition, you have all these other transitions here available to you. Like this one that is a cross blur. So instead of fading out, it's going to blur out and then blur back in again, we also have a fade to black. We have a fade to white, and then you have these ones that are a little bit more, well, they're a little bit more crazy. So this one here is called the spin in. So it's going to actually spin into the next clip. I would just caution you to, um, don't go crazy with these because they can distract the viewer from the actual content. Plus you can waste a lot of time just playing around with these things that don't actually help you get your video done and edited and published to share with your friends and family or upload to YouTube. Now, there are a few of these functions up here that I want to make sure that you have, because you may need these when you are editing your video. So the first one is cropping your clips, and you already saw this menu a little bit when I showed you how to rotate your video clips, but there's a couple different ways that you can go about this. So for me, this video was recorded in the horizontal landscape format, the way that I shoot all of my videos. If you happen to shoot something that was vertical, let's just make this vertical just for fun. If you shoot this vertical, like on your cell phone, which a lot of people do, then you're going to have these black bars on either side. So under this cropping function, we have the option to simply fit this file into the frame. Like it is right here, or you can hit crop to fill, and it will give you the option to essentially crop your video to fill the frame. So if I hit the blue checkmark, now it's essentially kind of zoomed in on that one section. I'm going to hit command z, because I don't want it to be like that. And then we have this ken burns effect, which is where you can do a subtle zoom in zoom out pan over. So you can see you have this rectangle. Here is the starting point. This rectangle here is the ending point. So if I hit the blue checkmark, and then I come over here, you can see what I'm talking about. It pans from one rectangle to the next rectangle. That's how the ken burns effect works. Now, if you simply wanted to crop in or zoom in on a video clip, all you would have to do is hit the crop to fill option and then select the actual frame size that you want to have here. Let's say like this, and then hit that blue checkmark. And it's going to essentially zoom in for you. It's going to crop in. So I'm going to go back and hit fit here. The next option over is the option to stabilize your shaky videos. Now, for me, for this video, this was shot with my camera on a tripod. So it's not shaky, but if I shot this with a GoPro or we're moving around, we're walking around, then it might make sense to stabilize the shaky footage. Just be mindful of the fact that it can take some time, some processing time for your computer to actually go through the clip and stabilize the footage. But if you wanted to do that, you can just hit this little checkbox over here and you can see it says, analyzing for dominant motion. I'm gonna hit this reset button so that it stops doing all of that thinking. Cause I don't really need it for this video. Now under the speed tab here, there's a couple of really interesting features that you can use. You can also find most of these up under the modify, slow motion, fast forward instant replay, rewind at a freeze-frame. So under this drop-down here under "speed", you have normal speed, slow, fast freeze-frame, or custom. And so you have those options available to you under the speed. So let me show you what the freeze-frame does. Wherever you have, you know, a frame in your video that you want to create a freeze-frame, create a still frame. You can see what happened here. It took the frame where my, um, yellow vertical line was and it made a still image out of that frame. And then just connected it to the clip. Now what you have here is a really great start, a really great rough cut to your video. And if you're happy with it, the way that it is, you can certainly move on to the exporting video so that you can share this on social media and download it to your hard drive. But if you want to add titles and text to your video, add music, do this picture in picture or a split-screen function, or color correct, or add filters to your videos. And you're going to want to make sure to hit that subscribe button because those are the exact videos that are coming up next. Now, if you are completely new to editing videos and you want to get better so that you can create a little more polished videos for your YouTube channel, then grab my free Edit Like a Pro cheat sheet. I've linked to that down in the description below. And if you're happy with your iMovie video, the way that you have it right now, before you can upload it to social media, YouTube, or email it to your friends and family, you're going to have to export it first. And I've cued up the very next video here explaining every single step for how to save and export your iMovie video so that you can share it with the world and you can hit up the next video in this iMovie series over here as a well.
