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Using Digital Pictures in Your Movie

Whether you’re on vacation or at home in the backyard, sometimes you’ll want to capture events with your video camera, and other times you’ll want to take pictures with your digital camera. And sometimes you’ll want to do both. Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine your best video and your favorite digital pictures? With iMovie HD, you can.
 
With iMovie HD, you can access pictures in iPhoto and easily add them to your movie. You can even drag pictures from anywhere on your hard disk right to the iMovie HD timeline.
 
 
 
Tips Step-by-Step
 
 

Organize your pictures ahead of time

If you plan to include lots of digital pictures in your movie, you may want to organize them first. In iPhoto, create a new album, and then add the pictures in the order in which you want them to appear in your movie. In the iMovie Photos pane, choose the album from the Photo Library pop-up menu.

Make a still image from a video clip

You may have a poor-quality video clip that contains one great image. With iMovie, you can easily turn any frame of a video clip into a five-second still image to use in your movie. Simply move the playhead to the image in the clip, go to the Edit menu, and choose Create Still Frame. Your new still clip appears in the Clips pane. If you want to adjust how long the still image appears in your movie, double-click the clip and then change the clip length in the window that appears.

Change the length of a digital picture

To increase or decrease how long a picture appears in the movie, use the Duration slider at the top of the Photos pane, and then click Apply.

Scanning your old photographs

You’re not limited to using only digital photos in your movie. Consider scanning your old pictures and including them. For example, you could scan your parents’ wedding pictures to use in a video you make for their wedding anniversary.

Drag photos directly from iPhoto into the iMovie clips pane

You can also search your iPhoto Photo Library to easily find just the right picture for your movie. When you locate the picture you want, drag it from iPhoto to the iMovie HD clips pane or the timeline.

Importing video clips you took using your digital camera

Many digital cameras let you take short video clips. This can be useful if you’re at an event without your video camera. When you import your photos into iPhoto, these movies will also become part of your Photo Library. You can then drag these movie clips to your iMovie project and edit them, just like the footage you take with your video camera.

Use iPhoto to resize your digital pictures to match your HD video footage

With an image in iPhoto, go to Edit mode, and then choose Custom from the Crop pop-up menu in the bottom toolbar. In the window that appears enter 16 and then 9 in the fields. This will constrain the crop tool to a 16:9 ratio–the same as used in your HD footage. This way, you can take advantage of the great editing tools in iPhoto, and your photo will be available for use in your iMovie project.

Use the Ken Burns Effect in iMovie HD to crop your pitures to match your widescreen footage

Within iMovie HD, when your project is set as HDV or DV Widescreen, the Photos pane is pre-set for 16:9 aspect ratio allowing you can crop a photo to the same aspect ratio of your video footage.

Add digital pictures to your iMovie HD project
  1. Make sure that you have pictures stored in iPhoto.
  2. In iMovie HD, click the Photos button. Notice your digital pictures appear in the Photos pane.
  3. Use the arrows to scroll through all the pictures in your library.
  4. Select the picture you want to add, and then deselect the Ken Burns Effect. This turns off motion effects.
  5. Drag the photo to the clip viewer. The small red progress indicator appears as iMovie HD adds the picture.
  6. After the red line disappears, click Rewind to move to the beginning of your movie, then click Play to watch the movie.
  7. Save your iMovie project.
  


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