Tips

Decide the story your movie will tell

When creating your movie, think about the story you want your movie to tell. Is it meant to entertain, inform, or persuade your audience? As you decide which clips to include and where to include them, always ask yourself, will this help tell my story best.

Carefully consider how you arrange your clips

When creating your movie, think about how you want to arrange your clips. Consider mixing wide shots with close-ups; adding a shot that sets the location (known as an establishing shot) before showing close-ups; and including similar shots at the beginning and end of your movie, which provides a sense of closure. Be creative and have fun—your audience will appreciate it.

Easily move clips around

There are a few different ways you can move clips around in iMovie. You can drag imported clips from the Clips pane to the timeline or drag and rearrange clips within the timeline itself. You can even open multiple iMovie projects and copy clips between them, too. To select and move multiple clips, hold down the Command key while selecting individual clips, or hold down the Shift key to select a range of clips.

Split a clip into multiple clips

If you have a really long clip with no scene break, and you want to break it into several sections, it’s easy to create multiple clips. Just move the playhead to where you want to split the clip, and then choose Split Video Clip at Playhead from the Edit menu.

Delete clips you don’t want to use

After you decide which clips you want to use in your iMovie project, you might want to delete any unused clips. This helps keep your project organized and reclaim hard disk space. To delete unused clips drag them to the iMovie trash, or select the clips and press the Delete key. The clips stay in the iMovie trash, and can be retrieved, until you empty the trash. To retrieve a clip from the iMovie trash, simply open the trash and drag the clip back to your project.

See when a clip was recorded

You can see when a clip was recorded to help if you’re arranging clips chronologically. Double-click a clip to open the Clip Info window. Besides the size and duration of your clip, you’ll see the date it was captured.

Compare the lengths of your movie’s clips

To view a clip’s length relative to the length of other clips in the movie, click the Timeline Viewer button in the iMovie window. The clips appear as long narrow boxes along with the tracks for any music you’ve added. You can use the Zoom slider in this view to see more or less of your clips in the window.

Steps

Arrange your iMovie clips to tell your story

1. Select a clip with which you want to begin your movie, and drag it to the clip viewer.
2. Repeat this process with the other clips you want to include.
3. Notice that when you drag a clip to the clip viewer, it becomes selected. You can tell a clip is selected because its background turns blue.
4. Click Play to play the selected clip in the clip viewer.
5. Click the blank area to the right of your clips to deselect them.
6. Click the Rewind button and play your entire movie sequence so far.
7. You can rearrange your clips simply by dragging them around in the clip viewer. Select a clip and move it to another location.
8. Select a clip from the clip viewer and drag it back to the Clips pane.
9. Go to the File menu and choose Save to save your iMovie project.