Editing with iMovie for Social Media

1. Course Intro: In this course, we're going to cover everything you want to know about iMovie from start to finish. We'll cover all the basics, how to import media, edit your footage, add effects to music, and export for the web and social media. We'll also cover advanced level techniques like smoothing out audio transitions, creating L and J cuts, and making your footage more dynamic. I also have a few hacks to overcome iMovie limitations, like forcing custom video resolutions and making sure your video is perfectly framed, foursquare, and vertical cropping. Well, this course is great for the novice, I'm sure there are plenty of useful tips for editors and media creators of all levels. When using iMovie on the Mac, which is a totally free program from Apple, a lot of the techniques can be applied to other editing programs, especially final pro acts. If you're ready to take your videos to the next level, let's get started. 2. A Note on Footage: A note on the footage will be working with here. This course is a continuation from my course on how to shoot high-quality video with an iPhone. The footage will be working with is from that course. However, you can use whatever footage you like from whatever camera or media source you want. Also, some of the tutorial videos were shot in the before times so my hair might look a little bit different, enjoy. 3. iMovie Overview and Best Settings: We've got all our stuff shot. Let's bring it iMovie breakdown how we start editing. I'm in iMovie right now I'm going to create a new project and it starts with a completely blank things. Just a basic overview of iMovie up here in the left side, we've got basically where our media is going to be and also where all of our effects and other options are. Over here we're going to be able to preview video that we're playing either for premium video from our media then or from our timeline. Then up here on the top is all of our settings for the video where we can adjust the settings. Then down here is our timeline, this is where we're actually going to be doing the editing for our project. If you shop your footage on your iPhone and you've got iCloud set up and all that good stuff, it'll most likely already be in here. The footage will upload the iCloud and then just be in your photos which will automatically be connected to iMovie, as you can see here, I'm in one of my moments and this is the moment when I shot all the footage. We've got here is we've got Rebecca, she is a registered dietitian and she is shooting a video, basically a quick tutorial on how to make a healthy and delicious and easy yogurt bowl. That's the footage we're going to be working with, and this is the media. Before we get started with bringing in the media, let's go over a couple settings that you'd want to change from the default in iMovie to make the editing go a bit smoother and easier when we start importing some clips. If you go up here to preferences, I already have these settings changed, but this photo placement's going to default to Ken Burns, which basically means if you bring a photo into iMovie, it's going to automatically animate it. We want to change that to fit. Basically, that means it's just if we bring a photo on, it's just going to place the photo down to talk and apply any animation. You can always apply the animation yourself. That's just not going to be the default. The other thing we're going to change is transitions. Normally the default is one second. We're going to set it at 0.3 seconds. I find usually with one second transitions, especially with social media videos way too long and it's just very obvious. Changing this to something shorter helps add a little bit more snazziness to the transition. Again, none of these are permanent. You can change these at any time. Once you edit, this is just what the default is. You don't want to have to constantly change the settings we need to just change it once and that's the default. We've got our media here, use these ways to just highlight it all and just drag it into our project media. When we're here we have all of our media. I believe I adjusted some settings here. If you click on this little gear wheel, I don't think it shows does waveforms that default you can turn on and show waveforms and you can adjust the size of the film strip view here. We've got all of our media here. We've got our timeline here. The first thing we're going to want to do is layout our interview or our on-camera talking and build out the spine of the video we're going to do. 4. Setting Project Resolution: One thing I've note with project sizes, by size I mean the size of the actual video file, whether the video's going to be 4K or 1080P, iMovie doesn't have a way to manually set that when you start your project. Basically what it does is it takes the properties of the very first clip that you put on the timeline and it makes the timeline properties based off that first clip. The first clip you put down in the timeline is a 4K clip. It's going to make a 4K project. If you put down a 1080P HD clip, it's going to make the project 1080P HD. [inaudible] being an issue is we shot our videos in 4K, but we want to export in 1080P and we went that smaller resolution size so that we have the larger video that we can then zoom in and crop, and it doesn't look pixelated. If we have a 4K project and we bring in a 4K file and put it on there, and then blow up that 4K file, even though we export two 1080P, there's still a chance that it could look a little bit pixelated. We want to keep the project being in 1080P resolution and edit with 4K clips. The problem is the clips are 4K, so how do we enforce the project to be 1080P? Fear not. I have created a clip that you will have in the project resources, that is a 1080P video clip and has the instructions on what to do to make this possible. All right. I've got this clip template here and it even has all the instructions on what to do exactly. If we take this 1080P clip, put in our timeline, this is your first clip. You're going to add more clips after this and then you delete this clip. If you go to settings, we can see here our project settings are 1080P. Bring in one of my lips that I shot, say this shot of Fage yogurt and I bring it down here. This Fage yogurt shot is 4K, this is 1080P. If I delete this 1080P clip, go to settings, it is still 1080P. Now say I just bring this file clip into my project, if I go to settings, I can see my project is 4K files, so that's what we don't want. To make it a 1080P file, we start with a 1080P clip. 5. Working in the Timeline: Some basic editing commands in iMovie you see when I click on "Eclipse," it highlights the entire range, the entire clip. You've got these little handles on the yellow side. This is our range selection and whatever is highlighted in this yellow side and these yellow bars is what was going to happen if we drag this down to our timeline. Let's go ahead and do that. Because clip is over here. I tend to use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, so hitting play is going to start and stop the playback. Another great shortcut is J, K, L so if we put our right hand on J, K, L, J is going to reverse playback, K is going to stop playback and L is going to play forward and if you keep hitting L it's going to double the speed playback. That's a great way to skim through a bunch of clips really quickly just using a couple of keyboard shortcuts. Then it also conveniently located right beneath I and O and so I will mark the end point, O will mark the out point. That's a super-easy way to play through a clip and mark an end point, mark an out point. Once you've got that, you can either drag it down to your timeline, iMovie has a little feature where you can click this plus and it'll automatically add it or if you like keyboard shortcuts, if you hit E, it will place the clip at the end of your timeline. It'll put it whatever the last clip is. If you do W it will wedge the clip between wherever the timeline indicator is. This line right here, if I were to hit W, dash, is going to insert it in between wherever my timeline marker is. The last shortcut that you'll probably use a lot is Q, and that'll append or attached the clip on the layer above your primary story line. I'm just going to delete that. It's all you don't have to remember the keyboard shortcuts if you drag and drop anything, it's the have dragging it, it'll apply a clip here on the top. I'm dragging this clip and if I place it here, it'll put it in between this edit. What I can't do is I can't drag and place the clip in-between here. I'd have to actually make an edit. I'm hitting apple B and then drag this clipping between if I wanted to do that or as I said for the easy way would just be to hit W or wedge. But for the most part you're not going to have to do that while we're doing this art of editing, because we're just going to run through this and edit it down and bringing in the clips that we wanted to have. We're going to make my pin point. She's doing your introduction. There's two ways to go about this. One way is to mark your endpoint out point here up in the media area and then bring it down to the timeline. Then find the next clip that we like and bring it down to the timeline. Basically, pick out the clips that we want here and bring it down. The other way to do that is we can highlight the entire clip, bringing the entire clip down to the timeline and do our editing down here in the timeline, going to hit "Shift Z," which will zoom out the entire timeline, so we can see everything when you delete these first two clips. We have this one take here that has the entire take, Rebecca talking, and we can just edit here, same thing that we're doing in the immediate area. If I wanted to mark a section that I wanted to delete now, let's I want to keep this beginning part and I start. Whenever we move this part. If I hit N, I hit O for out, and I can just delete and remove this. One advantage to doing this is I'm going to undo that. While we have the entire clip here, this is a good time right now to apply some general adjustments that we want across the entire clip. 6. Video & Audio Effects: [MUSIC] As you can hear, the audio is kind of low. If you look at these waveforms, you can't see it in about of peaks. That is one issue with the sheer Mike that I was using. It was according to audio, a little bit low and there isn't really any control I have over that end, the default iPhone app. I do have more control over audio if I was using filmic, but I was just using a regular iPhone app for this. I'm going to click on her clip and then I'm going to come up here to the little speaker setting and I'm going to just drag this to 400, so it's going to increase the audio by 400 percent. You can try out auto, but I find auto usually gets a little bit crazy by boosting it so much that it's boosting up the background noise as well and it turns into a lot of humming and distorted audio symmetrized the auto off and 400 percent is enough. Where it's a lot better we can hear her and we could just makes everything to be a little bit lower than this audio. Another setting you can try, sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't work as well. The equalizer, we can change that to voice enhance. Sometimes that clarifies voice is a little bit by adjusting the EQ, but every voice is different and it doesn't always sound better. You can experiments, sometimes it works better, sometimes not. You had a bunch of other options here to you or you can just try them out, play around with it a little bit and experiment and then while we've got the clip up, we can adjust color. If you hit this little magic wand, that's an auto color correction and it also, as you can see, auto correct, the sound which we don't want our turn that off, but it did auto correct the color which boosted the brightness a little bit. You know, honestly it actually looks a little bit better for doing automatic correction. Come into this little color palette here we can dig into the settings a little bit more. Here's our exposure adjustments are going to just the highlights I find with social media clips. I like making things a little bit brighter side just tends to pop out a little bit more as people are scrolling. Just make little bit brighter as the saturation may go that's more saturated. You turn that nice yellow dress and then here is the color temperature. We're filming in mixed light, as you can see here, the window, there's a window right here, so it's looking a little blue and honestly really does not matter how much for social media type clips, but if you want to adjust the color temperature, you can shift it here. Some of them are orange or a little bit more blue, but the other did a pretty good job of correcting that. Then if you wanted to mess with color temperature, you can adjust your white balance by clicking here and then finding a piece of white and clicking that. I'm going to undo that because I don't think it made it look better. Then one more thing, clipped filters as you wanted to add a more stylized look to your video, you have a bunch of effects here that you can dig around in, but we're not going to use any right now. We'll get into these in a second because as a basic overview up here we have crop. This would be the way that we basically punch in and zoom in on Rebecca. Now I have a close-up because we were shooting in 4K and I'm going to undo that and disconnect to fit. Then this is a camera stabilization. If you were shooting something looks very shaky, if you want to try to stabilize it, you can do that here and then if you're shooting some emotion or you want to slow the clip down for any stylized reason, you'd do that here and then this is just some information about our file. Okay, so the advantage of doing that is now we apply the correction already to the entire clip. Every time we edit this clip and make a deletion, it's now already set and the clip is good to go so we can start working with it, making all of these edits. The alternative would be say and when we set all the settings, say we didn't adjust everything and we've got a couple of clips. Now, I'm going to make these very drastic changes that you can see. There's a terrible looking clip, but let's say we made this correction here. Now just as one clip has the corrections and these clips don't. If we go to this clip and we say edit, copy and then we highlight these other two clips and we say edit, paste adjustments. Here you can see we have a bunch of options and so if we wanted to just paste the color corrections, we wanted to just paste the volume corrections or all the other options here, we can already to say paste all. That's basically copying all of the attributes and settings from the clip we copied from and pasting them on the other clips and so now you can see these clips are this beautiful, Beluga yellow. 7. Adding B-Roll & Smoothing Edits: I'm going to jump ahead. Basically, you want to run through your sequence and edit out the main spine of your story, the audio part that you want to hear that's going to tell the story. In this sequence, I've got Rebecca laid out with everything edited out. As you can see, there's a bunch of edits, these are jump cuts. Normally this is something we want to avoid. We're going to start covering up these edits with B-roll. The other stuff that we shot. Over here I've got fruit shots and stuff, I'm making yogurt. This is a very minimal scene. I remember I had my 3-5-7 guideline, but in this case there's like literally one little scene. We're just focusing on filming the making of the yogurt, but making sure that all the clips, the shots are held for a good amount of time, as you can see here, so we'll definitely get some good shots out of that. Talking about the yogurt, I want to get a shot of her scooping out the yogurt. I'm starting to wiggle the camera a little prematurely. I'm going to bring the time indicator here and if I hit Q, it's going to bring that clip right up top. We don't need to hear the audio of that, so I'm going to drag that down. Then we can repeat, do something similar. Look, I got this spoon fixing the stuff here. Just going to drag this one down, bring it up here and get that audio. Then basically I want to bring as much footage as I want and have to cover up Rebecca so that we can see what she's talking about. Basically this is a show, don't tell type thing. You want to see the visuals of what she's talking about as much as possible. We don't need to see her discussing it when I visually illustrate what's going on in the video. A couple of tips to polish up the cuts here, make sure the audio sounds great. If you hover your mouse over here off these little handles on the audio, you see it changes shape. If you click this dot and drag it, it is now creating a fade of the audio. That's very long dramatic fade, but let's say it ended on a hard cut where it sounded quite enough abrupt. We can drag it out a little bit to soften the edit. You want to make sure you hover over here because you just hover on this side and start dragging your trimming the entire clip, but if you hover over this and drag, you're just adding a fade. Same thing up here. You see the two handles. If I were to drag this top dot, that is actually bringing in a fade and it's fading that clip out. I feel like you can overdo it with the fade. Less is more. I usually don't fade out from clips that much, but if you so desired, that is how you can apply fade easily to a clip up here. You can't do it down here. If you want to fade, you would add a cross dissolve because you'd be fading between two clips. 8. Advanced iMovie Techniques: Here we have the finished video with Beca, edited and covered with B-roll and adding all the music. Let's break down this sequence. With music imported a music file, you can get a lot of free music from YouTube, libraries and just Google search and get royalty-free music. By default there's nothing here, so you could just drag down the music file and you want to bring it all the way to the beginning, then I drastically lowered the audio so it doesn't overpower Beca audio so we have the original file. Just subtly in the background, which has a little bit punch to the video. As you can see here, this audio and video is split, basically when I made was an l-cut because I wanted the video to start. It's got a little bit of a transition, a text and Rebecca starts speaking underneath this B-roll clip. The reason I didn't just have as B-roll clip up here on the second level is because I wanted this little quick blur transition to come in, something to grab attention, I think about this being on like Instagram and people are scrolling and you want a little bit of a pop to grab some attention. In order to split the audio and video from the clips, you can make an l-cut like this. If you right-click on the clip and you say detach audio, as you'll see now, the audio is separated from the video. You don't really want to do this that often, just because now if I were to drag this audio around and stuff gets separated, everything is out of sync. By default everything stays together, which is what you want. You want everything to stay synchronized, I'm going to undo that bu in this case, I wanted to have this l-cut I wanted Rebecca talking and it did that affect. As you'll see here, I've got a little bit of a black clip basically I needed a spacer because the edit that I had it sounded a little bit too rushed so when he did a little bit of time just to focus on this fire yogurt shot. If I go to background is up here, you've got different color options so I basically dragged one of this black color, really doesn't matter what color it is, I just needed something that's a little bit of spacier, so it's half a second. Just a little bit of a punch to have a little bit space. Over here you'll notice that the Phi_a zooms in on the shot, so there is no zoom, what I did was I added a Ken Burns effect. With Ken Burns effect, you have your starting frame so this darker, wider frame is what starts with and then when I click, this is the end frame, this is the shot it's going to end on throughout the duration of whatever this two second clip is. I'm going to change that a little bit, click the check mark. Has a little more dramatic zoom. That's one way to add an effect to our clip. This clip I actually shot vertically by accident. When you're shooting with a phone, sometimes you don't notice that the settings, the phone, you rotate the phone and even though you turn it back, it hasn't fully shifted and it didn't fully rotate and register being back as a landscape orientation again. As you can see here, I shot this vertically by accident. I'm just going to bring this over the top so you can see. It's super easy to just go to the crop settings and you can see these rotate buttons you just click the Rotate and you can rotate it to the proper orientation. With that couple of other things, you'll see that here I have zoomed in on Beca to change the shot just to make it a little bit more interesting, my audio also had a text here at the beginning. It's nice to have a little bit of text to open up the video when you're scrolling just so people know, hey, what this video is about. It's like you're scrolling through it. It's like, "Oh hey, it's how to make a healthy yogurt bowl." Admittedly, this text options are a little bit limited in iMovie. Here are all the text settings, I changed this from the default font to something a little bit more. I think it looks better than T fault you can add an outline here if you start messing with stuff, see if I reset it. For some reason it doesn't keep the drop shadow, which would help with readability, but you can always add this outline to it if you needed to improve your readability. Admittedly, the controls over font are not great. If you're good with Photoshop, you can always make your text in another app something looks a little bit better, export it as a transparent ping or a transparent image, and then bring that in. The only thing you got to worry about and this actually works best with the way we have this set up is you can only have two tracks of videos. We have this one or primary storyline or primary track, and then we have this secondary storyline or track number 2. You can't in iMovie, add a third track. You see, I'm trying to drag this up to bring it above the stuff that, it won't let me do it. It'll have me overwrite these clips. That's one of the huge limitations with iMovie, whereas if you're in final cut or any other more professional level editing app, you can have multiple rows of video and layer and layer stuff. Now you can take text and you put text on top of all this but that's it. Say you did want to bring your own graphics and that would be considered an outer layer, you couldn't put your text on top of this layer you'd have to basically do what I did here, which is split the audios you have all underneath, have your B-roll shot here and have your text layer here. For this effect here at the beginning it's a quick blur dissolve, if you've got the transitions, you can see some of the transitions here. Transitions, my thoughts are pretty similar, where less is more. A long one second page curl is a pretty easy give-away that you edited this in iMovie or some other program. Not saying there's anything wrong with it, it just lacks the pinage and finesse it screams iMovie. Could be a style thing, but everyone's seen the iMovie look, of like the giant title, text lower third thing, this thing. It just these little style things that are giveaways like iMovie, to try and make it look a little bit cooler than iMovie, because it's free. I've got our default 0.3 second transition here, which we changed in settings. Obviously we always make this longer by double-clicking and we can always make it longer than when you one second, which actually wasn't terrible for this intro shot. Again, stylistic choice. Sometimes shorter is better, sometimes longer actually is enough that. As you can see here, this is a little bit harsh on the audio that a little bit of a harsh cuts. 9. Exporting Your Video: Now, for finally exporting our video, if we go up to the top and we have this little Share button, we can just export as a file. If you really want to connect it, you totally can, but we export it as a file video. We want to export it as 1080p and we want the quality. Profile is a little bit unnecessary for exporting to social media, so high is totally fine. The compression, if you have time, you can always go with better quality, so you get little bit better quality. Then I'm going to export this, and it is off. In the next video, I'm going to talk about how to crop this if you want to export this and crop it into something in a square format or vertical format for Instagram. 10. Square and Vertical Cropping: If you want to go to Instagram or something where we want to crop this and make it a square or something a little bit different than the 16 by 9 ratio, there's a hacking iMovie where we can basically frame the stuff and make sure that we are within the confines of this new square format that we are going to export to or this vertical 16 by 9 format. First off, if you know you want to do this, then start with a 4K sequence. Basically, we're going to have our sequence in 4K. You can copy and paste your sequence. If you hit on command copy and then paste it into a new project. But in this project I'm already set at 4K. We're just going to export this project using those same settings, but this time I'm going to make sure I export a 4K with better quality. If we go to projects, we go to New Project, bring in our template 1080 clip because we are going to make this 1080 file. Then also included in the resources are two templates, one for a 9 by 16 format, you can't really see it much here, and then square formats. We are going to bring all three of these in. We're going to make our new projects and make sure it's 1080. Yeah, it's 1080. Then we're going to import our new clip. So I go up here, I can import this new file that I just made. All right. Now we are on movies so I'm going add this to the end and then delete this clip. Now we've got a 1080 video of our original cut. Why I do this? Because now we're going to take our little template here, so we're going to do square format, drag it on top, and now as you can see, we have guides to frame our video for a square. I'm just going to drag this out over the entire thing and we've got our square video. Unfortunately, we have to do this because as I said before, you can't add multiple layers of B-roll in iMovie, you can only have one level. In our other videos we have the clips here of this and Beckett talking, so we can't add this photo of these cropping marks above Beckett and our other project, we have to do it here. The alternative would be if you wanted to separate the audio as I went over before and basically merge everything into being one sequence and then bringing the clip above, you can do that as well. That's another option. Now we have these crop marks. We can do things like run through our project and make sure that everything looks good. As you can see here where we see Beckett, she's a little off center, however, this is when you run into issues because we had this text that was overlaid on this other side. We can't really move it that much because if we make an edit here than and shift Beckett over, this text is going to start here and then jump to the left as it's fading out. Sometimes you might have to play around with this and go back to your original project and tweak stuff and then edit it. But saying that I didn't mess up with the text and that the text was fine if we had another example of a clip. That looks good. Yeah, that's all centered. Cool. It's centered. Yeah. Now we're back here at Beckett clips, so if you hit the arrows you want to go frame by frame. Now on the first round of Beckett, so I'm going to have to make an edit here. So Command B. You also can always go here and then click the clip and then split clips if you like clicking with the mouse. Beckett. It's whatever, I'm going to go one frame more so we don't see Beckett anymore. Even though you see Beckett here, that's a glitch with iMovie because first frame of this clip is the cacao nibs. So we go back to Beckett, click this, click the crop, crop to fill. If we frame it, we can use this little arrow as a center guide. Now Beckett is more centered in our video. We'll just run through his video, make sure everything is framed the way we like it. Maybe we want to shift those cacao nibs over, but I'm not going to do that or shift this. We're not going to shift that over right now. Everything is in the frame. Great. We could shift back over on this one as well and then we are finished. 11. Wrap-Up: Thank you for watching. I hope you learned a lot on improving your videos and editing skills. If you want to learn more about shooting video on an iPhone or interviewing people for video or podcast, check out my other courses. I also have lots of resources on my YouTube channel at New Territory Media, and be sure to check out all of the resources in the course description. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next course.