iMovie Video Editing Tutorial For Beginners | Greg Gottfried | Skillshare

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iMovie Video Editing Tutorial For Beginners

teacher avatar Greg Gottfried

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:07

    • 2.

      Finding Music For Your Video

      4:53

    • 3.

      Trimming Raw Video

      4:48

    • 4.

      Enhancing Video Colors

      4:00

    • 5.

      Increasing Editing Speed

      4:22

    • 6.

      Video Exporting Settings

      8:43

    • 7.

      Final iMovie Editing Advice

      2:23

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About This Class

Create an iMovie editing strategy that works for your videos with internationally recognized digital marketer, and videographer, Greg Gottfried in this 30-minute, straightforward class.

Whether you're looking to learn the basics of iMovie editing, create your own videos, or edit videos for clients, learn how to create an iMovie editing strategy to achieve your video goals. From importing your videos, to editing your videos to music, Greg walks through his process of editing videos with iMovie. Learn how to:

  • Import your videos
  • Find the best clips
  • Add music to your video
  • Enhance your video colors
  • Export your final video

After taking this class, you'll be able to edit your own videos using iMovie, or offer your video editing skills as a service to clients.

Meet Your Teacher

Greg is an internationally recognized digital marketer. His business experience comes from a combination of being venture funded in a startup incubator and the real-world business experience that followed.

He places a high priority on reading and education. His favorite book: The Go-Giver - Bob Burg & John Mann.

He goes above and beyond answering questions and replies promptly to messages and discussion boards.

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Today I've got a cool video for you. So I'm going to be teaching you how to make really cool action videos on iMovie. So what I'm going to use as a bunch of GoPro footage and drone footage and show you how to edit it from start to finish. You won't need the GoPro editing software. It's really junk anyways. So I'm gonna show you how to use iMovie comes free on the Mac. You don't want to buying software. All of this is completely free. Show you how to go from a bunch of footage that you took throughout the day to a really cool action-packed video, to music. I'm going to show you how to line it up to the music, to the drops, all the tips and tricks that I've learned how to do. I'll show you some examples of what these videos look like. Posting these for a long time on my personal social media accounts. And people love it. People have been crazy about and they're asking for more of them. So it's really fun to do. The hard part of making these videos is the editing. So if you know how to do it this way, it's efficient, it's quick. You'd be able to do it in the same day that you fill in all the footage. So it's easy to fill in the footage and not everyone knows how to edit it in this class, I'm going to teach you how to edit it. So I'm going to go over all the basics of iMovie and then how it applies to making these videos. Now, this will only be for these tropical action videos. You'll be able to apply these principles to other iMovie editing for videos. But what I'm going to walk you through from start to finish, a ton of GoPro footage and drone footage to an end product. A really cool video set, two really cool music that you can post on social media or wherever and people will go crazy about. You'll look like a professional movie editor and all your family and friends and everyone's gonna be like, how did you make that video? It's really cool. And guys, this is really not that difficult of a process. The only thing is you need to know what you're doing. So I'm gonna show you specifically all the steps that are included as something like five steps total. And then you have yourself a really cool video. I'll show you how to do it, walk you through it real-time, screen record my computer on iMovie and everything. So I'm looking forward to teaching you guys all this stuff in this course. I've already packed it with a ton of information. I've done all the recording and I'm coming back to kinda tell you what's in it. It's a really information packed course, step-by-step. I hope you guys enjoy it. I'm looking forward to teaching you this course. 2. Finding Music For Your Video: So before you get into any of the video editing, the first thing you're going to have to do is find a song. So as you can see, I already have my song file right here. But I'll show you how you get that and just go onto YouTube. Now, once you're here, search the type of song that you want to use. If you're doing like a tropical video, like the ones that I like to do, type in tropical remixes. That's what I like to do. Tropical remix. And you'll get a ton of songs here so you can filter it by relevance or upload date. I like to upload date that way you're going to get new songs. So you kinda have to go through it and find the good ones. But these are uploaded eight hours ago or a day ago. So if you use songs here, then you're gonna get a lot of stuff that people haven't heard before. So what's cool about that? And the reason I like to do that is when someone hears a song for the first time, they link that experience to that song. So when they hear going forward, they remember the experience of when they heard it the first time. So that kinda sounds crazy. But if you're hearing the song for the first time and it's on your video. So if someone watches your video and they hear the song for the first time and they really like it, It makes there after feeling of watching your videos so much better. And then when they hear the song over and over on the radio, and a month or two later, they're thinking of your video. So that's a really cool way, eats a little bit of psychology, but getting people to like your videos, if the music's good and they haven't heard the song before and they really like the song. Inevitably they're going to like your video. They don't really have a choice. So that's a really cool thing to do. That's why I say Try to get songs that are brand new and people haven't heard of before. There's no short way of doing this. So you're just going to have to come in and just listen to all the songs and find the ones that you like. So say, this one's great and you really like this one. So you can do a couple of things here. So you can typically go into the description. And sometimes they have a download link, just a free download link. And if they have that, that's perfect. So if they don't, the other option you can do here is you can go back to the browser and search for YouTube to MP3. And there's a bunch of different ones. And you can really choose any of them. Listened to YouTube, that's the one I typically use. Or vid to MP3. That's the other one. Vivid to MP3. Think it's dot.com. Okay. Yeah, I thought I was.net but it's dot com. And you really just, you can use any of these. And all you have to do is and copy the URL. Just copy that. And then since being slow, so we'll go back and use the other one. No. I'm sorry. So they're just going to listen to you too. And then all you have to do is paste it right here and then hit go. And that's all you have to do. Give it a couple of minutes and then you'll have a download link. Don't hit any of these over here. These are their ads and they want to get you to think that it's the right thing. Just rule of thumb. If these pop up and your cursor is onclick mode when it's on the Start Download, and then it doesn't switch off to click modes. It stays in the clip mode. That means it's a full AD. So that's a good way to tell if it is or if it isn't the right button. So once you do all this, just hit go, give it a couple of minutes and then it'll give you, just download that. And once you download that, it'll go straight into your iTunes. So that's what's really cool. So then, okay, we're good over here. So once it's in your iTunes, you just come into audio. And now you can, it'll be right in Europe. This is pulling from your iTunes. As you can see over here, iTunes, it'll be right in here. You just pick the one it is. So I know it's not this one, but just double-click that one. And you can just drag it right down here. And then you have your song. So if you can't find a good one on YouTube, here's the other place that I like to go. So we'll go back here and we'll go to SoundCloud. Haven't account, that's great. I don't think you need one to use it for free. Yeah, you don't need one to use it for free, but you can search for the same deal. So tropical remix. And then you can find a ton here. And a lot of these will have download links like free download right here. So you just click that and it'll start downloading it. So SoundCloud is a great place to find a lot of songs that aren't even on YouTube yet. So a lot of up-and-coming artists will put their stuff on SoundCloud. And that's typically where I probably get eight out of ten of my songs from SoundCloud. Youtube is a great place though as well. So if you don't find anything good on YouTube, just come right over to SoundCloud and then you can do the download just like that. So that's how you get your music. 3. Trimming Raw Video: Alright, now that we've got our music, we're in good shape. So with all the footage that we captured in the day, if you're using a GoPro, just plug it in and then drag files into iMovie. So don't use the GoPro editor. It's, it's really just a, a skim down version of iMovie. So you don't even need to mess with that. It's a lot easier to just do everything in iMovie. So these are the raw files and they're just straight from the drone and they're put right into iMovie. So the first thing we need to do with these is dragged them one at a time down into here. That way we know which one's which. And what we're gonna do is go through and play them and just stop it at the points where we're gonna start the video. So you can kinda do this to be a bit quicker. But as you can see, this is kinda wasted time. Nothing's really going on. They're not going to use that as you can here. This is where it starts to start. So we're gonna do Command B for break. And then just double check that that's where you want it. Ok, and then click on the excess and just delete that. Now if you cut it too close or too far, you can always click here and just drag it back. And I'll give you some more time. Our Command Z to undo that. So same thing in the other direction. If you need to cut more time off, you can just do like look, it's at 14.6 seconds. It just cuts by the tenth of a second. So you can be pretty precise with that. So okay, that's the start of it. And let's just see where we want to end that. And then with all of these b over, just cut it long because you can always trim it down. So like I'll just cut that back here, break it, and then delete it. So then that's one clip right there. So you'll do this all the way through and that way you'll have your use usable footage. So it really doesn't take long. We'll just go through once it starts, break it deleted. C where we want to end, it would just go just before it. So like here's a perfect example. So it's, it's great. And then it kind of just gets a little funky. So you see how it's smooth. Everything's really smoothly, really smoothly, really smooth. And then it just kinda wobbles per second. Delete that right off. Just me. It'll make the world of a difference and I'll make your video look a lot more professional. So cut that right off. I'm leaving in a kinda a little bit more UCL slows down right at the end. I don't like that. So I'm going to just cut it again. So it goes full speed right to the end. Perfect. And we'll do this with all of our videos. So cut all the waste. See how that turns right there. You really don't want that. So cut it cut the turnout, get it as straight as you can. And see it stops there. So we'll get it while it's still going right about there. Got that. Just double-check it. Perfect. And do this on all your videos. So these are a bit longer, so I'm probably not going to include these in here just to save you the time. But when I stop this video, I'll go through and I've got these and then I'll come right back. All right. So I'm just coming back here and I just cut the rest of it so we're down to three minutes of footage. And when I was going through these other ones, I noticed that there's kind of a pretty long, so this is a one-minute clip, but all of this I think maybe usable. So as we go a little bit further, we'll figure out what parts of it we want to really use, but all this is definitely usable. Typically, three minutes of footage is a lot if you're trying to make a one-minute video, I think the best action videos are a minute or less. If you go pass that, you're going to have some kinda fluff in it. You have to have a ton of really good footage to be able to make a video that's three minutes long. The other factor to, as you're going to have to have a song that's long. So this one is 3.7 minutes, so that'll work. But there's definitely going to be slow points in the song. So you have to keep that in mind too. So that grey here is probably going to be a slope point. So if you want to have these really good action videos that keep people's attention the whole time, try to aim for 60 seconds or less. So I remember back when Instagram was only allowing you to do 15-second videos. And that's when people really loved my videos because I jam-packed only the best parts, only the best clips or a couple of seconds, and then the drop of the song. So it was really good audio and then really good action-packed clips in 15 seconds. People love that. So the more fluffy put in, just know that you're going to lose a little bit of people's attention. 4. Enhancing Video Colors: The next step that we're going to do once this is clipped, is we're going to adjust the colors. So as you can see, this is just raw footage to the colors kinda off. So before you start chopping any of this stuff, stuff up, once you have your usable clips, that's the best time to do colors, because colors, although you can select multiple clips by holding, holding command, you're not going to want to because see these are different angles, different lighting. So if I adjust the same saturation and things there will be different from clip to clip. So you want to do it on a clip basis so you can follow that. So just select one clip at a time and then will come up top here and I'll hit the color palette. First. A little trick do is you can try the wand and see how that looks. See, I typically don't like it, but it's a cool thing to try to. I'm not a big fan of that as expected. So I'll just turn the one back off and then just come to a pretty neutral place. I'm going to try like right here and leave it there. And then I'm just going to start adjusting the colors. Always bring a saturation up. It gives it that more of a tropical vibe to it. So always do that. And that's pretty good. And remembering the lighting up a bit and see what that looks like. It's going to be able to write. Alright, let's see what we can do here. And then it's really just preference. You're just gonna play with this until you get it. Kinda just where you want it. Use these couple, these adjust all the contrast, different shadows. It's kind of all built into one I'm not a huge fan of they don't iMovie because you can't control each thing individually. But just play with them, slide them. That's a little cool up there and see what that looks like. Nice and clean colors. Good, little bit bright. I'm going to turn that down in a second. Maybe not even that looks pretty cool. So that's a good look. So as you can see, just playing with it a bit. You can even come in and add the cast. So what I mean by that is over here can make it look like it's a warm day or cold. I like to add a little bit of warmth and adds a pretty cool look. I think it's more of like the sun on your skin feels. So if you're doing these tropical style videos, definitely, you're gonna wanna do that. So that's cool. So that's the first one right there. And then we'll just come to our next one and then we'll start the process again. So try the auto, see how bad that looks. So we'll just undo that, bring the Saturation up and see what this starts to look like. So it looks pretty cool. I'm going to bring it up even more. Yeah. Try to get the greens and the blues and the sand to really over-exaggerate it almost. And it gives it that really good tropical look. So I'm going to bring that up a tiny bit. And now we're in good shape. So look at how these two flow. Just make sure it's not a crazy jump from one to one. So they look great, perfect. So that's two of them done. And then again, we're just gonna do this all the way through for all the other clips. And then I'm gonna do that real quick and then I'll come back to this video. So when you're going through and you're editing these colors and other little trick that I wanna include in here, as you can do match color. So all you gotta do is select the one that you want to work on. So we'll just select right here. And then we'll do this little half dial right here. And we'll do match color. And then it'll say to find a frame that you want to match. So I'll come over and we'll just do something like that. So it doesn't get it exactly, but it gets it close. So you can keep clicking different ones and watch how it changes over here. And then just get one close to what you like. So I'm gonna do that one. Okay, looks good. And then you have a head start on editing your colors. So you only have a little bit more to do here. So that's just a little, little trick that you can use. The yellows are almost exact. 5. Increasing Editing Speed: So another thing that I like to do is anytime you have moving footage is to make it really smooth. So I'll show you how to do that. So we'll see where any of this needs to be smooth. We'll just do this one. So you see how it wobbles a little bit. There's a good example. So we'll select that and will come up top here. And what this shaky camera look. So just stabilize shaky video and it's going to automatically put it at 33%. So if you need it to be more stabilized, just drag it up to like 70%. You can go all the way up to a 100%. If you want to be a little less stabilized and you can go down to whatever you want. Anything below like 10% really isn't gonna do anything. So this takes a little bit of time for this to load fully. So you can go around and do anything else that you need to do while it's loading and just come back and wait. And it'll tell you analyzing for dominant motion and this will still be spinning. So once those are done and your selected on the video, then you can play with your percentage. Alright, so once that's done, let's take a look at how it looks. So here it is. So it literally makes it just glide. So if you wanna do more, it'll zoom in a little bit. So let's go back to that and take a look. And that's a great way to make your videos look more professional, is to have them completely glide and there's no movement, no shakes. And another tip, if you're flying with a drone and you have to and you're trying to get a shot like this. Don't turn the controls left to right. Just keep it straight and if you have to stay on track, just slowly turned to control. Don't do any like really abrupt movements because it'll make it just impossible to stabilize and you won't really be able to use the footage. I mean, you can use it, but it'll look like really amateur video. So just keep it really See, I don't even want it that stabilized. I'm just gonna come comeback to 20% and that should be perfect. So if you notice that little turn in the beginning, I'm going to cut that out. The break. And there we go. Now we just gotta perfectly. So that's what you wanna do. Stabilize the videos, and you can do that on anyone that needs it. So this one is pretty stable, but I'll probably do the same thing on it. Well, I've got one was instant. So I'm actually going to cut that again. I'm going to cut it all the way to here. Just so it's even motion. And then I'm actually even going to speed this one up. So if this is too slow, so back to the retaining attention thing on these videos. I mean, we're down to two minutes and 56 seconds, but that's still way too much time. So see how this is a bit slow and it doesn't really, there's nothing crazy going on. So if you want to speed up the video and just come up to this speedometer looking thing. And then you can do fast. And then I'll just give you four times, eight times. But what I like to do is just custom. And then so 200% as two times faster. I'll probably do 300%. And see what that looks like. That's pretty cool. Give your attention a lot more than the other one does. Then that cuts off like eight seconds. So that's good saving time. They'll do that just kind of across the board, whichever ones are a bit slow for you to speed them up. So we'll do the same thing here. And it's kind of a drawn outlet. Remember I was saying before I did a whole video in 15 seconds. So if you have a clip that's this long, definitely need to speed that up just to keep attention. Custom. And that's one of them might be 400 and get that down to 3.5 cycles. Yeah, that's cool. There's a lot more of an effect there. So I'm probably gonna speed, I'm gonna do this. So I'm gonna do two part here. So uses dial and zoom in. And then what I'm gonna do is while it's still about here, let me zoom in a bit more. So right before it takes off, right here, I'm gonna slow that down to normal. And then we'll get the music going. And once the musics there will have the drop, will align that to a drop. And it'll look really cool. 6. Video Exporting Settings: So then once you have kinda all your videos ready to go here, and it's all useable. Just zoom back out of it. Then you'll go ahead and take your audio, your song, and we'll put it right down in here. Just like that. So if any of your eclipse still have audio in them, I always advise to take the audio out so you can do one of two things that audience already taken out of these videos. So you just right-click and then detach audio and then it'll put it in a green box like this and then just delete it. The other option is you can just drag it. Seems there's no audio in it, but you can just drag it right down and then I'll have no audio. If you have something that you want the audio included, then just leave it in there. When you have audio over music, it's kind of they kind of fight against each other and it's not as good of a look and sound. So I always just take it right out. But then what you're gonna do is just listen to the song and see where you want to, you want it to start. So typically if there's a drop like this and you zoom in as you can see it. You can kind of tell where the drop is because it gives you where the, where the songs kind of taken off. So this looks like a drop, but you'll play if I play it well, I'm screen recording, it's gonna give you a really bad sound, but you'll just line it right up to the drops. So I'll do this and then I'll come back to the video and I'll show you what I'm talking about. All right. So this is what I'm talking about here. So this was the drop that I was talking about right in the beginning. So what you're going to want to do and what makes these videos so good and people won't know why it's so good. But I'm telling you right now it's because the audio and the drops lineup to the video when the video start and stop. So what I mean by that, so watch this real quick and then right when it makes us sound. So I think it's right here is a drop. So it's lining right up to that drop. And now watch what that looks like. And then what you wanna do is have all of your clips always line up to some kind of start or stop of music. So just like this is going to be another one, and then you can zoom all the way in and make it perfect. So see how that's slightly off. All you gotta do is extend this video's slightly. And just like that, a little bit closer. But this is like a fraction of a millisecond off. But if it's perfect, See that's too far. It's all right there. That's like really, really close. So every time the song drops or the beat hits, it's going to a new video. So that's one of the biggest things that if you do that in all your videos, that people really like your videos, they don't really know why, but it's because it's going to the sound of the music. So let's see what that looks like. That transition, it transitions right with the new B, so it's perfect. And then you'll do that with all of yours. So you don't have to use the videos in the order that you left them. So you can always transfer the videos into different spots. So you can decide which ones you want next. And just play with it. So zoom out and find the videos that you want next. So I'm probably gonna do one of these next. Yeah, I'll probably do on at ease right here. So let's put that all the way back here. See, I'm even going to cut it a bit closer. So it's all just playing with this and finding where you want it. So I'm going to put the second video back over here somewhere. And how many do that as I'm a speed this up slightly, and then I'm gonna cut them off at the end. That's what's good about the custom, is you can do whatever speed you want. So I'm going to cut it right here and put the other video and so it should transition. And then you're just playing with the speeds to get it to line up to the audio. So like this is too slow. So probably going to cut it there and see if I can get that to line up, take off right when the next week. And then you just have to have no slow moments. It's kinda like a radio talk show host or whatever. They don't want any silent moments. So you don't want any dull moments in your videos. So you just wanted to keep going, to keep flowing and have everything drop and cut out all the fluff. So that's a big part and you can just have it jump. So it's is it starts beat heads that takes off a couple beads layer. Something else happens. So then you're really just gonna do that, chopping and lining up all the way through the video. And that's really all you have to do for these videos? No. And still have two minutes, 52 seconds. I don't want to spend your time watching me got these things. So I'm just going to show you what an end result will look like. I've got one exported behind here. So I'll show you what that looks like and then I'll give you some more pointers. So the only thing that was different in that compared to what we had here is just the transitions. So all you have to do is just go into transitions and I use the cross blur on that and just drag it in front wherever you want it. It's all it's gonna do is make this video shorter and we'll actually add time onto it so your audio will stay in place. So that's only difference. And then if you need to make it shorter, just double-click it. And you can make this like 0.4. You can make it whatever you want. That's all that is. And then I put one in the beginning, one at the end. That's the only difference. I don't typically use them between video clips here, just because if you're having a hard transitions to the drop of a song, you don't want to put a soft transition in between. And then the way to export these videos is when you're done with it and you're happy with it, just go up to File, Share and then shares a file. So what this is gonna do is it'll put it right on your desktop or wherever you choose to. And it'll just be a file that you can use. So it'll be just like this. This is just a file and you can share it, you can email it, you can upload it to YouTube, whatever you want. You'll have the files right on your desktop. That's a really easy way to do it. I always set my settings on the highest resolution, it'll go. And then for quality, I do high because watch the difference. High is 437 megabytes, best is three gigabytes. That's just, it's not worth it. So just put it on high. And then for compressed, do faster instead of better quality, you won't notice a big difference, but it'll compress faster. So easier for sharing, easier for downloading. Good deal. So have your settings like this. You don't have to put a description in here using this, but the one that puts for you, it doesn't really matter. And then the tags, this is just if you're, you don't need any here, but if you upload it to YouTube, it'll automatically import those tags so it saves time. But what I like to do is I upload it to YouTube. I'll just put in the tags manually. So that's all you have to do. You can add it to your theater. All that is is on iMovie. You'll have a theater reviewers watch the files all in one place. I never do that because I've got the files read on my desktop, so I don't need to. But all you'll do is this and I can name it whatever you want. And then just save it. It'll have a little progress bar up top here. I'll tell you that it's exploiting it. And then I'll give you a time that is left. So it's it's kind of accurate, I should say it. I'll save ten minutes, but then this'll this'll go down to like three minutes, all of a sudden. And then I'll be like 30 seconds and then it'll be done. 7. Final iMovie Editing Advice: Alright, so rarely do I ever put text on the videos, but if you need to, there's only one way to do it. And I movie, this is kind of a drawback of iMovie compared to after effects or some of the more expensive software is that when you put text on here and you can only choose from their titles. So you can't really customize it all that much. But if you need to put went on here, you can just you just click it and drag it onto the video that you want to put it on. You can do beginning, you can do and can do the whole thing. And then you just edit it right up here. So we can just do test, test, test. So I mean, if you need to use text. So I mean, it's a cool look, but you can't really customize it all that much. You can change the font type, but you don't have a lot of options. You can't really move it around or anything. That's all you can really do with the text. That's why I don't use it that often, but if you need to, that's how you do use it. If you have audio in here and you need the audio to be clear and there's background noise. This goes for any, not necessarily action videos, but anything on iMovie. Just a really good tip that I never knew about for a long time and could have used. So just for the sake of this explanation, I'm just going to alter this to show you, but here's a clip with audio in it. And if there is background noise, all you wanna do is select the whole video. And I come up to these, these like graph looking things up here and then hit reduce background noise. And you can choose how much you want to reduce it by. And all this is gonna do is take out all of the noise in the background. So if there's air conditioning, fan, other people talking anything like that, it just takes it out and leaves only the prominent sound which will be your voice. And then you can do more or less, just like the shaky video thing, more or less. And then you can choose different things. So if it's music, you can do that. If you want more base, more treble, you can just play with these voice and anti, typically leave it on flat or hm reduction, believe it or not. So if there's an air conditioning unit in the background, harm reduction will help. And then you just play it again. And it sounds like you're in a recording room because there's absolutely no background noise. So that's just a good tip to know about iMovie or something that you can definitely use. And you will need to use when you have audio in your videos.