 creating videos in iMovie. iMovie is a free, mobile, and desktop video editing app for creativity on the go. It is available only for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users. iMovie is a comprehensive, user-friendly tool for creators with any level of experience. So whether you are a video whiz or brand new to editing, iMovie can be a great tool for you. Wherever you are, from your phone to your computer, you can shoot, edit, and share high quality videos. In this video, we'll cover the basic features of iMovie to help you create compelling, professional videos. Although iMovie is free, you will need to download the app from the App Store. Once you've done that, launch iMovie. A screen will appear with a prompt to create new. Here you can choose to create a movie or a trailer. Choosing one or the other will just apply a different set of editing presets to your timeline, but these can always be customized later on. For the purpose of this video, we'll be choosing Movie. This will open your empty project. There are three main windows here that you'll be working in. The window in the upper right corner is your viewer panel. This is where you'll see your videos as you edit, as well as make any creative changes, using the Adjustment Bar toolbar above the viewer. The largest bottom window is your timeline itself. This is where you'll make all your content edits. Lastly, the window on the upper left of the screen is your media window. This is where you can view and organize all the video and audio clips that you'll use in your project, as well as any potential effects or titles. You can resize any of the windows by clicking and dragging the border lines of their panel. To begin the editing process, you'll first want to import your video and audio clips. You can do this in a few ways. First, you can just click the Import Media arrow in the center of the media window. A new window will open and you can select all your files from your computer. Another option is to drag the clips directly onto your timeline from Finder. You can also import things right from your photo library by selecting it in the left-hand Project Media menu. This can be handy if you have footage taken on your iPhone that you want to use on your Mac. Lastly, you can choose File, Import from the top menu bar. However you choose to import your media, all your clips should now be visible in your media window. In order to make any changes to your clips, you need to drag them from the media window onto your timeline. The timeline in iMovie is what is called a magnetic timeline, meaning that when you trim or move any of your clips, the rest of the clips on the timeline will move to automatically fill the space. The easiest way to trim a clip is to select it, then drag from either end to remove unwanted content. This can be useful to remove any extra footage, such as setting up the camera at the beginning of a clip. To make sure you're getting the most accurate edits, you can always zoom in on your timeline by dragging the slider on the upper right corner of your timeline panel or pinch to zoom on a mobile device. If you want to split any clips to maybe use one half near the beginning of the video and another near the end, or even to remove something entirely from the middle of the clip, all you have to do is control click or right click on your video, then choose Split Clip or Command B on your keyboard. This will split the selected clip at the playhead. Now you're free to trim, move, or edit each section of the clip separately. If you do want to change the order of any of your clips, all you have to do is select the clip you'd like to move and drag it to a new location on the timeline. If you want to select multiple clips at once, simply choose a spot on the timeline above your first chosen clip. Then drag. You'll see a gray box appear. Drag the box onto all of your chosen clips. You'll see their outlines turn yellow. Release your mouse and now you can move or make changes to multiple clips at once. You can also choose to only select part of a clip. In iMovie, this can be done using the range selector. Hover over a clip in the timeline and press and hold the R key on your keyboard. When the pointer turns into the range selection pointer, drag across part of the clip. Range selections have a yellow border with handles on each side, just like a normal selection. You can trim range selections and modify their video or audio. You can shorten or extend a range selection by dragging either side of it. Once you've finished trimming all your clips and arranging them in the correct order, you can begin applying creative edits. The first thing we're going to do is fix our existing audio. Under each of your video clips, there should be a blue bar. These are your audio waveforms. If you do not see this, click the settings button right next to the zoom slider on the top right of the timeline panel. Then check the box labeled audio show waveforms. You can control your basic volume directly within these blue waveforms. If you hover over them, you'll notice a horizontal line. Click and drag this up and down to adjust the volume of the entire clip. You can also do this by clicking the volume speaker icon in the adjustments bar and dragging the audio slider here or typing in a custom number. You can also mute clips entirely by clicking the speaker icon to the left of the slider. Use this method one at a time by selecting multiple clips or even a specific portion of the clip using the range selector until you are happy with the audio level throughout your video. Next to the speaker icon, there is a noise reduction and equalizer button. This sets a slider to reduce background noise in your audio as well as several equalizer presets which you can use to enhance or fix audio in your movie. For example, you can choose an equalizer preset to enhance vocal quality or boost based or treble in a clip. To add some background music or even voice over to your video, drag your chosen clip from the media panel if you've already imported it or to import any additional media, click the down arrow import button at the top of your iMovie window. Select the music you'd like to use either from your phone or computer. You can click the audio button at the top of your media panel. Here you can import music from your Apple Music Library or select sound effects to browse sounds and music from the built-in audio library in iMovie. If you want to record a voice over rate in iMovie, click on the record voice over microphone icon in the bottom left corner of the viewer panel. The voice over recording controls will appear below the viewer. You can make any input and output changes by clicking the voice over options button. Then click the big red record button. Click the record button again or hit spacebar on your keyboard to stop the recording. The recorded audio appears as a new clip in the timeline above the background music. The voice over clip will be attached to the clip that was below the play head when the recording was started. When all your sounds and music are in your timeline and level properly, you can begin more advanced audio edits, the most useful feature being fades. Hover over your waveforms and you'll see small dots on the beginning and end of each clip. Click and drag these to fade the audio in or out. The further you drag, the longer the transition will be. To customize your volume even further, you can use keyframes. Keyframes are markers that you can add at specific points in a clip to change the volume at these points. Select a clip in the timeline that contains audio you want to adjust over time. In the waveform portion of the clip, move your cursor to the horizontal volume control line at a point where you want to add a keyframe. After you've added some keyframes, you can either set the volume at the keyframes themselves by dragging them up or down to raise or lower the volume, or you can set the volume of the clips between two keyframes by dragging the lines between the keyframes up or down. To delete a keyframe, control click or right click a keyframe in a clip in the timeline and choose delete keyframe from the shortcut menu. Now that you have the basics of how to cut and place media in your timeline, we'll begin to explore some visual effects starting with the titles. Navigate to the titles tab in your media window. Here you can preview and explore various types of titles you can use. To add one to your video, drag it to your timeline and place it at the beginning or end of your video, or between any of your clips to create a separate title screen, or drag it above any of your video clips to add the title as an overlay. When it's an overlay, you can change the length of time that the text is displayed on your video by dragging the ends of the purple box that appear when you place it on your timeline. You can also edit the text itself by selecting your title and clicking the T icon in the adjustments bar. You can change what the title says, edit the font, color, size, weight and alignment of the text. You can also drag it around on the viewer window itself to alter where the text appears on the screen. Click the blue check mark on the right of this text edit menu to approve any changes you make here. At any point in your video, you can add a background by clicking the background tab in your media window and choosing from one of the background options. Drag your chosen background under your text or video. Don't worry if you can't see it under any full screen media. We can easily fix that using the options in the adjustment bar. We've already explored the audio and text editing options, but there are many visual editing options in this same menu. The first option in this menu will be a media overlay. This is only visible if you have selected a piece of media that is layered above another one, such as a video above a background. This option allows you to change the size of the selected media by turning it into a cutaway, split screen, or picture in picture. You can also use media overlay to add any green screen footage. The first regularly visible option in the adjustments bar will be color balance. Here you can adjust the white balance, skin tone balance, match color, which will match the colors of any clip to that of a chosen source clip, or auto, which will automatically recolor your footage based off what iMovie thinks looks best. The next option in the adjustments bar is color correction. This icon looks like a paint palette. The color correction controls include a multi-slider control, a saturation slider, and a color temperature slider. These allow you to adjust shadows, brightness, contrasts, highlights, saturation, and color temperature. At any point, you can click the Enhance Magic Wand icon in the upper left corner of the adjustments bar to automatically enhance the video and even audio volume of the selected clips. You'll be able to see what changes have been made based off the buttons in the adjustment bar that become highlighted. The next buttons in the adjustment bar are crop and rotate, which allows you to change the crop and orientation of your selected clips, and stabilization, which allows you to stabilize shaky video. After the audio options, the next button is speed. This opens the speed control where you can choose either slow or fast from the speed pop-up menu, and the percentage to either increase or decrease speed. Then, clip, filter, and audio effects. Here you can browse filters to place on your video and audio and adjust their strength. If at any point you're unhappy with the editing changes you made, you can click Reset All in the upper right corner of the adjustments bar to add more advanced visual effects. Check out the Modify menu in the main toolbar. Chances are, if you have multiple video clips in your timeline, you'll want to make them flow together nicely. This is where transitions come into play. Click on the Transitions tab in your media window. Here you can preview and explore various types of transitions you can use. Drag and drop your chosen into the gap between two clips. You can double-click on the Transitions icon that appears here and change the duration of the transition if you want it to be shorter or longer. You can also add a basic fade, to or from black, at the beginning and end of your video, by going back over to the Settings button beside the Zoom slider in your timeline and checking the boxes for fade in from black and fade out from black. Once you've explored all the editing features of iMovie and you're happy with your video, it's time to export. To do that, navigate to the top right corner of your iMovie window and click the Share icon. There are options to share via email, YouTube, and Facebook. Save Current Frame and Export File. We will select Export File. A pop-up will appear where you can name the file, add tags, and a description, as well as change the advanced settings, such as Format Resolution, Quality, and Compression. Choose Next and you'll choose where you want the file to export to. Click Save and now your video is exporting. You can check the progress on the wheel that appears next to the Share button. Once that is done, you can go watch your final product to make sure there are no mistakes that you miss in editing. From this point, you can share your finished video with the world. Upload it to a video sharing website or just submit it to your professor. Whatever is best for you to reach your intended audience. For additional information on creating videos, check out the videos module on the learning portal.