How to edit video with iMovie

Some fun examples of wine industry videos made using iMovie are Ask the Pinotblogger and Do You Know the Way to Michel-Schlumberger.

iMovie comes with the iLife software package, so lots of mac users have it.  Final Cut is another Apple video editing software program that is more powerful, but it’s not available in most of the computer labs on campus.  If you are a PC person then you should learn how to do video editing on your PC.  Adobe Premiere is a popular PC video editing software program.

Apple has great iMovie tutorials on its website.

The hardest parts of video editing can be 1) capturing your video (getting it from your device into iMovie), 2) keeping your audience’s attention past the first 10 seconds of your video, and 3) getting your video uploaded to the web in 720p HD.

1) Be sure to bring your connection cables (USB and firewire) and patience.  Don’t think that you can just pop out your memory stick and put it into a computer.  It’s a good idea to bring an electricity charger too so that you’re not running your device on battery power.  You might have to import your video using iPhoto and then get it into iMovie if iMovie’s capturing software doesn’t recognize your device.  After you capture your video you should figure out how you are going to save your iMovie project so that you can access it from another computer.  You can save your work to the school’s server, an external hard disk, or to a cloud like dropbox.

2) Try to capture your audience’s attention within the first 10 seconds of your video and to keep your video’s length under 10 minutes so that you can upload it to YouTube.  Capture your audience’s attention with music, images, special effects, humor, etc..  For example, if you’re making a video about wine, find a song about wine, find some images of wine (high resolution), get some video of wine being poured or a bottle being uncorked, and think of something funny you can do with wine.  Don’t think that your video’s content is limited to only what you record.  This is going to require extra effort, but if you care about the quality of your final video then you need to think about how you are going to grab your audience’s attention.

3) Your goal should be to get your video uploaded to the web in 720p (pixels per square inch) resolution at 30fps (frames per second).  108op video is too big and plays slowly online, so don’t bother with it.  If you can’t record your video at 720p/30fps then record your video at the highest resolution/frame rate possible on your device.  I prefer video in standard dimensions (4:3 aspect ratio), but it’s up to you if you want to letterbox (16:9 aspect ratio) your video.  When you finish editing your video you need to save your video into .mov or .m4v format.  This might take up to an hour depending on the length and resolution of your video.  Next, check the file size of your .mov or .m4v video.  The video upload limits on social video websites range from 200mb to 500mb to 1gb.  If your video’s file size is too large then you might have to compress your video.  I have the video compression program Stomp, but you might want to get your own video compression software.  Save your final .mov or .m4v video to a large memory stick, external hard drive, or to a cloud like dropbox.  Embed your video onto your blog and rejoice.  Tweet/facebook/email your blog post link to your peeps.  If you are really proud about your work then upload it to facebook and tag yourself!