The easiest way to edit your videos on a Mac, is iMovie, not to mention it’s free. This is a quick look at iMovie for beginners using Mac that are looking for a way to edit and export their videos in the easiest and cheapest (FREE) way.
Video is now a very important part of any business, blog, school, and anyone who wants to get his message out into the world. So why not take advantage of this free Apple software to edit and publish our own videos.
Here are some basic things we can do iMovie:
Download iMovie
If you don’t already have it installed, you can go to the App Store on your Mac and search for iMovie, or download from here. Remember it’s a free download.
Import a video clip
We can go to File -> Import Media, and search for our file.
Or we can always just drag and drop it to the timeline.
Note: iMovie supports .mov and .mp4 file formats, among others. These 2 are the most common ones to use.
Import images and audio
If you want to add images or audio, it’s the same method as importing a movie clip.
Edit your clip
By selecting your clip, and ctrl+click, we get these options to cut, split, among other actions.
We have almost 50 different Titles to choose from, that already come preinstalled. To add them to our clip, we just drag and drop it into our project.
Note: To preview the animation, we can slide the cursor over the thumbnail from side to side.
Backgrounds
We can use a background when we have a “Picture in Picture” or a “Blue/Green Screen” project. To add them, we just drag and drop it to our timeline.
Note: To preview the animation, we can slide the cursor over the thumbnail from side to side.
Transitions
We have over 20 transitions that helps us go from one clip to another. Same as before, we can preview them by sliding the cursor over the thumbnail, and to add them, we just drag and drop them between any 2 clips.
Adjusting the duration of a clip
We may want to edit the duration of a tile, image, or any other clip, for this we just select the clip, and place the cursor on the edge until a double arrow cursor appears, now we can click and drag to edit the duration.
Editing options
iMovie is a basic video editing software, but it comes with a lot of options to correct or enhance our movie clips. Here’s a glimpse of those great features:
Exporting your video
You can export your video directly to social media sites, and you also get other options like “File”, where we export the video to share it the best way you think so.
If you need to create a video for your website, eBook, YouTube, among other places, this is one of the best, easiest, and cheapest (FREE) options to do it.
