NVMUG eNews 7/19/2003
Last updated 7/24/2003
Ted Birmingham Presented iMovie
Ted Birmingham showed us how he uses iMovie in his business, The Country Institute. He encouraged us to use it for home movies and nonprofit orgnizations, and showed us how.
1. The Story in the Caledonian Record
2. Notes From Ted Bermingham's iMovie Presentation
3. Other News From The Meeting
4. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 One-Click WOW
- a book review, see under Reviews button.
1. The Story in the Caledonian Record
Ted Birmingham demonstrates how to edit wth iMovie at the NVMUG meeting.
NVMUG Learns About iMovie
Ted Birmingham encouraged Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group members to use iMovie when he spoke to them on Saturday in St. Johnsbury.
Birmingham teaches people to use iMovie. His company, The Country Institute, produces commercial videos which do require final online editing using Final Cut Pro, Avid or other broadcast system professional editing, Half hour presentations and high quality commercial ads are beyond what iMovie can do, but even for commercial work, Ted often begins with iMovie because it is so much easier.
He saids, iMovie is an amazing tool, but I don't want to suggest that it can do more than it can.
Birmingham encourages more people to use iMovie. It does an excellent job for family videos, nonprofit Public Service Announcements, and small business marketing videos. He would like to see more people using it for nonprofit organizations.
He uses iMovie because it has the best learning curve of any movie editing program.
Small video cameras are a little hard to use because they are hard to hold steady, but their quality is good. If you don't have iMovie, your video zooms in for a close ups, then back out, making your viewers seasick. iMovie lets you cut and make transitions. You edit the clips to make a better home movie, one people will want to see, or to use for local groups.
Ted Birmingham described how you work with iMovie, selecting and putting video clips and still shots on the shelf, organize them into a story board, and then drag them into a movie timeline. He showed how to edit and time ambient background, narrative, and music sound clips to go with the video. He recommended using an external microphone to avoid the noise of he gears on your video camera.
Birmingham says being an editor makes you a much better cameraman. You learn when you came home and want to cut to the close up that you did not take.
Birmingham showed clips from a local theater production of My Fair Lady, and a public service announcement for safety made for CALEX Ambulance and the st. Johnsbury Fire Department which played on commercial television. It was a 30 second ad for a Rural Safety Expo at the Green Mountain Mall St. Johnsbury Center on Saturday, June 8, 2002. Birmingham said that this was really pushing the capability of iMovie. In cases like this, he recommends using iMovie for an off-line edit which you would take to a commercial edit house for finishing.
2. Notes From Ted Bermingham's iMovie Presentation
Richard Smith and Stephen Farber help Ted Birmingham to set up for his presentation. Photo by Gordon Alexander.
iMovie is a fine program, but has some problems for serious professional use.
Ted Birmingham believes the Macintosh was saved by the video and graphics industry in those lean years before Steve Jobs returned. He believes that Apple should do more to support their industry and to get the bugs out of iMovie. He agreed to do a demonstration when given a copy of iMovie 2: The Missing Manual. Ted thinks this is a very good book, and it has helped. Later downloads of upgrades have made some improvements, but it is difficult to download on a normal telephone line.
There were bugs in iMovie that made it difficult to work in Mac OS X, and he is still doing most of his iMovie work in the old OS 9 which he finds to still be more stable. You have to be careful when transferring with Firewire. Last night he was copying materials when his iMac blew his OS X, and he had not had enough time to put OS X back up.
During his demonstration the sound faded out and back in. This has been a serious problem. Program improvements have helped, but the problem persists, and Ted has had to develop work arounds that should not be necessary.
Also, you can not burn sessions on a DVD with an iMac, at least not without Toast, which Ted considers a definite defect.
Ted wonders if his older iMac could be part of the problem because working on an eMac appears to be more stable.
He is concerned because Apple and Applecare no longer support iMovie in OS 9, and no longer supports iMovie 2,So, he hopes they get the final bugs out of iMovie 3. iMovie 3 is improved, but he has heard that it still has some problems.
iMovie 3 has some very nice features including rubberbanding to lower and increase sound. But it is obvious that marketing had more influence that technicians when they brought in the Ken Burns effect as a default when importing a still picture. By the way, Ken Burns did not invent it, it was used in 1927, but he did use it very well. You can get around the Ken Burns effect by making a still clip, and now they have made it an option.
All that said, Ted worked on Windows machines, and he uses a Macintosh Computer only because it has iMovie (and Final Cut Pro and Avid).
Ted Birmingham encouraging NVMUG members to use iMovie..Photo by Gordon Alexander.
iMovie has the best learning curve of any movie editing program.
Because it is so easy to use, it makes sense to begin editing movies in iMovie before taking them to a professional for final editing or moving up to a program like Final Cut Pro or Avid which are more difficult to learn and to use.
What iMovie does is to take a video that you have made and make it very easy to handle. The video industry is still basically an analog industry, and what you are working with does not look as good on video tape as on your monitor. They are now moving to digital TV, but most people do not yet have it in their homes.
Ted showed how iMovie works beginning with the movie clips.
These small video cameras are a little hard to use, like shooting with a sausage, but their quality is good. Digital zoom specifications are humbug, but this little camera had 20 power optical zoom. Take plenty of close ups, and pictures of signs and the setting so you can put them in appropriate places later.
If you don't have iMovie, your video zooms in for a close ups, then back out, making your viewers seasick. iMovie lets you cut and make transitions. If video and audio are tied together, you could shoot a jump cut, but when you come back everything is not exactly in the same place making a jerk in the movie. Some people accept this and think it makes the movie authentic. But, Ted says It takes you 20 years to learn to hold a camera steady. If you want a shaking movie, let kids take the pictures.
We want a message conveyed to our audience.
While you play iMovie with a full screen view, most of the work is done with a smaller working screen for the iMovie, and thumbnails of clips on the side, on the shelf.
You can import selected selections from your camera as clips which you put on the shelf in iMovie. Under the iMovie window is the storyboard, a timeline sequence of iMovie and still clips and rows for background sound, music and voice tracks.
Knowledgeable quote, Save the project while the camera is connected.
Clips can be set to all same size,or timeline clips which are proportional to the length of time of each. Clips on the timeline can be stretch on the timeline for finer editing, or set at about 20 for normal work, or drop it down smaller yet. Turning the camera off and on makes a new clip. Ted elects to put therm on the shelf where less chance of losing them. He said my rule is do not move them from the clipboard, just copy them to paste into the timeline.
You then edit and arrange the clips. You can divide clips, iMovie comes with transitions which meld the video clips, including fade in, faded out, overlap, and cross dissolve. Ted spent $100 to buy new transitions and titles to use within iMovie.
You highlight a clip to just play that clip continuously, or click above the story board to continue to play the clips that follow. Transitions can be lengthened from 0.1 to 4 seconds, but they cannot be longer than the clips on either side. Analog video is 30 frames per second, but iMovie can break this down as small as tenths of a second.
iMovie comes with about 12 nice titles, and most are useful. You can preview what they look like. You can put them over a black background or a picture, and you have a selection of fonts and of text colors. A script subtitle takes a long time to render. To insert a script subtitle, over black or a picture, click on a picture clip, and drag a T down to the first clip and release. You can undo titles for the last 12 subtitles.
Ted demonstrated how to work with sound in iMovie.
Standard editing has used one video and two audio tracks for years. The first row contains little thumbnails of clips, the second is narration - audio, and the third is music. You may also have ambient, or background sound taken when you shot the video.
To enter narration, shoot a person saying the script. You can record voice into the computer, but the quality is not good. If doing a 30 second recording, allow two hours. If the person will not appear in the movie, appearance is not important. Then extract the voice to be pasted into the sound track where you want it. Usually you make the audio in somebody's living room, or somewhere where you won't hear passing trucks.
Get an offboard mike if you are going to use a narration in order to not record the camera sound. Use the camera mike only where there is enough ambient sound so you cannot here the camera gears turning. All video cameras have an outboard jack for a microphone, and $100 - $150 will do it. Recording sound on the camera is one mistake most people make.
For home movies you have more freedom, but for local groups music over six minutes long can get you into trouble with local musicians. People from the music industry come to Stowe twice a year to see who is using music illegally
Extracted audio can be copied and moved anyplace.
Meshing sound and video
If it is ambient sound, mesh the sound with the video clips does not matter. You can remove it or keep it.
It used to be that clips were as long as six seconds, but a three second clip is a long clip in a 30 second commercial. People have learned how to absorb a clip in one second. Ted likes three seconds. If sound is with each little clip, kill the ambient sound unless it has real meaning.
Ted split a selected audio clip at the playhead, and made it into two clips. Then he can get rid of one, or move it. He can take out music, or capture and fade out or fade in audio.
Never split audio in the middle of a word in iMusic. It is not precise enough for that. Ted likes to make a clip that is a complete sentence. Then he may do a paste over to bring both vidoe and audio down or just do paste to bring the audio down.
You cannot really change anything that you have saved in iMovie, You can in Final Cut Pro, but it has a much longer learning curve. You could take two weeks off to learn Final Cut Pro, or more for other programs.
Impressive demonstrations
Ted Showed part of a fine video of an automobile rally while waiting to start.
Ted showed clips from a local theater production of My Fair Lady prepared for Stowe cable vision. He demonstrated making a cut in the movie with the sound continuing, and said that you could paste in another clip from the movie with that sound. The sound quality from the little iMac speakers was impressive.
He demonstrated a PSA, public service announcement, for safety which played on commercial television. It was a 30 second ad for a Rural Safety Expo at the Green Mountain Mall which was held on Saturday, June 8, 2002. Ted said that this was really pushing the capability of iMovie. In cases like this, he recommends using iMovie for an off-line edit which you would take to a commercial edit house for finishing.
Using the Results
You can export the resulting movie to camera to record on the camera tape. You can export to a Quicktime movie in three sizes, small 15 frames per second, larger 20 frames per second, or full quality large 30 frames per second. Burning to an iDVD makes a full quality Quicktime movie. You must use OS X to make an iDVD, and it works very well. Ted said he has some short movies that he believes might fit on a CD, but has not found how to do that yet. One way to make a high quality iMovie on a DVD is to export it through the camera, with no tape in it, directly to your DVD recorder, or to your sound system. Be sure to listen to the sound as you export it to your camera. If distortion is there, it will almost always be at the beginning.The capability of a $500 camera to convert from digital to analog is amazing.
Ted encourages getting involved in making movies for PSAs. TV stations, must carry free ads (of their choice) for nonprofits. and will amost always play local ones, especially access channels and early on Sunday morning. If you do our video correctly with off board mike you can make it an audio Public Service announcement for radio at the same time. Make sure the narration does not refer to the video, and burn it to a CD. You can do still clips. They are very very useful for titles over, moving objects do not work well. Take a still clip and make it the length you want. You can import individual clips from movies or off a CD.
Make a two week vacation into an iMovie. Import JPEGs and make a slide show with transitions in iMovie. When done export it as a DVD. A DVD player costs as little as $50 at Radio Shack, and the resulting display is much cleaner than VHS.
Ted used iMovie 2: The Missing Manual and says it is a good book. The latest version is iMovie 3 & DVD: The Missing Manual by David Pogue from O'Reilly publishing.
See our Reviews for some other iMovie references.
3. Other News From the Meeting
Richard Smith brought his projector for the meeting. He has developed a solution to Special Education record keeping using FileMaker Pro. It is now being adopted by the Caledonia North Supervisory Union. About half the schools in Vermont will be using it this next year. I asked him, and he is willing to describe the need, and how he developed the solution in FileMaker Pro at one of our future meetings if people would be interested.
Midge Lubot brought her iPod with an iTrip FM transmitter to show us. She said it takes awhile to set the FM stations. She said it was something having an iPod and two iBooks at a camp with no electricity.
Tom Cudahy said Windows folks who bought iPods are saying WOW, what else does Apple do?
Richard Lubot brought a video of a Mac cruise to Hawaii with David Pogue. David narrated the experience with computer nerds on cruise. Costs began at $2,300, but with everything the average cost was probably $4,000 - $5,000. Pogue said that Macintosh users may be just 5% of market, but they have 95% of the passion. Many of the folks had names for their computers.
5 New Books added to the NVMUG Library"
O'Reilly
Digital Photography Pocket Guide
by Derrick Story
Pogue Press/O'Reilly
iPhoto 2: The Missing Manual
by Pogue, Schorr, & Story
Adobe/Peachpit
Adobe Photoshop Elements One-Click WOW!
by Jack Davis
Peachpit
The Macintosh iLife
by Jim Heid
The Little Mac iApps Book
by John Tollet and Robin Williams
The Robin Williams Mac OS X Book, Jaguar Edition.
