iMovie & iDVD Visual QuickStart Guide

Talking iMovie ’11 on MacVoices

On Tuesday I chatted with Chuck Joiner about what's new in iMovie ’11 and my TidBITS article, "15 Secrets of iMovie ’11" for the MacVoices podcast. Chuck is always great to talk to, and indulged me when I found myself having to back up and explain things like rolling shutter, CMOS camera sensors, and interlaced video footage.

Jeff Carlson has been spending lots of time with the new iMovie ‘11, and has discovered a number of useful, cool and largely undocumented features. Jeff discusses the under-publicized return of the timeline (even if it isn’t called a timeline), the usefulness of Movie Trailer and other effects, and then dives into things you didn’t know, including rolling shutter fix, morse code in a theme, and several other minor but tasteful additions. iMovie ‘11 still isn’t good with interlaced video; Jeff explains what that means to you and how to work around it, and why iMovie ‘11 is finally almost like the long-dead iMovie HD.

Catch the podcast here: MacVoices #10125: Jeff Carlson Looks At The Known and Unknown Features of iMovie ‘11

15 Secrets of iMovie ’11

There's a lot more going on with iMovie ’11 than movie trailers and audio editing. In this TidBITS article, I reveal several tips, trivia, and otherwise unknown aspects of Apple's video editor: "15 Secrets of iMovie ’11".

Here are a couple of items to tease you:

Made with Morse -- Speaking of trailers, you can choose which studio logo appears at the front. In the Signals Across the Globe trailer, the music that plays in the background is actually Morse code for "Made with iMovie."

Change All Title or Transition Styles -- If you decide to change the style of an existing title, you can drop a new style onto the section of the clip the title occupies (the video clip turns bright blue to indicate you're affecting the title). Now, when you replace a title style, iMovie asks if you'd like to replace just the one title or all titles in the project. The same option applies to replacing transitions, too.