PE3-iMovie

iMovie: Take Three 

Third Times a Charm?

From Flickr

As the saying goes, third times a charm ...at least for most people it is.  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.  Okay, it wasn't as bad as I am making it out, but really, I wanted it to be as easy as it seemed on Lynda.com, and it wasn't.

The first thing I did was exactly what I learned from a Lynda video on making the sound effects (music from iMovie) have beat markers so that the pictures will change with the beat of the song.  Sounds awesome, right?  

Well,  I looked for the same song he (Lynda trainer) used in his example and placed it in the project library.  In case your wondering, the song was titled Greasy Wheels Long.  What he suggested, and I did try, was to listen to the song and use the quick key M to make the markers at each beat you hear as the song played.  

Here is the sample he showed me that got me hooked below.

Now he also gave a suggestion as to how to remove mistakes but that wasn't the problem.

What he failed to tell me, or I just didn't comprehend, is that you cannot add transitions after you use beat markers.  So I had spent the later part of twenty to thirty minutes working on beat markers for the song and placing pictures to match up with my storyline, only to find out, after it was all done and I was trying to add transitions, that the markers would no longer be effective if the transitions were added.  

I didn't know how to fix it, and I didn't want to go to square one and try to hit the beat again (I learned I have little to no rhythm).  So, I scrapped the idea and picked a new one without the beat markers (maybe next time).

Adding transitions were a breeze.  But figuring out the time, with the transitions and the titles, was a train wreck.  Every time I thought that the title was on long enough, the clip was too short.  I finally figured out after thirty minutes of trial and error (30 being my time of brilliance it seems) that the clip length determines, in a way, the length of the title.  So, I made sure the clips were the length needed to read and adjusted the title accordingly.  

In the end, the video was pretty good, I think.  The biggest draw back is that the information I tried to present is too long for one minute.  But I made it work as best I could.  The funny thing looking back, when  I looked at my script, I thought it wasn't long enough.  Imagine that.

"The" video below.

You can see it better on my BP8 blog through my Viddler video account.