PE2_iMovie

As I progressed through the iMovie ’11 Essential Training on Lynda.com, I was really impressed by all the features. In my initial explorations of iMovie, I had noticed the themes and backgrounds and worked with transitions. However, receiving formal instruction really brought so much clarity and depth of understanding in how to use all the features.

Prior to the training, I had not taken time to explore how to create a movie trailer. It is so easy! It’s basically plug-n-play…plug in the media assets and play. And, it’s so authentic. Even though I was using headphones, I guess my volume was turned up a little louder than usual. As I watched and worked along with the movie trailer portion of the training, my husband said, “What are you doing…watching an adventure movie or something?”

I can see myself using random pictures and footage of my students and using the Movie Trailer feature in iMovie to create videos to use as anticipatory sets. It will be so neat for them to see themselves involved in a topic or unit it is being introduced.

It was also very helpful to have instruction on adding pictures. I was glad to find that it’s a drag and drop scenario. The Ken Burns effect is a wonderful default feature to add motion to those still shots. I love the attention to detail with the cropping feature and how easy it is to edit settings for the cropping feature and other image adjustments.

To take my video production to the next level, I really needed to know how to split video clips and insert a still shot, while keeping the audio from the video. I also needed to know how to utilize audio from one section of video to replace another section with bad audio. As with the image/photo settings, audio settings are easily accessible for making adjustments. Oh yeah, the stabilization feature rocks! Just the possibility of redeeming good footage -that’s not good because it’s too shaky- is awesome!

Also, I loved the green screen feature! It’s so easy in iMovie ’11 to work with green screen. I can’t wait to do something really neat with this. I would love to put myself in the middle of some footage from some far off place. I can hear my students asking, “Is that you? You went there – for real?” LOL!

I have enjoyed video editing for a few years now. I have wanted to experience video editing with Apple products. Right now, I am living the dream!