iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Importing QuickTime Movies

iMovie can import more than still images. It can also import existing QuickTime movies, which you can then incorporate into your footage.

Maybe you’ve created such QuickTime movies yourself, using other Macs or other software. Maybe you’ve grabbed a QuickTime movie from a CD-ROM or Web site. (You can’t grab video from commercial DVDs, which are programmed to block such potential legal violations.)

In any case, once you’ve got the QuickTime movie on your hard drive, choose File → Import (Shift-

-I). In the Open File dialog box, navigate to and open the QuickTime movie you want to import.

It may take iMovie some time to process the incoming movie. Behind the scenes, it’s converting the QuickTime movie into DV format, just like the clips that come from your camcorder. A progress bar keeps you posted.

When it’s complete, a new clip appears in your Clips pane, which you can manipulate just as you would any movie clip.

Using the Imported QuickTime Clip

It’s worth noting that most of the world’s QuickTime movies aren’t big enough, in terms of frame size, to fill your entire monitor. In fact, most of the world’s QuickTime movies play in a window only a couple of inches square.

Therefore, when you play back an imported QuickTime movie, iMovie does what it hopes is the right thing: It blows up the QuickTime movie until the footage fills the entire iMovie playback screen ...