Chapter 4. Working with Clips

Say that you've shot your footage and imported it into your Event Library. Now it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty: Selecting the clips you want to use and editing them.

In this chapter, we delve into the techniques available for viewing your clips, marking clips as favorites (or rejects), designating which clips are displayed in the Event Library's clip pane, and employing iMovie's stabilization routines to eliminate the seismic shaking commonly seen in handheld camcorder video.

Finding Out About Clips

To get started, we have to define the word clip for the context of this (and any future) discussion: It's a word we've been using and about which we believe you probably have a general understanding. A clip is a continuous stream of video. In other words, from the time you start recording until you click the camera's Record button to stop it is one clip. If you subtract the time code for the beginning of a clip from the time code for the end of a clip, you get the length of your clip. Similarly, if you cut footage from the middle of a clip, the result is two shorter clips.

Finding Out About Clips

Time codes are a somewhat techy concept, but you find them discussed in many digital video contexts, so you probably ought to get a handle on the idea. Video is composed of frames ...

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