iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Advanced Menu

This menu is a mishmash of miscellaneous iMovie features. For example:

• Extract Audio splits the audio from a highlighted video clip into an independent audio clip in the Timeline Viewer, as described in Section 8.11. Keyboard shortcut: ⌘-J.

• Paste Over at Playhead performs a video overlay. It pastes your most recently cut or copied video on top of (replacing) whatever video is now at the Playhead. (Contrast with the Paste command, which shoves existing footage off to the right.) Depending on your settings in Preferences, a Paste Over preserves the original audio, so that the video appears to cut away while the narration or soundtrack continues uninterrupted. Keyboard shortcut: Shift-⌘-V.

  Tip

  If you highlighted some footage before opening the Advanced menu, this command fills the highlighted stretch of time with whatever you’ve got on your Clipboard.

• Lock Audio Clip at Playhead adds pushpins to the highlighted audio clip in the Timeline Viewer, as described in Section 8.9, so that if the accompanying video clip shifts during editing, the audio moment will shift too, staying in sync with the moved video frame to which it was attached. Keyboard shortcut: ⌘-L.

• Revert Clip to Original. As long as you haven’t emptied the Project Trash, this command offers you the luxury of restoring a highlighted clip to its original condition, the way it was when first imported from the camcorder, no matter how much you’ve sliced or diced it in the meantime. See Section 5.2.