iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Problems Editing

All right: Your video is now in iMovie, and you’re ready to get to work.

Direct Trimming Doesn’t Work

One of iMovie’s most delicious features is edge dragging or direct trimming, which means that you can drag the right or left end of a clip to change its length.

If direct trimming stops working—the cursor never changes to offer direct trimming—you have Show Clip Volume Levels turned on in the View menu. You can’t drag edges when the little horizontal volume lines are displayed on your audio clips.

Video Playback is Slow or Jumpy

Here and there, iMovie fans around the Internet have reported peculiar playback glitches. The problem seems related to the audio clips in the project, not the video. Adding lots of audio seems to increase the chances for the problem.

There is no known workaround, but here are some things to try:

• If you’ve added songs that you bought from the iTunes Music Store, try removing those songs from the project. (If you absolutely must include those songs in the project, burn them onto an audio CD first, then import them from the CD into iTunes—this step strips out the copy protection—and then import to iMovie from there.)

• Open GarageBand and play a few notes.

You Can’t Close Up a Gap

Suppose, while editing in the Timeline Viewer, you drag a clip to the right to make room for something, creating a gap. All subsequent clips also slide to the right.

But then, perhaps after inserting something into part of the gap, you still have space left over. How are you ...