God I hate Macs. Anyway, as part of my student aide duties, they want me to assemble a bunch of video clips of gallery footage into a movie. I’m putting clips together, doing transitions between them, etc. But some of the clips are so short you can’t really see the art work (it’s just a video camera going from painting to painting). So I want to stretch the duration of the clip so that the painting is on the screen longer. I know how to do this in Adobe Premiere, but can’t figure it out in iMovie. It seems to only want to play back at the “correct” speed, it won’t let me stretch out a 2 second clip into 10 seconds unless I go and add 8 more seconds of clip to it (which won’t work because that’s not footage of the same painting.)
ARG! Please help
Also, how do I strip out the audio track entirely? I will be putting a music soundtrack over it eventually but in the meantime I don’t want to have to listen to the camera person breathe and cough and shuffle around. Right now I’ve been dragging the volume level of each little bitty clip down to zero but there has to be a way to do this more effectively (and no, I can’t turn down the volume on the computer because I have to be listening when I preview the clips before I add them to the timeline, in case they actually say something important.)
Oh, and is there a STOP button? I click play to view part of what I’m doing, then I have to sit there and wait until it gets to where it wants to stop before I can do anything, because I don’t see a friggin STOP button.
Stripping out audio (from Help)To extract sound from a video clip:
Click the Timeline Viewer button (the one that looks like a clockface).
Select the video clip or clips whose audio you want to extract.
Choose Advanced > Extract Audio.
The extracted audio appears as a separate clip in audio track 1 of the timeline viewer.
For the instructions for changing the length of a clip, look under “direct trimming” in Help. (Assuming I understood your question correctly)
click on the Effects button in the panel to the right of the monitor/viewer
choose the Fast/Slow/Reverse effect and adjust the speed slider bar
I’m not sure you can specify the desired end length of the clip, however…
As an alternate, if there’s no fancy camera work, you could save the desired clip as a static image, re-import and then manually change the length of the image clip:
select the clip and adjust the playhead so the frame you’d like to have on screen in the finished movie is displayed
go to File>Save Frame… and save the frame somewhere, as a jpeg
go to File>Import… and choose the file you just saved
Add the newly imported clip to your movie, and double click it. You can adjust the clip’s duration in the Clip Info window which pops up. This window is also accessible from File>Show Info… or by pressing Command-I.
No I understand how to choose the section of clip that I want. What my problem is is in making a 2 second clip take 5 seconds, for example. This video is basically someone walking around an art gallery shooting the paintings. Some of them are on screen long enough to get a feel for them, but others zip by too fast. I can trim the clip how I want it no problem, but I want those quick clips of a painting to stay on screen longer. Since it’s just a painting, and not movement, it doesn’t matter that it’s slowed down.
