News & Views

"It's All in the Edit"
Charles Wu, NCMUG member, ccwu@mac.com
Part 1
"and the Oscar goes to...," if you've been like me you've had that thought cross your mind while you play around with iMovie but when you take a look at what you've recorded you say to yourself, "This looks like a home movie, how do they do that?" A lot of the answer is they have more film than what you see on the screen, often a whole lot more, sometimes as much as a hundred times more.
The movie "Field of Dreams" had over 100 hours that were eventually edited down to an hour and forty minutes. While most of us don't have the opportunity to film multiple takes, we can usually squeeze out the best parts of long takes that inevitably happen as we try to catch everything.
The other thing that adds to the Hollywood feel is how you combine the different clips together, joining scenes together using transitions and other effects. This distillation process of cutting and combing is known in the industry as editing, and as often as not is what makes a movie work.
So this month's article is going to cover some tips for editing with iMovie first, a tip about how to organize your clips and next month we'll explore some of the transitions available. The rest will assume a basic knowledge of iMovie but you should be able to follow along even if you haven't worked much with iMovie. If you want to get a good idea of how iMovie works, the tutorial included in the iMovie help is a fun introduction. With some luck and these tips you'll find it easier to turn your home movies into cinema quality productions. The first thing you need to do use iMovie is to get the clips from your camcorder. You do this by importing and iMovie places them in the an area known as the shelf or clips pane, an image of the Clips Pane can be seen in the accompanying figure. Normally, iMovie puts all the clips one after another and you drag your choice of clips to the timeline in order to organize your clips into a movie. However, the grid structure of the shelf gives you a nice way to organize your movies, allowing you a way to make choices between two takes or clips in a movie. Here is how you can use the structure of the shelf to organize your clips. First thing to do is to list all your clips down in one column, it's best to start with them in column B as in the graphic. The next step is to extract the best part of each clip. Remember, in Hollywood what you see is the best of what they filmed and that's a small fraction of all the film shot. So don't be shy. With home movies you are, as a rule, probably able to extract a quarter to half of the clip as usable. You accomplish this by splitting the clip, separating the boring parts from the good parts. When you split the clip, it'll place one part at the next free spot on the shelf, most likely in column C next to the clip you split.
Next put the good part in column A. Clips that you want to appear earlier in the movies should appear at the top and those that should appear later should appear at the bottom. Put the part of the clip that you don't want in column C just in case you want to use it again. As you repeat this for your clips, may have to move clips around a bit but when you are finished you will have a way of organzing your clips that makes it easier to play with your edit. You can scroll up and down using the slider to see how the clips might progress in time. Because related clips share the same row you can play with choices as you decide which clip you like better than others. Starting from the top, drag all the clips in Column A to your timeline and you have it. This can be thought of as a pre-rough cut. If you watch the clips put together, it's jumpy and doesn't flow. Next month we'll talk about how transition can solve that and explore some of the freebies on the web.
If you are interested in the importance of editing in the movie process, Walter Murch, one of the great film editors who happens to live in Northern California too has collaborated on a book with writer Michale Ondaatje called "The Conversations : Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film". Another good book that puts the process of editing in context is "From Script to Screen: The Collaborative Art of Filmmaking, Second Edition" by Linda Seger, Edward Jay Whetmore.

Part 2

Last month we started exploring how to improve your home movies in iMovie by exploring a way of extracting the best parts of what you've shot and a method for helping organize your clips as you put together a movie.
This month we look at how to help stitch these clips together. The main reason for having short clips is to keep your attention. With a few disputed exceptions most movies don't happen in "real time," instead we watch a compressed version of events that form a narrative. Most home movies fail because they operate as an extended documentary capturing everything as it happens and as a result when the lights come on a few people snoring is not an uncommon sight or sound. As we have watched movies, we have been accustomed to certain short hands such as a man sitting a desk, a clock appears and then we see the man again playing solitaire. We intuitively sense that time has passed event though it's only be a few seconds of screen time. When this happened the first time it was revolutionary and people thought it would be disorienting.
iMovie provides a collection of transitions that are standard in the movies, dissolves, fades and wipes/pushes and irises. For most movies, these are the tried and true ones that will meet almost every need. In fact some will argue that they are all you need. Despite that, a thriving market in iMovie transitions and effects has popped up and many are worth considering to spice up one's movies. But like cooking, too much spice can make a mean inedible and too many funky transition and effects can make a movie unwatchable. So what does it take in choosing a transition? Transitions exist to bring the audience from one place to another while suggesting time or movement. Knowing that, one can choose transitions that work in the story or with the clips. A cut can be a hard cut that is very abrupt or a softer one that eases one scene to another. You tend to see hard cuts in dialogue scenes where you jump between points of view of the speakers. This provides a visual sense of motion that keeps the viewer engaged even if the speakers are not moving at all. This is hard to do since most home users don't have time to do multiple takes such as singing happy birthday twice; or have two or more cameras to create variety such as we seen in sports broadcasts where there many be literally dozens of cameras. A soft cut such as when two scenes dissolve into each other or fade away provide an easier transition indicating the passing of time. The other thing a cut does is suggest motion, pushes or wipes where one scene is pushed off by another is very common for example a car drives off screen and the next scene emerges. This combination depending on how fast it is done can also suggest time, fast if the drive is short or quick. More leisurely if it's a longer trip. Motion is not only in one direction, it can also imply depth as well, such as an iris effect where the next scene starts off as a point and grows bigger. This gives you the sense of moving forward in space. A great trick is to make a transition into a zoom or out from going wide accentuating the sense of motion.
A huge number of free and low cost transitions can be found on the Internet by simply typing "iMovie transitions" or "iMovie plug-ins" into any search engine such as www.dogpile.com, which searches all the major search engines and gives you the top results. Some are better than others. A great collection of free plug-ins is offered by Gee Three (www.geethree.com); their "Slick Volumes" of plug-ins offer enhanced transitions, titles and effects that are very affordable. The free "Barn Door" and "Burst Effects" are ideal for suggesting motion into or out of a scene. BKMS (www.bkms.com/) has a nice set of effects that add subtlety to standards and are worth having, with "Pixelate Dissolve 8x8" giving a futuristic digital fade for sci-fi adventures. CfX (www.imovieplugins.com) has a whole series of affordable plug-ins including a free fade to any color transition. CfX also lets you purchase plugs-ins a la carte at most affordable prices. These are just a few of the free and cheap iMovie transitions available, and more seem to be being created all the time.
Transitions stitch your clips together and improve the flow of your footage, giving it pace and motion. With more and more people getting camcorders and Macs there are sure to be more and better transitions coming soon to a monitor near you. After thought: iMovie also offers effects to colorize or alter the appearance of clips, while fun they need to be used carefully outside of creating a mood or "aging" a clip. If anyone has had successful experiences with Effects, please write me.