Effects and Still Images
One of the reasons iMovie is an exceptional product is that it can make a beginner look like he knows what he’s doing! An important feature of any film is adding effects to either open the video or smooth transitions between clips. iMovie makes this simple.
iMovie offers several different ways to do this. The most user friendly way it so select a “theme”. A theme offers various formats for the video to take, including “scrapbook”, “photo album”, etc. These themes embed certain transitions as well as give the movie a flow that can be quite appealing. Some of the themes are a little cheesy, so there is also an option to select “no theme” and simply add transitions between clips manually.
Other features that allow and amateur to look professional are the visual effect edits and the incorporation of sill frame images. Clips that have poor color or appear “washed out” can be edited by simply double clicking on the clip. The small inspector window that appears offers several options for edits including a light level meter, exposure and saturation sliders and a white point radial. By adjusting any or all of these, the presenter can really adjust the quality of the clip right in the project itself.
Adding still frames to a video presentation gives a truly professional feel. This is easily accomplished by clicking on the camera icon on the middle tool bar. It provides access to one’s entire iPhoto library. The default setting is the Ken Burns effect, which is a slow zoom, but there are other options as well. This could be particularly useful in a classroom if a still image of a historical scene needed to be included in a presentation. Perhaps that is just this dorky history teacher thinking out loud, but it offers a professional documentary style effect to a video.
Not at all dorky history teacher talk! The Ken Burns Effect, and others that i-Movie offers, do present a much nicer "quality" for documentary presentations. For that purpose, I also like the cut-aways (I've seen done on television documentaries, and in our i-Movie training), which cut away from subjects to incorporate environment/landscapes or something that aligns with the subject's memory within the environment.
ReplyDeleteAlso, for documentaries, check out the Smithsonian's Online, Virtual Museum, which allows you to store high quality images of art, from both the Museum and the Library of Congress, to use in movies you can make in their virtual museum. They offer tools for documentaries and have a good history base to their shows which include media rich materials beyond visual art, including movie clips, time period music, and podcasted interviews.