PE5_iLife '09 Part 2

As I started off this venture of learning more about the iLife products, I was mainly intending to learn more about GarageBand.  In my quest, I started watching the videos from Lynda.com that emphasized the new features of iLife '09.  Being new to the Mac as well as the iLife suit, this is all new to me.

I had started my masters program in June 2010 and was immediately thrown into creating a 30-60 second autobiography.  I was forced to learn the basics of iMovie in less than a week to produce this project.  I had learned what I needed and managed to do the project but not knowing the program, I stuck to the basics.

As I watched these 'new features' videos from Lynda.com, I immediately see that I was just at the tip of this iceberg.  The videos unearthed an advanced set of tools that do not appear by default.

To access these advanced editing tools, you will need to go under the iMovie menu and choose Preferences.  In the General preferences, click the top checkbox to Show Advanced Tools.

The advanced tools will allow you to perform precision editing.  While rudimentary editing by selecting parts of a video clip will work in most projects, the precision editor allows you to splice two clips together while having both clips visible at the same time.  This ability allows you to move to the exact frame to make the clips blend cleanly.

To access the Precision editor, you simply click on the cog symbol on the clip and choose Precision Editor from the context menu.


From there, you will see the adjoining clip and the current clip placed in the Precision Editor workspace pan below where you can granularly move the "splice" mark by clicking exactly where you want the cut point to be in each clip.

I look forward to using this feature in the future as it does a much better job than my "eyeballing" attempts.