Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On this episode let's look at iMovie Projects and Events.
If you're new to using iMovie, or even if you have been using it for awhile, you may
be a bit confused about the difference between Project and Events and where clips go when
you import them.
It is very confusing.
So let's take a look at an example and see if we can get to the bottom of it.
You really can't do anything in iMovie until you create a project.
So here I've got nothing in Media stored here and I've got nothing in Projects.
I'm going to create a new project.
It's going to be a standard movie project.
Now on the left I can see the sidebar here that shows all the different media I've got.
I've got the media in my current project which is called My Movie.
The terms movie and project are pretty much interchangeable in iMovie.
I look there and I've got nothing.
I've got a big Import Media button.
I can also look down here in the iMovie Library.
This is where events will be stored and there are no events.
Everything is totally empty and I just have this one empty project to start with.
Now there are two main ways to bring video clips into this project.
One is that I can go to File, Import Media.
The other is that I can simply drag and drop to here.
Of course I can also click here.
It's the same thing as using File, Import Media.
Just to make it simpler I'm going to drag and drop a video into here.
Now I see the video clip here as part of My Media under My Movie.
Notice there's still no events that have been created.
So where are these events that everybody always gets.
Tons of events in here.
Well, it turns out that if you import something directly into your Projects, your movie, with
it selected on the left sidebar it doesn't get added to an event at all.
It's simply a piece of media.
A movie clip that is only for this project.
If you were to create another project you wouldn't have access to this clip.
Only this project, this movie, has access to this clip and any other clips I import
into it.
So for many people you never need to mess with events at all.
You can simply import video into the project, into the movie, and then forget about events
and just create your video here by dragging and dropping from the media area into the
timeline.
So what about events?
How do I get clips into events and what difference does it make having it in an event rather
in a project media.
Well I cannot create a new event here, File, New Event is grayed out, because I have the
Project Media selected.
I'm going to instead click where it says iMovie Library and now I can do File, New Event.
It'll create an event and give it a name that has the date.
I'll just change that to My Event, change it to whatever you want to be descriptive.
Now I can import media and since I have the event selected rather than the project media
selected it will import it into that event.
So I'm going to choose three videos here.
Import selected.
You can see now that I've got My Event selected.
I've got those three videos.
When I look at Project Media I've got that other video I selected.
If I were to select iMovie Library I actually will see all four.
I see under My Movie one video and My Event three videos.
So it's going to show me everything when I select this.
I can also select All Events and I can just see the events, I would see this thing here
and I can flip between them and if I had a second event I could flip between that.
I can select just a single event.
I can go back and select just My Movie and just see the stuff in there.
Now at this point it is still somewhat straightforward until I go to My Event, which is basically
just a storage space for clips.
I select a clip and I drag it into the timeline.
Nothing changes here but if I go to Project Media, to My Movie, I see both clips here.
So what I've got now, is I've got one clip, this one, that's only part of Project Media.
I've got another clip that appears to be part of Project Media but is also part of My Event.
In fact it's not in two places.
iMovie is smart enough to only store one copy of it in the iMovie Library.
Since I originally brought it in as part of My Event this is where it is.
It sits in this folder, if you want to think of it as a folder.
But My Movie is going to give me a look at things that are in Events that I'm using in
a current movie and it's going to give me clips that are not part of any event but I've
imported and are just part of this project.
Okay, so then what's the advantage to having clips stored in My Event here in the library
rather than as part of the Project Media.
Well, if you were to start a second project and this one by default is called My Movie
1 but I haven't saved it yet.
You can see it has no clips in it.
However, the events are all listed here.
There's the three videos that I imported into the event but not the video that was imported
into the other Project Media.
So I have access to videos that are in events in all of the projects.
So if you're going to be using your videos and creating a variety of movies from those
clips then store them all in Events and then easily access each clip from an event, bring
it into different movies.
So you've got these two movies here.
I can access all the clips in all of the events in either one of these.
But in this one since I only imported this video of waves into the Project Media it's
only available for this movie.
That is the difference.
But what happens if you've made a mistake and you've brought this in as part of the
Project Media but you realize that you want to use it in other projects as well.
Well, in this view it is very simple.
You just click and drag to the event that you want to add it to.
Now it's part of that event.
When I leave this project and go into another one and I select that event I see this video
is there as well.
So it's very easy just by dragging to correct that mistake and make the Project Media part
of an event.
iMovie is smart enough not to duplicate the clip.
It simply moves it.
This is all just for organizational purposes anyway.
Everything is handle under the hood.
You're not actually creating more copies of the same file.
So the bottom line is if you're not into organization at all and maybe don't use iMovie that often
you just want to bring clips into Project Media and not use Events at all.
However, if you are into organization and plan on mixing and matching your clips into
different movie projects then you probably want to go to the media section of iMovie
and here you can access under iMovie Library the clips used for each movie and the clips
in each event and you can zero in on specific events.
You can create new events.
You can drag and drop items between events.
So we could do, let's create a New Event.
Then we can go in here and drag this over to this one and we can do all sorts of organizational
things to put our clips into organized events and then access them in projects.
You have either way.
Either you can kind of use iMovie without organizing your clips in iMovie or you can
use iMovie to heavily organize your clips into events before you even start making projects.