Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a look at using filters in iMovie.
I'm using the latest version of iMovie, 10.1 which has some new filters.
So if you are not using the latest version you won't see everything that I am doing here.
I'm going to do File, New Movie just to create a blank, no theme movie.
I'll just use the default name here.
Then I'm going to import some media.
I'm just going to drag and drop a video clip right into it.
You see it adds it to Clip there and it puts it in a timeline.
So now I've got this video clip and I can see the preview over here.
With it selected, notice I can de-select it and I can select it, and it's got the yellow
outline.
Now with it selected I can add a filter to it.
So in the preview area over here you've got a lot of different buttons.
The button over here that looks like three overlapping circles, that's the one where
you can get to the filters.
Then you've got Clip Filter and Audio Effect.
You want to use the Clip Filter menu here and it will bring up this display that you
can move around and it shows you all the different filters.
To preview each one all you need to do is move the cursor over it.
So, for instance, it starts off with None and you can see the video is actually playing
there on the right.
With my cursor over it you can actually see the orange line as it appears as to which
part of the video it is playing.
It is just going to keep looping.
Now if I were to move to a filter like Camo here you can see it changes it and you can
go back and forth easily between the two of them to see the difference.
You can go to all these different filters.
Basically what most of them are doing are changing the colors in there, making it look
different.
So for instance with Heat Wave makes everything is just more severe there.
Camo versus None you can see the difference there, more muted colors there.
Some of them are a little different.
For instance Flipped will actually flip the video which you may need in certain circumstances
for visual effect.
You also have things like Black & White that just removes all the color.
Then you have versions of those.
So you have Black & White but you also have Noir which makes it a little more severe.
Then you've got some filters that make it look like old film.
The first one of those is Silent Era which you see fades out the corners there and the
edge and adds some lines in there to make it look like old film.
There are some other ones like that, for instance, Vintage or Aged Film here which keeps the
color but adds those lines in there.
Or even Film Grain which makes it look all grainy.
So you've got a lot of options if you want to make your video look like it is old video
rather than something you just recorded.
Now to apply one of these filters let's go in and pick one like say the Vignette one
here.
I can just click it.
So I was just rolling over it before but now I clicked it.
Now it is selected.
You can see now it actually says the name of the filter there.
Now this entire clip will now play with that effect.
To get rid of it I would select it again and just go to None, like that.
Now what if you want a filter applied to only part of the clip.
So you have a long piece of video.
You are not really adding more clips or editing it in any other way.
You just want to filter it.
Well, the way you would do that is you would split this one clip into multiple parts.
So you can click anywhere in here to position the line.
Then you can Modify, Split Clip or Command B.
When you do that, Command B right there, now it is split into three pieces and I can apply
a filter only to one of these.
So as I move my cursor here and I see the preview in the upper right I can see that
there is no filter there, filter there, no filter there.
I can also apply a Transition to that to, click on Transitions up there, and I will
just do a Cross Dissolve.
I can put a Cross Dissolve between these and now what I get is a transition into a filter,
like that.
So these are, of course, all preset and there is nothing you can do to modify them.
However you can do your own, in a way.
I'll turn it off so I have no filter on it now.
I can use things like color adjustments to actually adjust the color to something I like.
Do all sorts of things to the video.
So I basically just set my own color parameters there so that I kind of have my own filter
on it.
Now you can't do special effects like those lines in aged film kind of thing but you can
at least do your own coloring with the colors here rather than using the preset filters.