Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Transitions in iMovie.
So I am using iMovie 10 here. I have a sample project where I have just dragged three clips
into the project timeline. You can see there are no transitions between them. Just these
black bars which means going from one to the other it is just a quick snap transition right
there. Nothing fancy about it. I want to add some transitions to make it go a little smoother
between these clips.
So to bring up Transitions I go to the Content Library and I click on Transitions. If you
don't see this left sidebar then you have to show it using this button up here. The
transitions appear here and you can see kind of little previews of what they look like
and you can even scrub left and right and see this preview area here will show them.
If you want to use a transition, like say let's use the Doorway transition right here,
all you need to do is drag it and put it in-between some of these. You can see it actually goes
to both sides of this clip here. If I wanted it to only go onto one, undo, I can simply
drag and drop it right in here like that and then I can drag and drop another type of transition
here. Now I've got some more interesting colorful transitions between these clips.
For instance we can see what it looks like now using this Doorway transition between
this one and this one.
Now for more exact control over these we can go into the Precision Editor. So let's select
this transition here and under Window we can go to Show Precision Editor. It is quicker
to do Command/. Now we can drag these clips left and right here to change where the transition
occurs in each clip. In addition to that we can even lengthen the duration of the transition.
So now it is longer between it.
If we select the transition here we can, we'll just double click and close it, and select
the transition, go to the adjust menu here I N you can see exactly how long the transition
is for the swap. Then I can go and change it to say four seconds instead of six. As
long as I go to less and there is plenty of space here in this transition, extra space
here and extra space here, I can go more as well. So, for instance, you can see there
is at least a second on either side. So if I were to close that up I could go to five
seconds. But if I tried to go to ten seconds there is not enough video to cover so you
can see is just concatenates it to 8.4 seconds, the maximum it can go. Then I could go into
Precision Editor if I want and add more time to either side if I want to increase it.
Now if you want to remove a transition you can select it and hit the Delete key on the
keyboard.
If you want to add a quick transition one thing you can do is select the clip there
and then you can go, under the Edit menu, to the Command T command there which will
add the default transition for the theme. This theme is no theme for this movie here
so Cross Dissolve is going to be the default. I do Command T and you can see it adds it
to both sides. If I were to select the end of a clip like that, just click on it and
you see that little white line there, I can do Command T and you can see it adds exactly
to the beginning but not to the end there.
You can also make transitions automatic. Let's go to look at the Movie Properties or just
use Command J and go to Settings and I can turn on Automatic Content. One of the things
it does is it adds the default transition for the theme, in this case Cross Dissolve,
to every spot a transition can go into.
Now if we were to look at adding another clip in here, let's say add this one, add it to
the end and it would a transition there at the end. So you can keep adding clips now
and it will always use that default transition as long as you are using automatic content
there.
You can also set the default time for a transition here. It was set to one second before and
we can change that to something a little more if we wanted to and then it would automatically
have each transition that.
If you wanted to select all the transitions in the video you can do that with Edit and
then Select a Movie and you can select Transitions and you can see it selects all those transitions
there. So I can do some adjustments with all the transitions now that are selected at once.
So one more thing about transitions. I've gone in here to the Project Settings and I've
changed the theme to Scrapbook. When you use one of these specialized themes you get a
different set of transitions here at the top that are special for that theme. I've applied
one of them here. Now when I select it you can see these little numbers here. That is
because the transition uses all these different little still frames from the video to populate
the transition. Here I've got exactly where it is taking those from. So if I want I can
adjust it so I can have the fourth part come from somewhere else and the sixth part come
from somewhere else and it will eventually update. You can see it updating right here
to change which of these still frames are put inside of which of these photos. Several
of different themes have transitions like this so when you select them you see these
numbers that is what they are.