welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today i want
to discuss importing video footage and photos into imovie let's do it
often you have an iphone you might have a camera a video camera dslr whatever device you have
ipad we're going gonna walk through the steps of importing your video footage and how to get
it from a device into your computer and import it into imovie so that you can start editing it
and you can take bits and pieces of different video clips wherever it may be and create a
movie with all of your content so let's go ahead and get started we're going to open up imovie
we're going to head to our media browser so if it's not already selected we're going to click
on media in the top center and we're going to look on the left hand side over here underneath
our libraries now when we import content all of your video footage is imported into an event
which actually lives inside a library now over on the left hand side i actually have two different
libraries i have an imovie library and a vacations imovie library you can have as many libraries
as you want by default you have one that's called imovie library i have another video for
that specifically covers the organization of all of your videos and events and libraries
and such but just know that when you're importing video footage it needs to be within a library and
imported into an event so let's start from scratch i'm going to have this imovie library selected and
honestly it really doesn't matter what library i have selected but what we need to do is go to the
import window and there's a couple different ways to do that we can either use this little import
here in the top and it will give us the option to import the video from a camera or a folder or
memory card or we can go up to the file menu and choose import media and it's going to bring up the
same exact window now this is the import window this is where you have the ability to tell imovie
where is the video footage coming and what are you selecting and where are you putting it so right
now i actually have my phone connected physically with the cable to my computer and there's multiple
ways for you to get video and pictures from your phone or ipad or ipod touch whatever you have
from your device to your mac in a couple different ways you could hardwire it through this
you could use icloud photos or you could use airdrop and any of those options are
available and some have pros and cons but this is definitely a surefire free way to do
it and probably the quickest way also because when you plug in your phone or any kind of device
it's going to treat it and just copy that information through the cable
and go right into your computer so while this is connected notice on the left hand side here
it gives me choices for cameras and i can choose the facetime camera and i could import directly
from here hello there or right below there we have my phone so on my phone i have now the ability to
see all of the videos that are actually on this device notice in the top right we have a couple
choices i can either choose and tell imovie to either show me just the videos on my phone or just
the photos or i can say show me all clips and it's going to show me everything combined it also gives
me the ability to hide things that are already imported so if last week i connected my phone and
i took five videos and i already imported those and now today i took more videos if by having this
checked it's not going to show me those previous ones that were already imported and then last we
have this little gear which shows us just the clip size of the photographs or videos that are
in your browser or down below and then also the ability to see the waveforms of the audio
or the video files so if i change this back to videos i can now see all of the videos here so
pretty much you have your choice of where is the videos coming from on the left
you can choose the videos down here by selecting them and then in the top center is where are you
importing these videos to so notice here it gives me the choice when i click on this import to
option it lists the imovie library which is one library that i have and a vacations imovie library
and inside of here are different events so an event is think of it like a container or a folder
you're putting these video clips into an event to filter and mark your favorites and technically
organize them so i'm going to create a new event and i'm going to put it in the imovie library
and it's going to say okay what do you want to call the event and i actually just
recently got married yes thank you it was a blast even though during covid we still
i mean seriously it was awesome um but i digress so i have some video footage from the phone
that i'm gonna put into an event so i'm just gonna call wedding day and we're going to touch
click ok and so now at the top it says okay we're going to import these files into a new event
called wedding day inside of the imovie library and down here below i'm only showing the videos
so i want to select all of these videos and if i click once on each one of them it always deselects
the other so there's a couple different methods that you can do to choose multiple video clips
i can hold down command on the keyboard and select multiple videos so now i'm selecting each
and kind of cherry picking the ones that i want or if i want to do a selection between two points
i can click on the first one hold down shift on the keyboard and click on the last one and it's
going to highlight everything in between the other option is i do have a choice to import all in the
bottom right but that's going to import all of these other videos and i don't want to do that
another option so many options the other option allows me to click and hold and i can drag this
marquee box kind of the selection and anything that it touches is going to select it also so as
soon as i let go all of those clips are selected now a lot of times people want to just select a
portion of the clip and unfortunately that's i haven't found it possible so if you know a way
let me know but if this were a 10 minute clip i don't have the ability to mark an in or out point
and select only two minutes of that 10 minute clip you have to do the entire thing so i'm gonna go
ahead and select all of these and we are going to choose then import selected in the bottom right
and that's going to create a brand new event over here on the left inside of the imovie library
and i can see the progress happening of these files being imported and copied from my phone
into imovie i can also see a progress in the top right if i click on this little circle
it's just saying hey it's importing from my phone uh two of 13 files and it gives me approximate
time two minutes it'll be done so now that that is imported notice i get a little notification in the
top right it says import complete and then allows me to eject that camera or the phone so i'm going
to go ahead and click eject here and then that's going to disconnect that device from the computer
another option to get videos or photos from your phone or ipad or ipod touch to your computer is to
use airdrop airdrop is a really nice feature it allows you to wirelessly send files or pictures
or contacts from one apple product to another so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go into
photos and i'm going to scroll up we're going to go to recents and i'm going to actually just
choose some wedding photos so that we can add the pictures not not videos because we already
have the videos we're going to add some pictures into this event as well so i'm just going to go
through here some of the photos that we took i'm going to touch select in the top right and
i'm just going to drag my finger here and select all of these pictures and a few more here we go
and so now in the bottom left of the phone i have the little share button and i have the
ability to do airdrop so if i touch airdrop it's going to see all of the devices near me
and i'm going to choose joel my youtube laptop so now on my computer i get a little notification
and notice in the downloads here on the bottom right and also on the top right it's saying hey
i'm air dropping 87 photos from my phone it also shows the little progress on the the phone itself
with the little blue outline and everything when you airdrop it it goes into the downloads folder
so then from the downloads folder we can import that into the event if i go to the finder go to
the downloads i'm gonna see all of the pictures here and once that's done i will be able to
drag them and import them there we go it says sent on the phone so i can touch done in the top right
i can close my phone and now i'll go back to the computer notice in the top right i can
just get rid of this notification so now i have all of these pictures in the downloads folder
now if i select some of these images if i drag it i can just drag it over here within this event and
i can drag them so let's actually do that with a handful of them so if i select these images here i
can either drag in this open window and it's going to import them if i go back to the finder here
i'll take another batch of them because i can also drag it to the event name i'm going to drag
it there or i could go up to the import button as well i can navigate to the downloads folder from
here go to downloads and it's going to say hey it wants access to the downloads folder that's fine
and then from here i'm able to there they are i can select multiple images just like
the video clips and i can choose from the top menu where these pictures going they're
going in wedding day and from there and import selected so i'll just go back to the finder here
we'll select the remaining ones and bring that into this event so that's option two to get
uh content from an iphone or ipad using the cable hardwired or airdrop now the third option that
you have is if you use icloud photos photos automatically syncs your pictures and videos
automatically with your computer without you even doing anything so what's really nice is
in the top left here underneath photos if i click or underneath libraries i have this photos option
and photos ties into apple photos the the program the app and this is gives me the ability to
see all of my pictures directly inside of imovie so they talk to each other behind the scenes and
notice you can probably hear my computer stressing it out a little bit so it's taking a little bit
longer and it's just it's showing its age for the speed of it so when i click on photos it actually
shows me all of the pictures that are in my photo library now if i click on the top left here i can
choose my albums i can look at the shared albums i'll be able to see all of that content there
this picture definitely needs a haircut yeah that's uh back in my high school days with my
one of my older brothers and yep the no need to say anymore so if i look back here we can go back
choose all of the albums and again if you if you have a ton of photos in photos it
may take a while to load but notice i can scroll through here and see all of the organization from
my pictures that i have so if i do all photos i can then choose do i want to just show the
photos the videos that i have in there or favorites and if i click on videos
it's going to only show me the videos that are in my photos library and that would because i
use icloud photos that means that i actually wouldn't have to airdrop any of my pictures
or videos to the computer or i wouldn't have to plug my phone in because everything is already
inside of the computer through photos so multiple different ways for you to get your content from an
iphone or ipad or ipod touch to here so if i go down notice here's all of those wedding videos
that are already on my computer so i didn't really need to transfer them that's importing from there
now let's say that you have a memory card so you have a memory card you took it out of your camera
and you want to copy the files now into your computer the same exact concept applies i'll
take my memory card i'll plug it in to my computer and i can either use an adapter i could plug my
camera straight into the computer and what it does is it automatically opens up the import window
and i can see that the camera is selected that's the memory card and the same exact
process i choose at the top center where do i want to put this video footage i want to do a new event
because it doesn't make sense that the content that's on this memory card is from arizona and
i was out shooting a video for this real estate and it doesn't make sense to put this video
inside the wedding day event because it has nothing to do with the wedding so really i want
to create a brand new event that is maybe labeled arizona because this is the video footage that
that makes sense so i'm going to go to the new event and i want it in the imovie library
so i'm going to select that and we're just going to call it arizona
cottonwood click ok and then i'm going to select some of the clips here and i don't
want all of them because there's a lot of clips on here so we're just going to do a handful
just so that we get the idea so i'm going to hold down command on the keyboard and just
select some of these clips here and notice in the top left of them you can see the duration
of them so this one is 1.9 m standing for minutes versus 55.1 seconds so i don't really want really
really long clips because that will take longer so we're just going to do 18 seconds 39 seconds
so on and so forth okay so we'll just take these clips here and again the same options apply in the
top right we can filter out depending on what's on the memory card either all the clips or videos
we can hide already imported and then this just gives us the waveforms and the clip size so now
i'm going to do import selected and notice on the left hand side it creates a brand new event
inside of the imovie library and now those video clips are being copied from that memory card
into that event and then once that's all done it's going to give me a notification saying hey
all of your video files are imported you want to eject this memory card we can do that we see the
little progress in the top right of the screen up here we can click on this and see the duration of
it importing and these are smaller files so it doesn't take too long and now we can eject this
memory card now if we don't eject it from here you can eject it from the finder so i can open
up the finder and over here on the left hand side we can click the eject button here and that will
disassociate the memory card from the computer as well if you just pull the plug on it there are
possibilities where you could corrupt the files on that flash drive or memory card so always eject
it first don't just pull the plug on it but now i can safely remove the memory card and all of those
files are copied into this library the last option to import videos is to bring it from either a hard
drive or maybe they're already on my computer so notice here on the desktop if i swipe over i have
these i have a folder here called swimming pool videos north shore videos and if i double click
on one of these i can see all of the original raw video footage of these clips i could have gotten
it from someone else that gave me a memory card or a flash drive or a hard drive there's a variety
of ways to get these clips to the computer but this is not importing from a device specifically
it's just the raw files and so we treat it the same way if we go back to imovie here
i can come to the import and do a whole process just like i did before
go and create a brand new event select those files from the desktop or an external hard
drive wherever they may live so i would go to the desktop over here on the left hand side desktop
left-hand side and here's the north shore videos and i can select the clips here and i could select
multiple and then again make sure that you're not importing into a different event that you want
and i can create a brand new event here let's say i want to create another event and not do it from
here if i select the imovie library or the library that i want to import it into i can go up to file
and choose new event and this is where it'll allow me to title it here we'll just call it north shore
press return on the keyboard and now i have an empty event an empty container and i can click
import media here as well it brings me to the same exact spot so i can select two of these clips
choose import selected and now it's copying them from the desktop into the library and after that's
done i can actually delete them off the desktop because they're inside of this library let's say
you accidentally moved them or imported into a different event and you want to move them well
you can just drag these clips to a different event so if i wanted to put that clip into wedding day
i just moved it from one event to another and if i go to wedding day i'll scroll down or up see where
it's at there it is it's up at the top so if i went to north shore again i selected this clip and
i drag it to wedding day i've now just moved that clip from one event to another event moved it from
one container to another container that's all i'm doing and some things to know when you're viewing
these these events in the clips here you can go up to the view option and you can sort the events
you can sort the clips by either name date or duration ascending or descending order so i can do
name and it will sort them by name i can go up to view again sort clips by duration so
it puts the longest clips at the top versus the shorter clips i like date and then i also like to
you can do show separate days and events that way it's going to break it down
and show you all right this was taken april 10th 2021 and if i scroll down
we should have yeah these older video clips from 2018 with uh north shore
so that's pretty much importing video content and photographs into these events
then it's just a matter of organizing them marking them as favorites rejecting them and adding them
to a project and then you're then you're good to go so thank you so much for watching i hope you
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