Subtitles of the Movie

We are now going to take a tour of the iMovie window, you'll immediately notice two things. First, iMovie takes over the whole of your computer screen. If you need to go to the Desktop, you'll have to access the finder by this icon in the upper right hand corner of the monitor. Second, everything in iMovie is large and colorful. All of the icons, buttons, and scroll bars are very easy to see and to access. As you become more familiar with iMovie, you'll be more and more impressed by the shear elegance of the interface. Apple's brilliant design makes everything you need for your editing simple, logical, and easy to use. It's this interface that makes iMovie so user friendly and such a joy to work with. Let's start our tour at the top of the screen. On the left, you'll see the menu bar, notice it only has 4 drop down menus now that's a sign of the simplicity of the program. Many of the items in these menus only have to be selected once during your project. Almost all of the rest have keyboard shortcuts. It's well worth taking the trouble to learn these because they're great time savers, after a while you'll hardly ever have to use the menu bar. The most dominant feature on your screen is the clip monitor. This is where you'll view your video as it's being captured, edit your clips, and preview your movies as they grow. Here below the clip monitor, you can see a blue bar. This is called the scroll bar. Along this bar, you'll drag the play head, which is this white triangle here. As the play head travels along the scroll bar, the time showing to its right changes. This informs you how far you've traveled into the clip you are editing. Immediately, below the scroll bar on the left here are the mode switch icons. One shows a video camcorder and one a filmstrip. Switch the button to the camera and you are in video capture mode. Move it to the filmstrip and you enter video-editing mode, to the right of the mode switch of the playback buttons. Their functions change depending on which mode you are in and I'll be covering this later on. To the right of the playback buttons is a slide bar denoted by a speaker icon on it's left and right. This is used to control the sound level of the clip you are editing. Now, we come to the shelf. As you can see, it looks like a 35 mm slide organizer. This is where your captured video clips will be stored until you are ready to edit them. To the right of the shelf is a blue scroll bar. This is used to access clips stored lower down on the shelf. Immediately below the shelf, you can see five buttons. From left to right they are, first the clip button. Click on this and you'll be taken to the main editing window. Next, we have a transition button when you click here, the transition window opens and that gives you access to the transition work area. Next, we have the titles button which when opened lets you work with the titles palette. Click on the effects button and you have access to some very useful and some way out special effects. Use them sparingly and you can give your movie a real lift. Finally, the last here is the audio button. Click on this and you'll open the work area where you can add audio effects, record voice overs, and download music directly onto the music track.