Subtitles of the Movie

At the beginning of this lesson, I mentioned three other special effects, which you won't find in the effect's list. They are slow and fast motion and reverse direction. There are two amazing things about these effects. First, when you apply them they play back immediately in real time. Second, the quality of the play back is superb. Let's take a look at reverse direction first. This effect makes your clip play all of it's frames backwards from the end to the beginning. At first glance, you may feel that this is just one of those wacky creative effects which you'll hardly ever use. After all how often do you need to see somebody walking backwards or somebody diving out of a swimming pool, but let's think about this for a minute. Reverse direction can help you out with 1 or 2 potential problems. For example, take this scene you decide to zoom in for a close up of these men at work. When you get home and start to edit the clip you realize that it would have been better to zoom out from this shot or maybe you should have panned right to left instead of left to right or from up to down instead of down to up. This is where reverse motion comes to the rescue. Let's look at this clip I've selected, it's of a child crouching in some marks square. Note, the position of the play head is at the start of the scrub bar. Now I'll apply reverse motion by clicking on the Apple key and the letter R. The child is now standing up because the last frame becomes the first. Note the play head is still at the start of the scrub bar. If you need to reverse several clips, iMovie has another really neat trick up it's sleeve. Let's select these four clips. Now take careful note of the order of the images. When I apply the reverse motion effect, iMovie not only reverses the frames in each clip, it also reverses the clips themselves. Now that's really cool. The audio, in the reverse clip, will also be reversed and could provide some fun in family videos or if you wish why not design your own secret language. Here's an example. However, if you do not want the sound tracks of these clips, just select them and reduce the volume on the sound bar here to it's lowest setting. Let's look at the slow and fast motion effects. You can now see three soundtracks, which we'll be covering in depth a little later on. To apply either the slow or fast motion to a clip or clips, first select it in the top track. Note it's now changed from white to yellow. The clip appears in the monitor window ready for editing and previewing. To select the amount of slow or fast motion you require, you must move the slider either to the slower or to the fastest side of the bar. Your choices of speed are restricted to 2,3,4, or 5 times. Unfortunately, you can't choose anything in between so fine tuning these effects is not possible. If you need to speed your clip up or slow it down even more than the five times aloud, you can export it back to your camcorder and then recapture it into iMovie and apply the speed effect again. Notice, if you move the button to a slower setting, the clip in the top track will get bigger. If you move it to the faster side it will get smaller. You can control the amount of the clip, which is viewable on the track by selecting a number from this drop down box here, the higher the number, the wider the clip. This enables you to set the most convenient size you need for editing each clip. Notice a fast or slow motion symbol is added to your clip information. When previewing in slow motion or reverse motion, you may feel that the play back is a little jerky. This will be more prominent if you are using an external video monitor, do not worry about this. When you record your final movie back to your camcorder iMovie will present you with the following message. Go ahead and click on the render now button and your final movie will play as smooth as silk. Use slow motion when you want to impart a warm and fuzzy feeling or a romantic move to your movie. Use fast motion to provide some comic effects. Those will always raise a smile when used in family videos. You can also create some very effective time laps video sequences using the fast motion effect. Now, when you apply either the slow or fast motion effect, the sound is not going to be useable. You can turn off the sound for each clip selected by moving the sound bar down here at the button of your screen all the way to the left.