PE3_iMovie

My brain is feeling a bit overwhelmed after spending much of today learning about iMovie '09 and trying out some of its features.  I decided to try to put some of this new knowledge to use by creating a short video tour of my Aunt Vonnie's award winning flower gardens.

I have never created an iMovie video before by just using photographs or the photo frame theme in iMovie.  So for this example project I decided to import some of the photos I took last summer during a visit to my Aunt Vonnie's house in my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin.  After importing photos into iPhoto I was able to use the media browser in iMovie to scan through the 130+ photos I took that day and select the ones I wanted to showcase in this video project.  I decided to let iMovie insert transitions automatically, at least for the first pass.  I then made some adjustments to those transitions by deselecting the automatic transitions feature and editing the framed photo transitions to include the specific photos I wanted to appear in the transition.

I also used the music media browser to select the royalty free "Buddy" track and dragged it to the background of the video project panel.  The track was not quite long enough to keep playing for the entire movie, so I merely inserted another copy of the track - not the greatest solution, but the best I could do given my time constraints.  After editing the text for the titles and adding a second credit slide at the end of the movie, I was ready to preview and then exported the project to my Mobile Me gallery.  I also exported the movie as a Quicktime file which I attempted to embed into this blog posting.

Even though the video was only 2 minutes and 14 seconds in length, after more than 15 minutes of uploading the file into the blogger editing tool, I got an error message saying that the file could not be uploaded.  So I decided to go back to the Viddler option and then embed the code into blogger.  Please add a comment if you have other suggestions for including video files into blog postings.

Obviously this is just a "rough cut" but it gave me an opportunity to practice using some of the lessons I learned today about creating an iMovie video by just using still photographs.  When I have some extra time I will add some sound effects and a bit of voice-over narration, as well as experiment with other transition effects besides the default Ken Burns effect.  But that fun stuff will have to wait for another day - I have articles to read, a concept map to create and a literature review to write.  So long for now - I hope to see you again soon.