How I came to the Village

A belated video introduction to the Village philosopher for #prisoner106.

The process

This was a new one for me–it’s very simple, but I had never done a video that had both still images and moving video footage in it. Video is the one thing in #ds106 that I feel least adept at.

I used iMovie for this video. It was surprisingly difficult to figure out how to create a new “event.” Honestly, the way iMovie organizes things into movies, events and projects…I’m not sure I’ll ever get it all straight. I had to do a web search just to get a new event started. And now I can’t remember how I did it. Sigh.

After that, things were mostly easy:

1. I used the “down arrow ” sign to import media. Importing images, videos and audio all worked in the same way.

2. Then, when the media was in the top left window of iMovie (honestly, I don’t know what these areas are called), then I moved it down to the bottom, editing area. The music file just slotted right into the right place, and the images worked just like video–they were automatically set at a few seconds long, and with the “Ken Burns” effect.

3. I altered the Ken Burns on the images by clicking on the image in the bottom window, and it shows up on the top right window. Then I click on the little “crop” tool on the top right, and can adjust the Ken Burns effect on the image (or get rid of it).

4. I recorded the voiceover in Audacity and imported it into iMovie–that way I could do edits in Audacity, which is quite easy. I didn’t know what it would be like doing audio edits in iMovie (and, given what I describe below, I’m glad I did it this way). The timing of the images and video just fit with the voiceover. I made sure the voiceover was the length I wanted, and then just trimmed the images and video to fit.

5. Perhaps the hardest part was reducing the volume of the music after the intro titles so that the voiceover could be heard. Again, I needed to do a web search to figure out how to do this, because it was not simple.

• Option-click on the music track, and you get a little diamond. Option-click on another place in the video and you get another little diamond. These can then be adjusted up or down to raise or lower the volume. I tried to do a kind of “fade out” to a low volume before the voiceover started, but the adjustments on those diamonds is really, really coarse. I couldn’t even seem to move the diamonds right or left after I placed them, which was a real pain. Probably there is some way to do it that I am not aware of.

Every time I tried to adjust the diamonds on the right to lower the volume, it jumped from like 60% volume to 20% or 13% or something. There didn’t seem to be much in between.

I was then able to click on a small piece of the audio line and go to the top right window, under the “volume” icon, and adjust the volume there. But sometimes that adjusted the volume of the whole music clip rather than just that portion.

Somehow, eventually, I managed to get the music to a decent volume level, and though it didn’t fade smoothly like I wanted, it was good enough.

 

5. Fading out the music track at the end was much easier. There is a little circle at the beginning and end of the music track; just drag that and you get a fade out as long as you want. That worked beautifully. But if you wanted to have fine control over the fade as well as the length of it, you might be back to the diamonds of doom.

6. Then it was time to “share” (that’s what “export” is in iMovie). For some unknown reason, every time I tried to save it to a file, one of the end titles was empty (it just said “TITLE”, even though when I previewed it in iMovie it had the right text in there. So I just deleted that title and added a new one with the text and finally it worked.

 

Other Mac video editing software?

I’m not thrilled with iMovie. Does anyone know of good video editing software for a Mac? I’m willing to pay money, but not a really large amount. Suggestions appreciated!