Well that was a way to spend a day. I have been working on some photographic images over the past couple of days and I thought it would be fun to make a little video of them - after all isn't that what iMovie was for? Well maybe but it has taken me most of the day to sort it out to something I'm starting to be satisfied with.
So silly me believed that it was going to be a doddle - just download the images into iMovie - no problem. Only there was a problem - all my images are managed in Lightroom so I don't touch iPhoto which, of course, is where iMovie looks for the images. It took me a while to realise I could just drag and drop the images into iMovie. The next problem was getting my head around the iMovie interface. I have very little experience with video editing - other than Windows movie maker and some Adobe video editing express package I once owned. Both of these packages seemed to be more intuitive than the iMovie interface. In the end I had to start reading the help pages which is usually a bad sign. To be fair the tutorial videos were really quite helpful but it meant further delays.
Then it was time to choose the music. I had by chance stumbled across Lifted by the Lighthouse Family when I was trying to make a simple package in Lightroom and this seemed the best tune for my needs. It loaded easily into iMovies and away I went or would have done if I could get the images to sync with the music. More fiddling around, I'm still not sure I truly know how to do this which was so simple in Windows Movie Maker. Anyway, after more fettling around I managed to get the job done and I have to say I'm quite pleased with the results given the contraints until, that is, I came to view it on my iPad. Whatever compression system is used to compress/configure the file so that it can run on the iPad has made a real mess of the images.
So what have I learnt? Well first of all I don't think that iMovies is as user friendly as Apple tries to make, no surprise there. Second, whilst the final result is pleasing it is a lot of hard work to try and make it look in anyway like I wanted. Thirdly, if you are going to make a movie out of stills then capture/make the stills with this in mind rather than trying to shoe horn images made for all different purpose - it makes things so much easier. And of course the final thing is I can't publish this to my Facebook, web site, blog etc because I have used copyright music, which I know doesn't seem to bother too many other people but it does me.
Simon Marchini
Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment