Washington Apple Pi

A Community of Apple iPad, iPhone and Mac Users

Washington Apple Pi iLife/iMovie SIG

As many of you know, we re-started the iLife Special Interest Group (SIG) this past March in partnership with the Apple Store, Tyson’s Corner, Va. It’s the same good stuff as the ‘old’ iMovie SIG – just a new time, new place, and new topics. For those of you who are familiar with the Apple Store, Tyson's, you know that they have a great media center, with plenty of comfortable seats. For those of you who aren't, you're in for a treat. The iLife/iMovie SIG has a mailing list. If you are not already signed up, we invited you to subscribe.

If you are interested in Apple's iLife suite, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, GarageBand, and iWeb, and related subjects, then the iLife/iMovie SIG is for you.

Upcoming events:

Though we’ll be taking the summer off – no meetings July nor August – we will resume in September.

When: check the Washington Apple Pi calendar for date and times.

Past Activities:

At the March meeting, we learned about how to make an iMovie - without using a camcorder!

It's an easy assumption that you need a camcorder to make a movie and, while we agree that it helps, it certainly isn't the only way to capture video. For example, almost all of the newer digital cameras nowadays have a 'video' mode, allowing you to capture short video clips which you can download to iPhoto and import into iMovie. But even if your digital camera doesn't have a video mode, we learned we don't have to be deterred. Using the 'Ken Burns' effect, you can import a series of stills into iMovie, add motion, put in a beginning and ending title, complete your project with a sound track and/or effects imported from iTunes.

Just think about all those historical documentaries you've seen, made mostly with still images. Today there may exist only paintings, or pictures, or artifacts to work with, yet with a little creativity, they manage to tell a pretty good story in video.

We learned to do the same thing

• We learned how to make an iMovie using a mixture of stills and video clips. Using the vidoe mode of a digital camera, we captured two clips, imported them into iMovie. we then created still frames of the first and last frame of each clips, and used Photoshop to turn them into a black and white line drawing, a watercolor, and a still images.  Re-importing them back into iMovie, we arranged them in the timeline, applied cross dissolve transitions, added titles and music.
•  The completed iMovie looked like this.
• A 'how-to' achieve these 'special effects' can be found here.

Videos and Pictures

Here are other examples of the kinds of things our iLife members have done using the iLife suite of applications::  

• a short clip by Bob Mulligan, "Jump!" (1.7 MB) featuring very clever use of "pan and scan" (Apple calls it the "Ken Burns" effect) to tell a story using still photos;
• a short clip, by Hal Cauthen, showing Paige Counts (873K) conducting the Washington Apple Pi April 2004 General Meeting, done entirely in iMovie;
• a large, lengthy but elegant clip done by Phil Shapiro of a "video iChat" with Rich Jaeggi, with commentary on how it was created;

• this amazing photo, 'Bikes', was taken Labor Day in Fairfax when the bikers gathered for their Rolling Thunder ride, using an incredibly cheap little 4 in 1 DXG 506V camera -- it's a 5.1 megapixel still camera, a full motion digital camcorder, an MP3 player, and audio recorder. More on this fun little gadget soon.