The iMovie Tutorial

The iMovie tutorial is highly recommended.

The first time you launch iMovie, you are given the opportunity to run the tutorial that comes with the software. You can also access the tutorial directly by pulling down the Help menu while running iMovie. In this series of articles, I will cover some basics of how to work with iMovie. They will be enough to get you started with putting together a very simple piece for streaming. But I highly encourage you to spend the short amount of time that it takes to go through the iMovie tutorial before you do anything else. The software is very easy to use. Following their well-written tutorial, however, will make you that much more confident with iMovie in the long run.

You can access iMovie help or the tutorial right from the Help pulldown menu.

The iMovie Screen
You will find the iMovie screen is broken up into three areas. I have pictured it below for a reference. In the top left-hand corner, you will find the Monitor window. Here is where you play your raw camera footage and your edited video. As I will cover shortly later, it is also where you input your camera footage into iMovie.

The iMovie screen is broken down into three areas: Monitor, Shelf, and Viewer.

In the top right-hand corner is the Shelf. Here is where you store your raw camera clips that you will use in your edited program. You will be dragging your raw camera footage to and from the shelf as you edit your video. Attached to the bottom of the shelf are a series of tabs that changes the shelf area to allow you to access effects, transitions, titles, and sounds used in editing.

Across the bottom of the screen is the Viewer. When you drag your raw footage from the shelf it ends up here. The viewer allows you to arrange (or edit) that footage in the sequence you want your final video to have. The viewer offers a clip view and a timeline view. The timeline view is a more detailed look at your edited work but the clip viewer is friendlier if you are new to the process of editing.