Trimming Your Clips

Click and drag slightly below the Playhead to open up the trimming feature.

Now that you have made a rough cut of your video in the Viewer and checked out the results of your work in the Monitor, you might wish to trim some of your footage a little tighter. These kinds of pacing choices make your video less like home video and more like the professionally produced television we watch every day. In doing so, you might split some of your clips or cut them shorter than they currently are. iMovie makes this possible through use of pulldown menus and the Monitor window.

Trimming your video clips means that you will probably be throwing away non-essential footage. (Ed. Note: the more trim the better for streaming.) Trimming is not exactly intuitive in iMovie but once you have tried it, you will not find it difficult. Let’s say you've carefully viewed and wish to delete the last seconds of your clip. Choose that clip in the Viewer so that it shows in the Monitor window. As shown in the graphic to the right above, slide the Playhead (that little downward pointing triangle that moves along as your video plays) to the start of the video you wish to trim. Then click below the Playhead and drag slightly to the right before releasing the mouse. A split triangle will appear. Now slide the right half of the split triangle to the right. A yellow bar will stretch out in the Monitor timeline and the Playhead will move forward. When you reach the end, pull down the Edit menu and choose Cut. The yellow bar, and its attached video, will disappear.

Splitting a clip into two segments gains you additional control over your video footage.

Splitting Clips
Splitting your video clips means that you wish to break a longer segment down into smaller segments. Just as with trimming, move the Playhead to the point in your clip you wish to split. Pull down the Edit menu and choose Split Video Clip at Playhead. As you look down to the Viewer, you will see what was one clip in the timeline is now two. You can rearrange that extra clip in the Viewer or drag it back to the Shelf window for future use.