How to Get the "Film/Movie Look" With IMovie 6

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Intro: How to Get the "Film/Movie Look" With IMovie 6

I don't know about you, but for a long time, whenever I watched a movie and compared it to a sports game or somthing on TV, I could always see a difference. Somehow the movie looked like a movie, and the TV show looked like a plain old TV show.

In this instructable I will show you how to make your "home movies" look like professional movies with iMovie 6.

STEP 1: Here We Go.

Nowadays most movies are filmed in 16:9 Widescreen. If your camcorder has the capability to film in 16:9, do it. If you can't film in 16:9, that's ok, it will look just fine.

Once you have worthy footage, import it into iMovie and do all of your standard editing.

STEP 2: Apply the The First Effect

Now we are ready to apply the effects.

First, select the clip that you want to apply the effect to.

Then select the "Peephole" effect from the "Video FX" tab. Before you click apply, slide the "Radius 2" slider to the right so it just shades the corners of the footage.

If you want to tint the footage green(or something else), click "Color 1" and choose a very light pale green color. Make sure "Color 2" is black.

Then click Apply.

STEP 3: Apply "Brightness & Contrast"

Now select the "Brightness & Contrast" effect.


Slide the Contrast slider to the right a little bit to darken the shadows.

Click Apply.

STEP 4: Final Step

If your footage is 16:9, than congratulations, you're done. If not....


Select the Letterbox effect.

We don't want the black bars to take up the whole view, so, drag the "Size" slider to the left a little bit.

Click Apply.


Congratulations, You're done!



I hope you enjoyed this instructable. Questions and comments are welcome.

4 Comments

very cool! it'd be neat if you uploaded a before/after video so that we could see the effects in action too! I wish i had iMovie! I'm stuck with a PC for now but once i've got some spare change i will splash out on a really powerful mac :) You wouldn't happen to know of an analogous program to iMovie for PC would you?
Try this --> http://videospin.com/Redesign/

I have never used it, so I don't know how similar it is to iMovie, but it's worth a shot. They say that it's better than Windows movie maker.

Good luck!

P.S.

I will post a before/after video as soon as possible.
looks really cool man! will hopefully use this soon!
awesome, thanks for the link! looking forward to the video as well.