Making portrait movies with iMovie

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Level 1

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Making portrait movies with iMovie

I troubled making a portrait movie with iMovie. However, I was able to make a movie with only static text like this (see url below to see it run). Is there a simpler way than the below?

PORTRAIT 9:16 MOVIE. On a Mac: Two movies shot as portrait (3840 × 2160, H.264, AAC, each split into 10 seconds by Preview as 122 MB times two), into iMovie. Still parts from Pages exported as PDF, into large jpg files with Preview, into iMovie working with all content there as tilted (not very practical, and with this scheme titles cannot be used), then exported to mp4 (1920 x 1080p, H.264, AAC,, high quality coding, 70 MB, 27 seconds), then rotated to standing by QuickTime Player into mov (1080 x 1920, H.264, AAC, 34 MB). Finally mov into mp4 (1080 x 1920, H.264, AAC, 19.2 MB) with HandBrake.

See https://www.teigfam.net/oyvind/home/hobby/193-my-aquarium-holiday-automatic-feeder-for-granules/#feeder_feeding_twice

Posted on Sep 15, 2019 2:39 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Rich839

Level 8

47,724 points

Sep 15, 2019 5:55 PM in response to aclassifier

Hi,

There's no simple way to do this. You obtained a great result with your video and I would stick with whatever procedure that you used. Sad that the little tetra overate and met a regrettable ending.

Unfortunately iMovie has a 16:9 aspect ratio that cannot be changed. If you have a vertical 9:16 video you will get black bars on each side to make it fit iMovie's 16:9 screen. If you don't mind the black bars you can add a title to the 9:16 vertical movie and export it. The actual video portion as displayed will be smaller than full size.

To get rid of the black bars in the exported final product, you can rotate the video 90 degrees so that it fills up the screen. Then you can make a title on a transparency screen in a photo app outside of iMovie, such as the Preview app on your Mac, and import that into iMovie. Then you rotate the title 90 degrees and position it on your video with the Picture in Picture feature of iMovie. Export the project to your desktop. Open in QuickTime Player and rotate back to vertical. As you can see, it is not exactly quick and easy. The description that you posted of how to do it is a bit confusing, but essentially it is similar to the above procedure.

Another way would be to export the vertical video and crop out the black bars by using the New Screen Recording feature of QuickTime Player.

-- Rich

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Answer 2

aclassifier Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 16, 2019 12:56 AM in response to Rich839

Thanks, Rich!

I guess this is what I was wondering about, that the way to do this is as hard (and confusing!) as we both seem to agree on. That there is no hidden feature in iMovie.

Yes, Preview is itself a good way to lay text on top of pictures. I used Pages to get more control, but then exported to PDF and then Preview to export jpg to then insert to iMovie.

Good idea to use the Screen recordning of QuickTime player. I didn't think of that one. But then, the pixel size would end up being what the screen gives. Which could be just what one is after, if it's downscaling - which I guess is most probable.

Rich839 wrote:

You obtained a great result with your video and I would stick with whatever procedure that you used. Sad that the little tetra overate and met a regrettable ending.

Thanks! You even noticed the cardinal tetra letting that pellet go. Yes, it must have been full after those seconds. In my SW I can set it to one or two feedings. One is 50 ms and two is 35 ms twice. But it isn't linear. So it's about the double. This is new to me, so I need some time to see that it works, that I can actually leave the fishes well looked after.

Thanks!

-- Øyvind

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