Locking Video Clips

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No.

"..This is a music video project so syncing it up is important and time consuming.." ..Absolutely!

You may need to create spare lengths of, say, just black nothingness, to drop these into the slots where chunks of your movie get removed or moved around ..create them as 'placeholders', and also create Bookmarks, to make it easy to jump back and forth to particular spots while you're editing, and to sync things up - then delete all the Bookmarks before sending to iDVD, if that's your destination.

Be aware that every Transition (..except 'Overlap'..) will 'eat into' and use up its duration from the tail end of a clip AND from the head of the following clip, so a 3 second transition will effectively remove 3 seconds from the head of the incoming clip, placing it over the last 3 secs of the outgoing clip. This will mess up your timings.

So every time you add a transition, all your timing and sync'ing will go wrong unless you allow for the duration of every transition before applying it.

Straight cuts won't affect any timing, nor will an 'Overlap' ..but everything else will.

So always allow an extra length to every clip to be 'eaten away' during transitions, then always Extract your audio before applying any transitions. This keeps the audio at its original duration, on its own track, and lets you do whatever you want to the video without affecting the audio.

Try doing just one short 'practice' video before doing the real thing, to see how the timing slides around, just as a preparation.

But no: I'm not aware that you can 'Lock' a clip to a particular point in time - e.g; at, say, 01min:35secs:20frames - and then drag your other clips around that one to build material ahead of and behind it. You'll need "filler" clip(s) preceding it to 'lock' it at that pre-determined point, and the lengths of those "fillers" will change if you apply transitions to them.

Only the Final Cut programs "work backwards" by trying to use any unwanted material at the head and tail of clips on which to apply transitions ..thereby keeping the actual wanted portions of those clips unaffected.

Sync'ing is easier with Final Cut Express and Pro ..but you learn so much more (..and it's more fun, too!..) by doing it the hard way with the cheaper and 'simpler' iMovie! ..Possibly!

"Only the Final Cut programs "work backwards" by trying to use any unwanted material at the head and tail of clips on which to apply transitions ..thereby keeping the actual wanted portions of those clips unaffected."

Thanks for that bit of info David - I wondered how the Final Cut programs handled transitions, having seen it mentioned in a post some time ago (but not fully explained). The poster - a professional editor/teacher/author - was very critical of the method used by iMovie.

His point was that, any user moving to a professional program would have to re-learn editing techniques. Fair enough, but I'm quite happy with the simple, elegant way that iMovie handles things. Like the old cliche "What you don't know won't hurt you!". Or, as Karsten would say: "Was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß."

John

Oh, so that's what he would say! [..Last time I looked, he was saying "whoo, me in the HiDef area...! everything looks so.... sharp! 😉" ..roughly translated as "..wass? mich in der HiDef raum...! Deutschland für WeltcupMeister!.." or some such..]

Erm, FCP ..importing in FCP (and Express) pre-supposes that you import more than you need, and that each clip will have excess material at the ends.

You then capture the clips, set 'crop markers' to tell the program how much of each clip you want to use, and then the program applies transitions to the areas beyond (outside) the crop markers so that the footage you want remains intact and unaffected.

The reasoning behind FCP was that it would be a program used by editors who were not the people who actually shot the footage. So camera-people shoot material (e.g; news, features) including extra footage at the start and end, and then it's handed over to editors who capture it all, come to it afresh, assess it, and cut it as they think fit.

However, people who use iMovie have generally shot their - our - own material, and we don't always (usually?) include extra 'disposable' footage at the ends.

The crop markers and the 'non-destructive' editing capability in iMovie can isolate just the 'wanted' region within any clip, but those crop markers can't be used for setting where transitions will start or end.

The "pull-in-the-edges" direct-trimming method can help a bit when editing, but it still doesn't define the start and end points of transitions as being outside the region chosen, and doesn't "intelligently" apply transitions ..by choosing to use for transitions the extraneous footage outside the trimmed boundaries, in the way that FCP does.

Timings remain accurate in FCP (..assuming there's extra footage outside the crop marker boundaries..) when applying transitions, so it's handier to use for "cut to the music" videos. But FCP and FCE are, nevertheless, more complex overall to use than iMovie, on the whole.

LOL

I would need at last 5 Mass (=stones) beer, to talk like that... REALLY funny... 😉, good try....

to add my 5 € cents:
FC(E) is the simulation of editing, it was done since Sergej Eisenstein.
a film-camera creates allways some "before/after" material, a good Director of Photography (I LOVE this term for a "camera man") allways shoots more then needed (aside the "assistents" of Alfred Hitchcock, he claimed to have the whole movie in his head BEFORE entering the studio...).

but, a consumer product "muss den Nutzer abholen wo er steht" (I'll teach you German/___sbsstatic___/migration-images/migration-img-not-avail.png/___sbsstati c___/migration-images/migration-img-not-avail.png)/should take care for the needs of the user: most Daddy-does-movies doer point and shoot; they don't think about transistions, jumping-axis, follow-ups, whatever a pro does...

so, where's no "beef", you can not grab it for a transition; I like to use the term concept - iM's concept is shoot, edit, add, share ...
just have a look at the used metaphor: sorting slides... EVERYBODY can accomplish that... aside the users of DVDcamcorders (<< that is some very silly, very inside joke, just a few gurus will understand...).

but using iM on a more... apprenticed level, will teach you to record "more", keeping the edit in mind WHILE shooting... and finally, you will make the switch to FC(E).....

Thank you David - that's an excellent explanation, as always (you should be a teacher).

I always understood the principle about shooting more than you need, and of course try to apply that principle where possible. But I didn't realise that programs like FCE & FC used that crop marker method you've outlined.

Thanks again,
John

PS. Here's the site I pinched the translation from:
http://german.about.com/library/blredew_W.htm

Nah-Karsten would be saying "... mein guter alter Würfel" 🙂
(Loosely translated = "...my good old Cube!"

EVERYBODY can accomplish that... aside the users of DVDcamcorders (<< that is some very silly, very inside joke, just a few gurus will understand...).</i> can't believe you went there!! LOL!
Sue
iMac ppcG5 1.8 GHz 20FP & (2)iMac G4 800MHz 17FP Mac OS X (10.3.9) OS X 10.4.6 / iLife 4,5,6 Superdrives & 1 G RAM / QT6 pro

Do the iMovie creators think that everyone will edit their movie together entirely sequentially from beginning to end and then never have to go back and change anything?

you don't have to be a psychic to answer this with
"Exactly!"

as said: iM is a consumer product and does an excellent job for the average Daddy-does-movies (Moms included)... I do use both products, FCE and iM right because both apps have their advantages and disadvantages…

happy editing...

thanks for usage of the forum's marker feature.... 😉

"..if you have to sync video to audio for a long movie like 20+ minutes. It would be 10 seconds of inserting a clip and half an hour of realigning everything that comes after it for every single edit.."

It's always best to 'Extract' all the audio from the various clips, and slot together all the audio first. That makes a 'bed' onto which you can then drop the video clips.

If the video clips are each slightly longer than you need, you can drop all the video clips into their rough positions, then "fine trim" them, using the 'drag-the-ends-of-each-clip' "direct trimming" method - described in iMovie's Help items under "Fine Tuning" the video.

Then you just need to decide how long each transition should be, and allow that same amount extra on the end, and start, of each clip, by 'pulling out' the ends which you may have 'pulled tighter', using that 'direct trimming' capability.

Then just apply the transitions. That should make everything fit pretty much exactly!

You can also do it by just counting minutes, seconds and frames, and allowing the appropriate extra seconds and frames on the ends of clips, to allow for that footage being "eaten up" and overlapped during the transitions.

However, as Matthew (I think) pointed out; sometimes - if editing NTSC video - just counting seconds & frames may lead to sync being out by a frame or two after a minute. [This is because NTSC uses "drop-frame" timecode, in which a few frame numbers are ignored every few minutes.] So the "direct trimming" method may be more accurate.

Once you've done it a few times, it becomes second nature..

"..Do the iMovie creators think that everyone will edit their movie together entirely sequentially from beginning to end and then never have to go back and change anything?.."

Erm, you can use 'placeholders' by just making a still frame from anything, then adjusting the length of that still (by typing-in a new duration). Or you can drag the end of a clip to a new position, automatically creating a black 'slug' of the right length to fill the intervening space. You can then chop away lengths of this blank 'slug' as you drop in similar lengths of clips which you want to occupy that 'blank' space.

"..go back and change anything?.." ..That's what the 'Advanced'>'Paste Over at Playhead' feature is for!