Ability to both use Green Screen and then resize the clip?

Imovie 10 - the Green Screen works great. Place one clip above the other and presto. But then if you want to shrink it and put it say on the bottom corner, there in no way. It looks like you can either use the Green Screen or the PIP but not both.

This is a problem as say clip on is of a field of buffalos. Clip 2 is you in front of a green screen. There is no way to alter the size of clip 2 to fit it into the herd. Clip 2 has the subject way too big. You would have to shoot it from an equil distance from the herd for the two clips to match up. If, after you Green Screen your clip you could then PIP in and adjust the size of the video it would be perfect.

Any suggestions or am I missing something?

And no, I am not bothering herds of buffalos, ....not since the accident anyway.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), imovie 10

Posted on Feb 11, 2014 12:51 PM

Posted on Jan 1, 2017 6:35 PM

You are right you can only use green screen or PIP but not both. That said, iMovie supports pre-keyed footage. Essentially certain codecs support transparency (e.g. ProRes4444). You can achieve the desired effect in two steps as others have mentioned by first creating the pre-keyed video then re-importing it for use with the PIP feature. There are several expensive apps (Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro) that can save out pre-keyed footage but if you had those, you wouldn't be using iMovie. I figured out you can do this for free using the slightly older iMovie 9.x.x. I believe you can still download it from Apple here. The trick to get an existing video that is completely transparent (i.e. ProRes4444). It doesn't matter how long the video is as you can extend it using the "Add Freeze Frame" feature. Add your green screen footage on top of the transparent movie and then export using Quicktime to a ProRes4444 movie. Make sure you use the Millions of Colors+ option. Once you create that, re-import into iMovie 10 and use it in the PIP function. I did this successfully today after a lot of experimentation so wanted to pass on the trick!

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