How to Easily Make a Memorable Family Video Montage Using iMovie
Are you and your family always taking pics? Here’s how you can easily make a memorable family video montage with the help of iMovie.
One of the greatest joys in life is being able to look back and enjoy what’s come before. Looking at photos from the past can give you a warm feeling of happiness and nostalgia. It’s why family photo albums have been a tradition as old as time.
Today, there’s a more modern version of the family photo album: the family video. If you and your family are always snapping pictures, it’s easy to make a memorable family video montage to play at an event, party, or even just on a loop in the privacy of your own home.
You don’t even need any fancy software to do it: you can make this video easily with the iMovie program that comes with most Macs. Ready to dive in and create your own montage masterpiece? Read on and we’ll walk you through everything you need to know.
Get Your Photos Onto the Computer
The first thing you’ll need to do in order to make your video montage is to ensure that all the photos you want to use are in one place. That one place, of course, should be in a file on the computer you hope to edit on.
Getting your photos on the computer shouldn’t be any kind of big hassle. Most likely, the photos you will be collecting are probably already digital files, whether they were taken on a digital camera or on someone’s phone. You can easily transfer these files to your computer in a variety of ways.
You can airdrop, e-mail, text, or direct offload via a wire or cable. It may take a little time for the photos to transfer from one place to another, but it shouldn’t be an all-day endeavor either.
On the off chance that you have some photos you want to include that aren’t digital, there might be a little more work to do. In order to get your physical photos into iMovie, you’ll need the help of a digital scanner.
A digital scanner takes, in a sense, a photo of your photo and put it onto your computer. If you don’t have access to a scanner, you can take your photos to a local service and they’ll digitize them for you.
Keeping all your photos in one place as you add things to your computer will help to keep you organized as you start this process.
Get Familiar With iMovie
iMovie is one of the class Mac applications that has been included with Apple products for many years. It’s easy to use, so even if you haven’t opened the program before, it shouldn’t take you too long of clicking around to get the basics down.
In fact, that’s what you’ll want to do first: take the time to learn how to use iMovie on mac. You won’t need to become an iMovie expert to make your video, but you will want to get a handle on the basics, like how to add clips, cut video, and move things around.
When you open iMovie for the first time, you’ll be prompted to create a new movie file. You can continue to create new movie files by hitting Control+N whenever you want to start a new project.
If you need to, drop a few random video clips in from your computer and try to splice them up together. It doesn’t have to make any sense as a coherent video. All you need is to get yourself used to using the application.
Importing Your Photos into iMovie
Once you’re comfortable in iMovie, it’s finally time to get started on that montage masterpiece. You’ll need to bring your collection of photos into the iMovie program in order to get things going.
Under the My Media tab in iMovie, you should see a selection called Photos. If you hit that tab, iMovie should bring up a selection of all the most recent photos on your computer. This should display all the photos you’ve recently added or uploaded to your Mac.
Select all of the photos you want to include in your montage and add them to your iMovie library. You should see them each populate your workspace even when you click away from the media tab.
Creating Your Montage Sequence
It’s time to put your montage together. That means you’ll need to think long and hard about what order you want your photos to be in.
Drag each down to the timeline in sequential order. If you change your mind about the order of the photos, you can drag them around one another to rearrange. The photos will have a default time of a few seconds of display when added to the timeline.
Adding effects to your timeline can make your family montage more engaging to watch. You can hit the Ken Burns effect to add pans and zooms that will make your project more visually appealing.
You can also add transitions between photos to spice things up as well. Photos can either fade simply into one another for a classy feel, or you can play around with more extravagant and attention-catching transitions. The iMovie platform comes with many different transitions.
With these effects in place, your montage should be ready for export and enjoyment by all!
Creating a Family Video Montage in iMovie
If you’re looking to celebrate the great times you’ve had with your family, there’s no better way to do so than with a family video. If you follow the above advice, you can make a great one in iMovie in no time.
Need more family advice or ideas? Keep scrolling our blog for more information.
