iMovie is great for small projects because it allows you to create video for the web with simplicity and speed. I use it at work quite often, and can usually crank stuff out pretty fast. The main topic of this post is around importing video, but one thing I want to mention before I get to iMovie Importing is: If you are using badly recorded audio in your video because you think people won’t notice or care, stop it. You can easily record the audio separately with Garageband if you don’t have all the fancy audio recording software. Seriously. It’s really all about the mic you use. Go buy yourself a decent condenser mic and a Presonus Firebox and hook it up to your mac with Firewire. You can later import the audio to your video project. Importing quality audio is just as important as importing all of of your video.

Ok, on to the main topic of the post: iMovie Importing. Anyone who has ever used iMovie knows it takes FOREVER to import video files into iMovie using the traditional method: File–Import. It can churn away for hours and hours. So… if you already have a bunch of video files that are ready for iMovie editing, take a second to smile because your life is about to get easier. If you want to quickly import video into iMovie without officially ‘importing’ them through the program, you can do this little trick:

• 1. Go to your iMovie project file.
• 2. Hold down the Control Key and click on the file. A Menu will pop up. Choose ‘Show Package Contents’. A new window will appear with some folders in it.
• 3. Look for the Media folder.
• 4. Drag all of your video clips into the Media folder.
• 5. Now close all the windows and open the iMovie project.
• 6. A notification may pop up to tell you have items in the trash. If it does, click view items.
• 7. If no notifiaction appears, click on the little trash icon in iMovie window.
• 8. You should see all of your transferred video in the trash.
• 9. Hold the shift key down to select the videos.
• 10. Drag all of them over into your iMovie ‘clips’ pane.

Bingo!! A quick way to import video to iMovie. Now that I just saved you a whole lot of time, you can go buy that Pumpkin Spice Latte and still get your project done on time.