PE3_iMovie

Well, the Lynda.com iMovie tutorials have definitely given me some great new information about the program, but I must admit that there are limitations that frustrate me. For as easy as iMovie is to use, there are certain things that really frustrate me.


One of the big things that frustrated me on my project was the lack of text control. I wanted to make some end titles for my movie, and was hoping to use the "scrolling" title option. The only problem, though, is that it scrolls way to fast for viewable text. Yes, if it was just names, then it would probably be fine. But to add scrolling text that is legible, I couldn't get the speed of the scroll to slow down enough, so I had to just use centered credits. But to use centered credits, I had to make 4 different "titles" at the end to get all of my text into the movie.

Another thing that looked great in the tutorial, but was frustrating for me to use was the precision editor when dealing with audio. I will have to go back and review the audio editing section of the tutorials again, but I was hoping to edit the audio in my music bed, and couldn't easily do it. If the audio is part of a video clip, then it seems easy enough. But as an underlying music bed, and trying to piece stock content audio together, I had a heck of a time making it work.



So below is my final creation in iMovie. I apologize for the length of the file, since this is actually a project that I've been wanting to complete for almost a month now, and it means very much to me. The project is a collection of pictures and video that I took at an event held at my son's daycare this past March. The event is called a "Trike-A-Thon", and it is held to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. After weeks of learning about bicycle safety, through videos and lessons created by the team at St. Judes, the children raise money by collecting donations to ride laps through a closed course. The course includes stop signs, yield signs, etc, so that the children can learn the proper rules of the road.


The reason that this means so much to me is because my son, Joshua, is a cancer survivor. At 10 months old, Josh was diagnosed with a Wilms' tumor, and had one of his kidneys removed. Joshua is now 4 1/2 years old, and despite the ongoing CT scans, blood work, and doctors visits, he has shown no sign of cancer since his operation. St. Jude has been a leader in the study and treatment of wilms' tumors patients, and the survival rate of patients with Wilms has increased from 50% to 90% since they first started their research in 1962.