How to Make a Video Slideshow in iMovie

Landing into the world of creativity, it can be a smart choice to experiment with creating a slideshow in iMovie. Stay tuned to understand the exquisite design know-hows!

Part 1 What's the Advantage of Slideshow in iMovie?

Slideshow presentations land among the most elusive means of sharing valuable information across a diverse range of personal and professional content creation domains. Be it a fun-filled family event or a high end business centered client presentation; slideshows are there to address it all! Talking about affordable software solutions to adhere the purpose, you can conveniently pick the iMovie slideshow creator program.

Entering deeper into the software specifications, the iMovie application package is essentially a video and graphic editor tool, exclusively for MacOS and iOS supported devices. Working with the program, you can create stunning slideshow presentations and storytelling movies to commemorate your most cherished personal and commercial events, moments and scenarios.

Now that you have got an elementary overview of the iMovie video editor software, let us move ahead with our discussion to talk about the latter’s credibility towards creating top rated slideshow presentations in the following section prior to proceeding with addressing the concern of how to make a slideshow on iMovie:

Benefits of Creating iMovie Slideshows

● User Cohesive Working Interface

The most pronounced credibility of iOS compatible software tools and program utilities is undoubtedly, their user friendly operation characteristic, and iMovie is no exception to the lineage. The editor workspace of the slideshow creator is intelligently designed to suit the technical aptitude of the expanded diversity of tech savvy and amateur graphic editors. The interface is equally appealing to the newbies in the design realm.

To proceed with creating a slideshow in iMovie, you can either begin with scratch, working on an entirely new idea; or move ahead with picking any preset slideshow template or background theme, followed by customizing the same in line with the specific creation requirements. The software’s effect library is a vast storehouse of high end editing features and tools with the most convenient access.

● Customization Elements

The iMovie program allows you to create cinematic movie edits in Hollywood style. From curiosity generating trailers to nail biting thrills, you can add it all to engage your audience within your presentation. Talking about the customization flexibility, you can try hands at including studio logos, cast names and credit rolls to add extra value to the edits, while simultaneously appreciating the participants of your project.

If that’s not enough, you can work to create your presentations in a variety of genres and themes by choosing from tons of premade templates under a variety of genre centered categories and sub-categories. Moving further, you can also add related effects from the program’s effect library to match the mood and setting of the slideshow.

● Effects And Improvisations

The software offers a decent range of slideshow enhancement features and special effects. You can pick from over 10 different filters, 8 vivid themes and several numbers of sound and audio effects, along with including recorded voiceovers of your own. You can also go ahead to import audio tracks and music files that are saved locally on your iOS device.

● Convenient Presentation Sharing

To make your presentations accessible to a wider audience, you can proceed to share the created slideshows directly from IMovie to any of your preferred media sharing platforms, or export the same to an online storage account, like, AirDrop, iCloud Drive, etc.

Part 2 How to Make a Video Slideshow in iMovie?

Having observed the credibility of designing slideshow presentations in the iMovie video editor program, you might easily have a motivation to explore your graphic creativity by working with the software to make an iMovie slideshow of your own. Adhering to the concern, let us see through the process of making a slideshow in iMovie through a detailed, step by step guide in the following section:

User’s Guide to Create Video Slideshow in iMovie

Step 1: Download and Install the Program

To create slideshow with iMovie, start with visiting the home website of the iMovie video editor program and proceed to download the software in your desired iOS system for free. Next in the line is the installation process, which you need to complete in order to successfully launch the application in your system.

Step 2: Open a New Project

In the app’s welcome screen, navigate to and click on the ‘File’ tab in the ‘Functions Toolbar’ at the top. From the dropdown menu that follows, select the ‘New Project’ option to start working on a new slideshow. You can alternatively, press the ‘+ N’ command keys from your device keyboard to launch a new project. Once your project file is created, assign it a suitable name and select a desired aspect ratio.

Step 3: Create the First Slide

The inaugural slide of your presentation is generally consists of the slideshow the title, which you can add by clicking on the ‘Title’ icon under the ‘Preview’ box, to see a variety of text customization choices appear within the editor workspace.

To work with adding titles to a slide, choose a preferred text style; followed by navigating to the ‘Events Pane’ and dropping the same within the first dotted frame box. You can edit the text in the blue box above the first frame. The amount of text you can add depends on the size of the box. To change the length of the box, click on the same to drag it to a desired place and finally include the text in the ‘Preview’ box.

Navigate to and hit the ‘Show Fonts’ button to customize the added text in terms of color, fonts, style and size. Tap the ‘Preview Slide’ button to see the applied changes and click on ‘Done’ to confirm the same. You can repeat the above process to add titles and informative banners to all the slides within the slideshow presentation that you are about to create.

Step 3: Include Still Images

Browse through the locally saved images within your device gallery and add the desired ones at a specific point in the editor timeline using the ‘Drag and Drop’ method. A green colored indicative light will mark the spot where the images are being dropped. You are free to drop all the images at the same time and sort them at a later stage. Do not close the image folder in your device until you have imported all the stills.

The images can be alternatively added to the timeline by selecting the required ones from the iOS device’s Photo Booth or iPhoto account. All you need to do is navigate to and hit the ‘Photo’ button to drop the selected images in the ‘Photos’ box at the bottom right corner of the software workspace.

Step 4: Adjust Image Pans and Transitions

Having included the desired images within the slideshow project, it is now time to improvise them with classic and enhanced looks. You can adhere to the task by making suitable changes under the ‘Video Adjustments’, ‘Crop Tool’ and ‘Clock’ options. Drag the cursor to a desired slide to see all the 3 options pop up at the top your slide screen.

● Video Adjustment Tool

Using the ‘Video Adjustment’ option, you are granted the liberty to adjust the brightness, contrast, white point, exposure, saturation and levels of the added images. If your images have an appreciable quality by default, you can skip this step.

● Crop Tool

Consider working with the ‘Crop Tool’ to zoom or pan the system camera across a selected slide. Click on the ‘Fit’ option to set the image within a chosen frame size; however you need to be cautious lest using the tool may render an incorrectly cropped image. Select the ‘Crop’ option to adjust the image aspect ratio according to your specific size constraints.

The ‘Ken Burns’ tool, you can rely on this one to spark the slideshow images with the coolest zoom and pan effects. The tool is represented by ‘Red and Green’ boxes above the ‘Video Preview’ box in the editor timeline. You can easily move and resize the boxes using the ‘Hand’ and the ‘Cross Hair’ tools respectively. When you are satisfied with your work, hit ‘Done’ to return and confirm the changes, or click on the next presentation slide to crop and pan the same.

● Clock Tool

The ‘Clock’ icon lets you adjust the screen time of each slide, assigning a preset minimum duration of 0.25 seconds to each slide. Setting a play duration somewhere between 2-2.5 seconds would be an optimal choice. Avoid choosing shorter slide duration unless it becomes an obvious requirement, lest the audience may find it hard to process the contents.

Prefer adjusting the screen time separately for each slide, in case you have a large project with more than 50 slides. It is instead, advisable to time the entire project under one time frame, while setting a longer screen time for the title slide.

Step 5: Add an Upbeat Background Audio

Adding background music to your presentation slides is pretty simple, with you having to just position the audio files within the desired slides using the ‘Drag and Drop’ method. The slides containing music pieces will have a ‘Light Green’ highlighting box under them. To correct a wrong placement, drag the audio file across the individual slides and drop at the correct space. You can further, modify the length of the audio clips by extending and trimming them.

To import audio files from your online iTunes account, navigate to and click within the ‘Music and Sound Effects’ box at the bottom right corner of the editor timeline. You can also clip the music file to start playing the background audio from a certain point within the track. To do this, take the cursor to the end of the track and drag the red indicator line to the point where you wish the audio to end at or begin playing from.

Step 6: Share Your Presentation

Run a mock slideshow in the ‘Preview’ box to ensure that every element of the presentation is at its specified place. When all looks good, navigate to the ‘Functions Toolbar’ at the top and hit the ‘Share’ tab to select a media sharing platform of your choice. You can even choose to export your slideshow directly from the editor timeline via QuickTime.

Part 3 In What Way Could You Edit Your Video Shortly?

Creating slideshow iMovie presentations is a creative task and everything comes on the line with the finesse of editing skills to evoke an intelligent play with features, tools and effects. While you can master the art with consistent effort and practice, there are some really cool tips and tricks to quickly edit and uplift iMovie presentations.

Let us have a look at a few of the most prominent ones in the following section before you move ahead to create slideshow in iMovie:

01Cool Ways to Quickly Edit Your iMovie Videos

● Crop to Zoon in the Video

When editing your videos in the iMovie software, you can zoom in a desired portion of the video frame. All you need to do is, select a clip, tap on the ‘Crop’ button at the top right corner over the ‘Preview’ box, choose the ‘Crop to Fill’ option and drag the effect to the specific clip area you wish to crop. Apply your changes by clicking inside the checkbox at the top right corner.

● Split a Clip

You can reduce the size of a sufficiently long video clip by choosing to break the same into several parts or trim it to ward off unwanted portions. To split your footage, take your cursor to the specific splitting point of the clip within the editor timeline, make a right click, and select the ‘Split Clip’ option from the dropdown menu that follows next.

● Detach an Audio File

Detaching audio from a clip allows you to experiment with different video play options. You can let the run the in the background as you proceed to split a clip for inserting a still image. To work with the effect, navigate to and right click on a desired clip within the editor timeline and tap on ‘Detach Audio’ in the upcoming list of options. The added music clip in ’Blue’ will detach to appear as an independent clip in ‘Green’ within the software timeline.

● Fade Audio In and Out

To ensure a smooth audio transition between successive clips, try hands at fading the audio in and out by pointing the cursor at a detached green or an attached blue audio clip, followed by dragging the small round circles at the beginning or end of the footage. To introduce a gradual fade in or out effect, drag the round button to the center of the video clip.

● Include Transitions

Transitions allow a seamless presentation flow by ensuring a smooth movement between different slides appearing in continuity. Add a suitable transition element to the video footage of your slideshow by navigating to and hitting the ‘Transition’ tab in the ‘Functions Toolbar’. The default transition screen time is 1 second, but you can customize the same by double clicking on the effect post the latter’s addition within the editor timeline.

02Editing Video Slideshows in Filmora

The iMovie slideshow maker program is an excellent choice to work on, as far as the creation of classic and stunning examples of professional, personal and commercial presentations is concerned. However, if you ever land across the need to pick alternative software for making high end slideshows, you can safely choose to go with the Wondershare Filmora Video Editor slideshow creator and editor application package without having to think twice.

Talking about the specific concern of editing flexibility, tools and features; working with the program you are entitled to access a trunk of graphic customization utilities to spark up your presentations that are bound to receive jaw dropping viewer appreciation. The vast, inbuilt effect library of the program houses more than 800 different and top rated, latest editing effects to uplift and improvise your presentations. Here’s a mention of some of the most distinguished ones:

● The ‘Picture-in-Picture’ effect allows you to layer several video clips in a single track.

● You can change the background and add special effects to the presentation slides with the ‘Green Screen’ feature.

● The ‘Split Screen’ feature of the editor program allows you to introduce a new and unique style of storytelling though a multi-screen access.

● Filmora offers over 70 different ‘AI Potrait’ effects that visibly have the highest accuracy of background removal.

● Using the ‘Auto Reframe’ tool to automatically resize your videos without any pro level editing skills.

● You can work towards creating high resolution screen recordings of business meetings, live events, gameplay sessions, product demo presentations, etc., with the software’s ‘Screen Recorder’ tool.

● Use the ‘Silence Detection’ feature to instantly fade out the slideshow music and make your narration more pronounced.

● You can use the ‘Color Match’ tool to introduce suitable color corrections simultaneously within several slides, thus saving much of your valuable time.

● The program allows you to eliminate the camera shake distortions from your clips with its ‘Video Stabilization’ feature.

● Ending Thoughts →