GreerMUG Meeting Highlights - August 2006

Pre-Game Show
This month we treated the group to the opening from the WWDC conference featuring "PC" from the new Mac commercials. Thanks, Matt, for pulling that together for us!

Opening Moments
Mike welcomed everybody to the meeting and then took a moment to discuss his fear of large animated creatures. Don't inhale, Mike, and everything will be okay.

Member Dock
Looking for volunteers for The Mug Inspector, our newsletter. The next issue is due out mid-September. Contact Matt if you'd like to help.

Summer Photo Contest
Remember the Photo contest? Believe it or not, so do we! It seems our Summer Photo Contest took a bit of a Summer Vacation itself. But have no fear, it is alive and well. In fact we're extending the deadline to the end of August.

So how do you enter your photos? There are three easy wasy! 1) email your entries to: gmugcontest@mac.com; 2) drop them in Tim's Public Folder "tgodby" or 3) Bring a printed version to First Church of the Nazarene 1201 Haywood Road.

As a reminder: 1) you may have up to three entries; 2) the photo MUST HAVE BEEN TAKEN between May and August of 2006; and 3) the Categories are: Family & Friends; Nature and 3) Still Life

Your entries will be judged by qualified local professionals (in other words "Not by us!" and the winners in each category will be awarded prizes at next month's meeting!


Core Presentation
iMovie Inspiration!
iMovie is not considered a professional grade piece of software, and so it's amazing what you can do even though some steps to execute certain tasks are clunky.

First, let's look at doing a slide show. We've all seen the standard slide show iPhoto produces, but now can you add extra camera movements.

First, let's ask What does iPhoto do? It'll add music AND motion. We all are naturally drawn to motion. This motion is the Ken Burns effect. With iMovie we can take it a step further.

Matt opens up a current project in iMovie. Matt tip: group your photos so that you have visual continuity. Matt shows us a preview of nature pictures with lots of movement. Photos are grouped so we have "meaningful motion".

For example, two photos might be the same subject btu perhaps with a change in angle.
OR, very subtle camera moves, very small zoom amounts.

Music can add quite a bit of impact. The media browser lets you see all the music you have in iTunes.

Matt digresses: Let's got to freeplay.com where we can find royalty free music (you can use as long as you don't make money on it. You can search Freeplay and find great background music for your slideshows and movies. We say, Freeplay, cool! adds neat stuff to iTunes.

But we digress.

Back to iMovie. Matt points out that in the very same photo we change camera direction from panning right to zooming in. HOW DID HE DO THAT???? IS HE A MUTANT??

EXAMPLE: Matt creates a transition from a zoom in to a zoom out. This is his first camera move. But wait, theres more. iMovie turned the transition into a movie clip. Start a new transition and pick the same photo, and viola! iMovie remembers where you stopped on the last one. So you can pick up where you left off. This helps achieve seemlessness. We all want seamlessness, don't we? Now choose Reverse. Now change the second transition (keeping your new start point, which was the old end point) and you now have two camera moves edited together!!! WOW! There's no end to this madness!! (Which we love.)

Real world project: Matt and his nephew went to Six Flags Georgia.

Matt digresses: Matt and his nephew went to the media browser and clicked on microphone, recorded all their comments about the trip, which then became an audio track for this project.

But Matt digresses. Here's Matt's project with his nephew at Six Flags.
(Note Matt's frustration with little girls who can't frame a picture.)

Another project!! Check this out. Matt's Comic Life Intro from one of our meetings last spring! Whee!!!

You can bring just about anything into iPhoto. Example: save a drawing in Appleworks as a jpeg to your desktop and boom, you can import it into iPhoto. You can do that with just about anything. Really. So now you've got iPhoto loaded with all the assets you need for a really cool iMovie slide show. (Like titles, Keynote slides, etc.)

The last thing Matt wants to show involves video clips.
In iMovie we have two modes: Clip mode and Timeline.

So, in clip mode we find the beginning point we want to use in our video clip. We do this by dragging pointers at the bottom of the clip and that changes our starting and ending points. Clip mode - you gotta love it. You can re-arange clips real easy, too.

When you first bring a clip into your new movie, your video and audio are together. But Matt wants to cut away to the road and then come back to the kids, and still have the audio in Sync!! Can we do that? Matt splits the video in two, first. Then, extract the audio to a separate track under the advanced menu. (Aha!) Now he drops the road clip in there. Seems like an interruption at this point. But then Matt drags the extracted audio to the beginning of the road clip. Ohhhhh! We're catching on. But now kids are out of sync. Nothing worse than out-of-sync kids, eh? So we're gonna have to trim off the second kid's clip so the video matches up to the audio. Wow. Might require a little trimminnig and undoing, but Matt showed us how quick you can do that!!!

Matt shared with us a website where you can purchase extra transitions and effects for iMovie. The URL is www.geethree.com.

Questions and Answers
The Q: I'm converting old VHS material to digital files on my Mac, any thoughts from anybody?
The A: Video cams often have a pass-thru feature that will allow you to convert your vhs analog to digital so you can imovie and idvd old projects.

The Q is the A: "Cool Mac Apps" is a book reviewed by one of our members. Very cool book, cool mac apps.

Member help alert: one of our new members named Tim wanted to talk with the member that was transferring VHS to her Mac and learn how she's doing that. Contact Mike if you can help Tim.

Give-away
Mike Senn won our O'Reilly iDVD and iMovie 6 book. That will come in handy now that Matt has us wanting to push the envelope of our iSkills!

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!
Has he no shame? Will these plug's ever stop? Check out Tim's blog at TimothyGodby.com. A cool Mac blog - it's coolness begs for your interaction. Blogging lets you give new meaning to post-it notes!

Wrap-up
We introduced the iPlace gang and everyone had a good chance to hang out and visit. When it got close to nine o'clock, the Library Lady looked for us to run us off, but we weren't there.