Green Screening on iMovie 10

We have begun to organise ourselves for our next big budget TCTV production... ( ok, no budget is more like it ... )
One of the things that we need to do is some green screen action, so we decided to have a little trial go today. We had a try last year when we made the opening titles for our Doctor Who presentation for the Manaiakalani Film Festival.
All we had to do last time was to drop one clip on top of the other and a nice handy dandy little menu would pop up with useful things you could do, like green screen. This was on iMovie 9 and since then, I have got a new mac book and am using iMovie 10, but I haven't tried to use green screen yet.
I taped some green sugar paper to my board, cut out a print out of the Millennium Falcon and put it on a piece of rolled up green paper and we had a go. I was flying the Falcon while Dj manned the iPhone doing the recording.
A nice shot of a suitable space background was dropped into iMovie and then we tried to drag the Falcon footage on top of it. A very small list of options came up, but no juicy ones like side by side, or screen in screen, or green screen. Frustrating.

After much muttering and grumbling, I found this really useful video on YouTube.
Thank you Mr Mitch Davis - link to his YouTube channel here.




It basically boils down to placing the background footage on the timeline, with the green screened footage above it.

Once you have done that, then a new option appears on the adjust bar at the top. It is the one on the left. You can then choose this option and a drop down appears where you can choose from the more interesting options for editing, like green screen.

Here is our trial today. It is not very long but I am very happy with the outcome. It is definitely something we can do, I have learned something today and we have had a chat about how ere are going to improve it for the real filming.

Apple, you know I normally love you ( except for the standard apple mouse, but that is a whole other conversation ), but this was not the smoothest upgrade transition of a task that was once so easy. It took some shuffling about to find out how to do this today. hhmm.....

Live Editing and Blogging with an iPad...

It was Year 8 open day at Tamaki College today, with all the Year 8 students in the surrounding intermediate schools coming for a college experience day.
As the person in charge of TCTV, the school blog site, I decided to try a first on the day, and shoot, edit, upload to YouTube and put onto the blog all from one of the school iPads throughout the day in a series of instalments. Previous to this, we have done all the editing etc on macs after the events, not during.
The boys doing the presenting were up for the challenge so we gave it a go.
The iPad already had what we needed installed, Safari and iMovie for iPad.

It all went smoothly. It was easy to shoot the video, with the sound coming through surprisingly well. Editing was ok on iMovie, although we could have done with some headphones or ear buds as there was always a lot of noise around while trying to do the editing. Transferring from iMovie straight up to the school YouTube account was generally smooth with one wrinkle when it decided to not play the game. At this point we ignored it, went and shot some more video and came back to it when it had stopped sulking.
The one fly in the ointment today was the inability to get the embed code for the uploaded videos from YouTube on the iPad. When we hit the share button, the embed option was there but it would not work.
So, we had to cheat a little on our original plan and take a chrome book around with us too so we could do that final stage of putting the video from YouTube onto the blog.

Visit TCTV here, if you want to see our efforts today.

The team.... John Campbell and Paul Henry apparently.... !! ( alias Samsom and Eli )

After School PD Sessions are all Go Again...

We had a good time after school today, during our regular after school Thursday "help" sessions.
This week, we covered the basics of using iMovie for creating movies.  We have already covered using YouTube, so now staff are equipping themselves with the ability to create their own content to load up to YouTube and embed on their sites, rather than relying on other peoples' video content.

We started the session by using the Flip video cameras to record a little bit of content around the room and the corridor. Luckily, there was a Media Studies after school session running in the same room, so the students were more than willing to be filmed by staff.

We then went over getting the video footage from the camera up to iMovie, starting a new project, what the areas on the iMovie work area are,  choosing clips, transitions, titles and music and sound effects. By the end of the hour, everyone had put some clips together and used a variety of the things we had covered. They then saved out their movies as mp4s ready for uploading. Not bad for just under an hour.
The students in the room, who were all knowledgable Media Studies students, were amused by staff being taught these basic skills. Cheeky things.