Last January after creating a movie using Windows Vista I documented it in a blog entry. This weekend before going to my wife's parents for an early Thanksgiving get together, I again created a movie but this time using my Apple MacBook. I already had digital photos that my kids took during their Princess Cruise to Scandinavia on my Mac laptop. When they got home from teh cruise, I hooked up our Canon Powershot A590 to my son's iMac and transferred all 560+ photos. I then sat down at the computer with my wife and came up with 75 of the photos she thought represented the whole trip. I burnt a CD of these photos to send to her sister. Before sending her the CD, I put it in my MacBook and created an iPhoto library for all of the cruise photos. On Saturday morning at 10 am I decided it would be nice to create a movie of these photos so we could watch them on their TV instead of huddling around my laptop to watch them. Plus they would have the DVD and could watch it whenever they wanted or to show their friends. I have never created a movie on my laptop nor used iMovie or iDVD.
The first thing I did was drag all of the cruise photos from iPhoto into iMovie. I then noticed the project had a default name so I changed it to "Princess Scandinavian Cruise 2009". I then thought it would be nice to change the way to movie looked so I went in the "Project Properties" and found six themes available with the default being a theme of "None". I tried the "Photo Album" theme which mean the project had to be rebuilt. Then I tried the "Bulletin Board" theme and waited for the project to be rebuilt before trying it. Then I tried the "Comic Book" theme and liked how that looked. By selecting this theme it automatically created nice transitions between the photo frames which I really liked. Then I thought I need to create a nice title page. I then found that I could add a dynamic map to that page. When I added the map I saw it had a default origin of San Francisco. When I double clicked on it, I found I could add my own origin and destination. I add JKF in NYC as origin since that is where they took off from. I added Copenhagen, Denmark as the destination since that was where they landed. I had a screen shot of their route while on the ship that I got from the Princess Cruise web site which I then added as the second title page. Then I saw that iMovie had automatically created a page that started with the words "Directed by Rick Evans". Now that was really nice touch. When I played the movie I saw the title page still had the default project name before I changed it. I tried changing the theme and that did not regenerate the title page as I expected. Then I thought I would try to double click on the title page and sure enough it let me change the title directly. I looked up at the clock and only 15 minutes had passed, which was also nice. Then I thought I have enough time to get a little creative with the end of the movie. I moved the "Directed by" page to the end and added a new credits page. There were so many formats that I tried a couple different ones. Then I added a nice underwater reflection behind the credits. When I played the movie the credits went way to fast, so I extended the length of the underwater reflection and then extended the credits to match. I then played the whole movie and showed it to my daughter, who approved.
I then tried the "Export" option from the menu and found iMovie creates Internet style movies for YouTube and Internet style sites. When in the "Share" menu I saw a "DVD" menu item and clicked on it. Then I waited and saw that iMovie was automatically transferring the files to iDVD, which I was not sure that I had or not. When I looked up at the clock it was 30 minutes since I started working on the movie and when it appeared in iDVD. It had even picked a nice 3D rotating animation for the initial DVD menu with my project title showing up in the menu and random photos being displayed on the rotating cylinder. Now that was simple and easy. With almost no effort I was ready to create a DVD and all I had to do was find a physical DVD to write it to. That was so easy it was embarrassing as within 40 minutes I had a very nice DVD. When we showed up during the weekend even though it was only 5 minutes long every one was happy with it.
I must say that it was very easy to create a very good looking movie with little effort.
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