How do I edit clips in iMovie (or Premiere Elements 10)?

Question

I am new to Mac. Used to have no problem at all editing and converting movies on my PC. Have both iMovie and Adobe Premiere Elements 10 on my new Mac. Even as a borderline PC geek, I can't seem to figure how to clip and edit and merge videos on my Mac. Guessing I will have questions about saving to a new DVD as well when I get that far. Trying to condense dozens of DVDs with old family home movies down to a single DVD by selecting 'best of clips.' Grateful for any assistance.

Answer 1

Hi Jeni,
I am not familiar with Windows Movie Maker, so I lack any frame of reference (no pun inteneded) to judge what you may be doing wrong. Both iMovie and Premiere Elements (PE) are designed so that the normal work flow is trim the clip the way you want, then put the clip in the timeline of your movie. In either you can work other ways, but the layout and tools in these programs are pretty much geared for that type of workflow. I use both by the way, although I am fairly new to Adobe Premiere Elements 10 and have not used iMovie all that much. In PE for example, you can double click the clip you want to use and that opens the clip viewer. You slide the pointers at the beginning and end of the clip viewer time line to set what are called "in and out points" and drag the clip into your time line or onto the scene line depending on which PE editing mode you are using. When you eventually export the movie using the Share panel, the program exports the entire timeline, which should be the series of trimmed clips, unless you check the box to tell it to only export the marked part of the timeline (I forget the title on the check box and don't have the program running in front of me). But in either case, each clip in your movie or portion of a movie should be trimmed according to the in and out points you previously set.
iMovie works on a similar concept, except you drag your mouse pointer over a clip in an event to adjust the yellow rectangle to mark the part of the clip you want to use, then drag that clip into you project. In either program there are ways of trimming and cropping clips in the timeline/sceneline/project and automatically adjusting the rest to compensate, but in any case, I'm not sure why you would be losing the edits.
Steve