Adjusting playback speed in Apple iMovie

on Friday, November 14, 2008

Changing playback speed in iMovie couldn’t be easier. If you look closely, you’ll see a slider adjustment for playback speed right on the timeline. To adjust speed, follow these steps:
  1. Switch to the timeline (if you aren’t there already) by clicking the timeline view button (refer to Figure).
  2. Click the clip that you want to adjust to select it. The clip should turn blue when it is selected.
  3. Adjust the speed slider at the bottom of the timeline, as shown in Figure. To speed up the clip, move the slider toward the hare. Move the slider toward the tortoise to (surprise) slow down the clip.
  4. Play the clip to preview your changes.
  5. Giggle at the way the audio sounds after your changes.
If you don’t want to include the audio portion of the clip after you’ve made speed changes, choose Advanced.Extract Audio to extract the audio, and then delete the audio clip after it is extracted. Another neat thing you can do to video clips in iMovie is reverse the playback direction. To do so, select the clip and choose Advanced.Reverse Clip Direction. The clip will now play backward in your movie. To reverse it back to normal, just choose Advanced.Reverse Clip Direction again.