iMovie 8.0 Help
About Events and the Event Library
You can use iMovie to organize, access, and watch all the video you record. As you add video to your collection, you build a video library organized by dates and events.
Each time you import video you’ve recorded, give it a name. For example, you might call video from a birthday event “40th birthday,” or video from a trip “Hawaii Summer.” These names become entries, called “Events,” in the Event Library. After you’ve created an Event, you can import additional video into it.
iMovie also breaks up Events by date. For example, if you import the video that you recorded during several days on a trip, you might see entries like these in your Event Library:
Hawaii Day 1
Hawaii Day 2
Hawaii Day 3
After you’ve imported video, selecting an Event reveals the video clips, called “source video,” it contains. All the source video in all of your Events makes up your video library. You can select multiple Events (hold down the Command key as you click them) to browse through all the video they contain as a group.
As video is imported, iMovie keeps it organized in chronological order. If a video clip is out of order, you can adjust its date and time.
As your video library grows, you can keep your video organized in the way that makes most sense to you.
Here are some ways to organize your library:
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Merge Events in the library. If you decide to include more video under a single Event, you can select several entries and merge them into a single Event.
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Split Events into finer-grained categories. If you’ve imported video from unrelated Events under a single Event name, you can separate the video into two Events.
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Change the name of an Event at any time by selecting it and then double-clicking it and typing a new name.
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Adjust the date and time of a video clip in an event so that it appears in the correct chronological order.
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Delete an Event, permanently removing the associated video from the hard disk where it was stored.
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Choose an existing Event as a destination when importing new video.
You can also show and hide the Event Library to optimize your work space in the iMovie window.