iMovie Fun

All these months of Murphy Mac, and this is the first iMovie post. It must be something good.

Murphy is going to show you how to make elements in your movie vanish from the screen. Here are the basics: Put your camera somewhere it won’t move, like a tripod. Film your subject in motion. Let the camera keep rolling and get a shot of your background without the subject.

In iMovie you’ll do a simple Cross Dissolve from the clip with your subject to a clip or still of just your background. The subject will gradually fade out and disappear from the movie.

This works great with something like kids running across a field or skiing or jumping rope - or just about anything.
Click below to learn how in the screencast. You can download the Quicktime output too.

iPhoto Review Tool : Automator

iPhoto has a lot of stuff packed inside. Book makers, slideshows, greeting cards, special effects - it’s easy to get distracted when you’re trying to clean house and delete some photos. That’s where Automator comes in.

Just add three actions to a workflow - you’ll find them all under iPhoto in Automator:

1. Ask for Photos
2. Review Photos
3. New iPhoto Album

You’ll probably want the last one to prompt you for a name, so check the option to “Show Action When Run”.

Save the workflow as an application. When you run it you’ll see the same mini-browser we saw in a post last week. But you’ll also get a handy panel asking you to approve or reject each image. Make your choices, and an album will fill with your rejects. You could reverse the process and have Automator do something with the Approved images, like adding them to a Finder folder.

Confused? See it all in a screencast.

Once you’ve isolated your rejects in an album you can remove the files from your disk. Here’s more information on deleting from iPhoto.

iTunes Windows

First off, thanks to everyone who Dugg this old post. Murphy made it to the front page of Digg on Sunday. Exciting stuff! Now, on to today’s business….

Mondays are for beginners. So yes, chances are you already know about multiple windows in iTunes. But if you don’t, this can help you out. For that one person who doesn’t know about mutliple windows in iTunes, we have a screencast.

Murphy doesn’t like scrolling up and down the tree when he’s going back and forth from the Library to a playlist to his podcasts. So he opens the playlist in a separate window. Then he can hop around in the main window, dragging items to the playlist.

You can also open your Podcasts in a separate window with a double-click. You might find this helpful when you’re snooping around the Music Store subscribing to a bunch of podcasts.

Odds and Ends

RSS: Don’t forget to add Murphy Mac to your favorite feed reader. There are links on the main page for adding the feed to Google and My Yahoo. You can use this address for other RSS applications.

Remember, your friends can add your iWeb Blogs to My Yahoo and other RSS friendly sites too. Murphy has a screencast that shows how you can make it easy for them.

Links: From here on out Murphy Mac links won’t be opening in a new window. This is more in line with most web sites and has been requested by a number of readers. Screencasts will continue to open in a new window.

Update: We posted a screencast a while back about Autofill, podcasts, and the iPod Shuffle. MacOSXHints has posted a script that helps with the issue.

Zip

Windows users know zip files. But when they get to the Mac they might see some things they haven’t seen before. Like .dmg files, .sit files, stuff-it, drive images - it can be a little overwhelming.

It would be great if .dmg files were Windows-friendly. But Murphy isn’t holding his breath. Luckily we can all get along with zip.

OSXDaily put together some information about making zip archives with Finder. Murphy’s going to show you how to create a zip archive in the Terminal. Type “man zip” at a Terminal prompt to learn more about zip and its file format compatibility.

Zip is a powerful tool with functions far beyond those in the screencast. Murphy uses it to backup files on his hosting provider, which provides ssh access with his account. Zip makes it easy to periodically backup the entire web site and copy it to another physical location.

The screencast uses the mv command, which can overwrite existing files without warning. Make sure you know what you’re doing! Watch this if you’re not comfortable with Terminal. Check out Murphy’s other Terminal screencasts too.

Note: Murphy Mac is a Bluehost affilitate.