iMovie for music video (master track)

[myawn]

I'm trying to edit what is essentially a music video -- I have a master shot which I've synced up to the background music track, and that seems to be working well. But now I want to cut away to different shots throughout the video, without losing the synchronization (in other words, if I insert a 2-second shot somewhere, I want it to replace 2 seconds of the master shot -- I don't want to split the existing shot and insert 2 seconds in the middle of it as that would cause the video to be out of sync with the audio track from that point on).

Is there a way to do this with iMovie 08 (preferably)? If not, would I be able to do it with iMovie 06 or one of the pro products?

Thanks!
Mike

 

[chilipie]

I don't think either version of iMovie allows you to have more than one video track, so no - or at least not very easily. If you know how long you want the cutaway shot to be, you could cut that length of footage from the master shot and then drop in your cutaway, but this is very time consuming (I once had to edit a multi-camera live shoot with iMovie '06 - not fun ), and it can be hard to get the feel of the cut, as each adjustment takes so long.

Final Cut Express would be more than adequate for what you want to do, but sadly there's no trial for FCE or its big brother FCS, so you'd have to go out and buy it. At only $199/£129 it's not a big investment, particularly if you plan on doing more projects in a similar vein. It can be quite a big leap from iMovie, but there's an abundance of tutorials available online, and I managed to work out the basics for myself.

Best of luck

Regards,
Ollie