Digital Commons at Penn State

iMovie 09 allows you to smooth out or stabilize a clip, in other words if your footage is really shaky it will help smooth that out. The following tutorial will help you find and smooth out your clip in iMovie 09.

Once you have some footage in your timeline you are ready to smooth it out. To do so simply hover your mouse over the footage and you will see a "Gear wheel" appear over that specific clip, click this "Gear Wheel" and choose the option "Clip Adjustments."

Once "Clip Adjustments" has been selected you will see an "inspector window" pop up on screen.

You will see a check box at the bottom of the inspector window that reads "Stabilization: Smooth Clip Motion" check that box and iMovie will automatically analyze the clip, this may take a few minutes depending on the clip.

Once done the inspector window will show you a maximum zoom slider, iMovie needs to zoom in on your clip in order to stabilize the motion, but that may cut important portions of your clip out of the shot, you can manipulate this slider to zoom back out. However, if you zoom back out with the slider iMovie will be less able to stabilize the motion of that clip. Simply press Done when you are ready and watch your clip to see it stabilized.