I HEART iMOVIE, SORT OF

It is indeed true that Necessity is the Mother of Invention.  No, I didn't invent anything that can change the world drastically.  It's just that all these times as a Mac owner I rarely play with iMovie, which is part of the iLife suite of multimedia applications bundled with every Macintosh computer.  When my son was young, I may have dabbled a bit, baby videos and all.  Maybe my Mac back then was too old and slow, or maybe I didn't have the time like I do now during the pandemic quarantine, but I didn't make anything out of iMovie.

I run a very active alumni group for my high school and one day came across a YouTube video that turned out to be popular with the group.  Then some time later I discovered that the video was blocked by YouTube, because of some copyright issue with the music used.  It's still there, maybe viewable in some Communist country that doesn't care about copyright laws, just not available where I live.  I was able to contact the person who posted the video and after much waiting finally got a hold of the video file, some 700 MB in size and in the WMV format.

The entire video is 35 minutes in length and would need to have certain sections having no sound because of copyright.  From my past dealing with uploading videos to Facebook, it's best not to have a big file.  Facebook needs to do some processing and after the long wait to upload the big file, say anything 300 MB or bigger, there would be another delay before the video is viewable.  I was sure iMovie could do that for me - chop up the video into more digestible sections and zero out the sound level anywhere that there's music that may offend some copyright owner's feelings.

If it's something I have no idea how to proceed I would read up, perhaps spending an hour or so going through the online help.  But iMovie looks simple enough so I dove right in.  Making the first few clips was a pain!  Sure I got them made, but I was doing it the hard way.  Eventually I found the correct way, as far as I know, and I was quickly Splitting clips, Joining them, etc.  In the end, I was able to even re-combine all the various clips into one file to re-upload to YouTube, without the offending music.  If you are from Newtown High School of Elmhurst, Queens, New York, Class of 1994, check out the video:


NEWTON HIGH SCHOOL OF ELMHURST, QUEENS NY CLASS OF 1994 SENIOR VIDEO