How To Edit Green Screen in iMovie

Caucasian guy with green screen laptop and bank card on bed in bedroom.

I see most people searching for some authentic ways of properly editing a green screen video. Today, I’m going to teach you guys how easy it is to edit a green screen video. I’ll be using iMovie to showcase the techniques which you can use for editing your green screen videos in a very efficient manner. We’re going to look at iMovie and how we can use green screen in iMovie and edit with some Creative Commons media.

1. Setting up Your Project 

The first thing we’re going to do here is click on the little plus button in the corner. Then we’re going to choose movie because we don’t want to create a trailer at this point. Lets choose movie and then we’re just going to choose no theme, but there’s different themes you could choose if you wanted to. Let’s go to no theme and give it a name of your choice, and click OK.

2. Importing Media

Now we want to go the iMovie library. You can change today’s date with anything you want, like My Green Screen Movie. Then we’re going to click this button in the middle to import some media into our movie. On my desktop, I’ve got various different movies so I’m going to choose this which is a picture of Paris. I’ve got myself on the green screen being chased by a train, the Eiffel Tower, Space Trimmed space station footage and a train ride. I’m going to import all of these.

3. Lets Get to Work…

Now we can start building our project. To do green screen in iMovie, you need to put the scene in first before you put the green screen footage. So, let us put the Paris scene in by dragging that down into the timeline. We want to take this footage, let’s take it all and drag it on top of the Eiffel Tower here. Now, because this is not long enough, what we can do is we can drag it along. As you can see it’s a picture, we can drag it right along to the end here.

4. Taking Out Green Background

Now you can see we have a new option at the top here. This is video overlay settings. Let’s click on that and select Green and Blue Screen from the dropdown menu. Now you can see that green screen has been taken out. Now, we have a bit of a problem here as you can see the shadow of the green screen quite clearly.

5. Lets Get Rid of Shadow

There’s a bit of a shadow on this side here, so what we can do is click on this bit here where it says clean up. Let’s click on the little rubber here and then we can just click and drag it over. Yes, now you can see the annoying shadow has disappeared.

6. Lets Get Rid of Shadow

Let’s have a look at putting another piece in. I’ve got a train here so let’s take this train footage. This footage is about 11 seconds worth, drag that in and put it in our timeline. The other footage is about 8 seconds long. Again, drag this over and drop it in. The microphone needs to be cropped first. Click on crop and drag it a little bit so we don’t see the microphone. Press the Return button to save your video cropping. Now, again, let’s use the rubber to take out the shadow and there you can see the green screen also.

Adjust the position of the running person clip by moving it around. Now let’s move the green screen up to the front of this clip…
Now we can just split the clip at this point, in order to clean up the mess. You my want to delete what’s left here. And there we have it! That’s really the basics of using green screen. If you have any questions regarding this method of editing two video clips together, please leave a comment below. We’re always here to help.

3 Responses

  1. Aw, this was an extremely nice post. Taking the time and actual effort to generate a superb article… but what can I say… I put things off a lot and don’t seem to get nearly anything done.

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