How to cut multiple home movie reels into clips, then reassemble them by theme?

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Level 1

12 points

How to cut multiple home movie reels into clips, then reassemble them by theme?

I have several dozen 4-minute home movies that I've digitized. The films were created over a number of years. Each reel includes multiple segments, of different events, in no particular order. I'd like to cut each reel into clips (segments) by theme, then reassemble them into reels based on theme

Themes might be something like: (A) hometown parades, (B) trips to Grandpa's farm, (C) visits with cousins. So reel 7 might include scenes of Themes A, C, F; reel 12 might include scenes of Themes B, C, J, etc.

I'd reassemble them into a reel with all the clips of Theme A, and another of all the clips of Theme B, etc.

I've got a basic familiarity with iMovie, and I've done something similar on a very small project. But I don't know how to organize this much larger project, with many different reels and clips and themes and resulting reels. (Roughly 30 reels, to be cut into roughly short 150 clips, resulting in roughly 12 theme-based videos.)

How can I organize all this? I don't want to just stuff all 200 clips all in one collection (window). There has to be a better way to organize it into projects, media, clips, themes, etc. Maybe part of the solution is to tag each clip to identify its theme and the number of the reel it's from, if iMovie has any way to do this.

I'll be grateful for any advice.

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Jul 16, 2023 12:27 PM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Jul 16, 2023 5:04 PM in response to omccreary

There's no way to avoid the grunt work involved with organizing a lot of varied material.

You can create an Event and import all of your clips to the Event. From there you can drag the various clips into separately created projects or into a master project. In the projects you can use the trim function to eliminate unwanted material from a specific clip, leaving the desired material intact. Or you can use the Modify/Split clip function to cut the larger clips into segments according to theme, that you can then Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste, into different projects according to theme. The full original of clips dragged out of events into a project will remain as a full original in the Event, and will not be changed by the splits and edits that you make to the clips in the project. So you can drag a clip out of the Event into a project and trim out everything except the footage that pertains, for example, to "Home Town Parades". Then you can drag the same clip from the Event into another project and trim out all footage except "Visits to Cousins". Ahead of time, set up different projects, each titled with a theme. Then work your way through all of the clips and populate the projects accordingly.

-- Rich

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