I decided to play around with the iMovie 11 and its new Trailers templates.  The family and I had gone out Ice Skating earlier in the evening and I thought it would be fun to put together a little video trailer from pictures and video we took while at the rink.  Much to my surprise it seems as though iMovie Trailers do not allow photos to be used as clips.  Well poo to that!

I don’t want iMovie telling me what I am and what I am not allowed to use in my trailer, especially when I didn’t really have enough video to cover all the clips.  After a quick search through the interwebs I found that it is a problem that lots of people have complained about.  I came up with a pretty simple workaround, though.

Step 1: Create a new iMovie project and drag all your photos that you want to use into it to make a slide show (make sure photos last at least 5 seconds) ** Step 2: Export the slide show as a movie ** Step 3: Import the movie back into iMovie

And there you go!  You now have all your pictures available for use.  For the slide show I suggest going through and making sure all the Ken Burns or whatever other effects you might want to use are there and looking good.  The Ken Burns looks nice since the still will be coupled with videos.

Here’s the trailer I made, enjoy!

[video mp4=”/assets/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/IceSkating.m4v” poster=”/assets/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/IceSkating.png” width=”480” height=”270”]