I am making a little Happy Birthday video for my nephew and am trying to figure out the easiest way to do it on a Mac. I am looking at using iMovie (which doesn’t have great instructions) and managed to make a test film with a moving video background, but I was wondering if others had ideas. I was going to use Quicktime App, but could not figure out how to add a movie background instead of just a picture. I am using the camera on my Apple Studio Display as well as the microphone from that.
Before I try to wrangle this out of iMovie, was open to ideas.
For iMovie you might check out Ripple Training on YouTube or their own site. Those guys are good, sounds like you want to composite two videos.
My initial thought was that you could just have the video playing on your Mac and use a screen capture app which also takes the camera stream and audio. I use ScreenFlow for work I want to edit and Clean Sot X for quick captures. Clean Shot X is an excellent tool to have anyway but ScreenFlow is expensive and overkill.
I am keying on the words “little”, “birthday”, and “moving background.” For the moving background bit, you need to work in layers. iMovie (from my past) is great at trimming, arranging, stitching, and transitioning between multiple movie clips. I don’t recall it being good for layers. Since this is “little” and “birthday”, perhaps Canva (www.canva.com) would do the trick. It is a web based interface so it is sort of on your Mac. It has lots of assets for birthday like stuff. It can do layers. It is designed to be way easier than something like Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve. I am not sure what you get on the free tier of Canva but it may be enough for a little video.