Resizing and Positioning Green Screen Video In iMovie

You can't resize or position an overlay and also apply a green screen effect in iMovie at the same time. However, you can do the scaling positioning over a green background, export, and then use the resulting video in another project to get the same result.


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Here's a question somebody asked me recently and I found others online had the same question as well. It's how do you combine the mobility of picture-in-picture in iMovie with Green Screen. Because I could take a clip like this clip here and I can stick it above a clip, just a simple background and I could set it to picture-in-picture, so I use here I go to picture-in-picture, and then I could position it somewhere. Or I could set it to Green Screen and then it cuts out the background. But I can't do both. So what if I wanted to position myself, say I was in the lower right hand corner, but I also had Green Screen on. There's no direct way to do it in iMovie but you can do it in two steps.

So, the first step is positioning. I would change this to picture-in-picture. So it's going to have the green background. I position it where I want and make it the size I want. So this could be something where you could, you know, be in a certain portion of the picture or be doing something in particular. But I'm going to just do it really simply here and put myself in the bottom right hand corner. It doesn't have to be there. It could be anywhere but the bottom right hand corner for this example.

Now that I've got that what I want to do is I want to replace this background here with a green background. So I'm going to go to Backgrounds and I'm going to scroll up and there is a green background that's included by default. I'm going to replace the background there with green and make sure it stretches to fill the entire clip here. So I end up with me on a green background like that. Notice that they're different shades of green. We should be able to adjust that.

So, for now, let's just export this. I'm going to go to File, Share, and I'm going to Export as a File and I'm going to go to the highest resolution as I can. In this case 720 for the video I'm using but, you know, typically you want to go 1080 and you might want to go Best Quality too. This is only going to be a temporary file. So I'm going to save this to the Desktop and call it Green and Export it. You'll see the progress up here. What I'll end up with is a video that basically is me talking at the bottom right hand corner in my own field of green with a larger field of green there.

So I'm going to now leave this project and I'm going to call it Green Corner and I'm going to create a new project here. I'm going to make this my main one. I'm going to add that background like I had before. So I'm going to use that map background and I'm going to extend that for quite a bit. Now I'm going to bring in that green background clip that I just made here. I'm going to put it on top. Let me move it all the way over to the left. Great.

So now that I've got that there and I'm positioned in the right spot, by now it's all green, I can change that to Green Screen. It'll get rid of it. You can see it doesn't do a great job because it's a different shade of green in here. But I can use this Eraser tool here and click there and you can see now it adds that level of green to it as well. Hit the Checkmark there and now you can see there I am. I've got Green Screen and me talking. I'm in the bottom right hand corner. There's a fadeout there that I can get rid of if I want to or if I need to. I've got what I want.

So I could have put myself anywhere in this. I could basically combine resizing and positioning and Green Screen with just doing everything in those two steps.

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