SAN FRANCISCO – Baseball season is here in the United States, and in addition to the professionals, little league teams and community leagues are also swinging for the fences. If you capture the action using a video camera, iMovie ’11 includes a little-known feature that lets you build a database of team members (of any sport) for creating highlight videos.

Step 1: Create a team

The first step is to build a team in iMovie’s Sports Team Editor. Choose Window -> Sports Team Editor to open the editor. A sample team appears in the Teams list (the Leopards), but you’ll want to create your own.

Click the + button at the lower left corner of the Teams list to create a new team, and then rename it (you don’t want to be just a Leopards farm team, do you?). If you’re tracking a different sport, click the Sport pop-up menu to choose Baseball, Basketball, Football, Soccer, or Volleyball.

You can also add a logo by clicking the + button in the Team Logo field and locating an image file on your hard disk. Drag the zoom slider to change the size of the image in the preview window, and drag the image itself to adjust where it’s placed.

Step 2: Add player information

It’s time to fill out the roster. Select your team and, in the Players list, click its + button to add a new team member. Fill out the player’s name and other data. As with the team logo, you can add a photo of each player.

Other than the Player Name field, the other columns can be customized. For example, you may want to display a player’s batting average or other stats that can be updated over time. To change the column labels, click the expansion triangle next to Sports at the bottom of the window and edit the labels as you see fit.

If you already track players’ information and statistics elsewhere, such as in a spreadsheet, you can speed up the process of adding them. Save your data as a tab-delimited text file and click the Import Player List button in the Sports Team Editor to bring the data in.

Click Done when you’re finished entering team information.

Step 3: Create a Sports-themed project

In iMovie, create a new project and apply the Sports theme. Doing so unlocks the theme’s titles that take advantage of the Sports Team Editor information. Options include a scoreboard that pops down from the top of the screen, a title displaying the two opposing teams, and a Lower Third title where you can add any text you want, and include a team’s logo.

If you’ve already started a project, choose File -> Project Theme to change the theme. Start building your movie using the footage you shot by dragging clips from the Event browser to the Project browser.

Step 4: Add and edit sports titles(Image Caption: Superimpose a player’s information over the action using a theme title.)
Click the Titles Browser button in the toolbar to view the titles available to the theme. To add a title, drag it onto a clip in your project.

Depending on which title you use, pop-up windows appear in the Viewer that let you choose teams and players. In the Player Stats title, for example, choose a team and a player to view that person’s name, photo, and statistics. (If the pop-up windows do not appear, click the title in the Project browser to edit it.)

At any time, you can update stats in the Sports Team Editor. When you do, the current project displays a yellow warning triangle icon. Click the Update Project button in the editor to update the titles you added to show the most recent data.

Whether you’re a coach, a player, a mom, or a dad, the Sports Team Editor in iMovie ’11 makes it easy to track and display important information for the entire season and even build your own sports channel.

I’m new to Macs and can’t seem to copy videos taken on my iPhone over to iMovie. The Mac seems to want to open iPhoto and sees the videos as a picture. Is there anything I’m missing?

Just a basic understanding of how iPhone movies are treated by a Mac and new and older versions of iPhoto and iMovie. It’s like this:

Shoot a movie with your iPhone or 4G iPod touch and then attach the device to your Mac via the sync cable. By default, iPhoto and iTunes open. Check iPhoto’s Library pane and you’ll see your iPhone listed as a camera. Again, by default, its contents will appear in iPhoto’s main window. Movies you’ve captured with your iPhone will appear with a small camcorder icon in their bottom left corner. Select those movies and click the Import Selected button and the movies will be imported to your iPhoto library.

When you launch iMovie it will likely ask if you’d like to update thumbnails for videos in your iPhoto library. Let it do that by clicking the Now button. When iMovie’s done you should see the clips you’ve recently imported into iPhoto.

This describes how it was done prior to iLife ’11. If you have the latest version of iMovie you have a more direct route. iPhoto will still launch and you can still import your iPhone and 4G iPod touch movies into it, but you can also import movies directly into iMovie ’11.

Launch iMovie ’11, attach your iPhone or 4G iPod touch to your Mac, and click the Camcorder icon that appears just above the Event Library. In a short while iMovie will recognize the iPhone or iPod touch and produce an Import From window that includes all the videos on the attached device. At this point, import the clips just as you would from any compatible camera or camcorder. Select the clips you want and click the Import Selected or Import All button.

In the sheet that subsequently appears, choose the event you want to place the clips in (or create a new event). If you like, enable the After Import Analyze For option and choose Stabilization and People, Stabilization, or People from the pop-up menu. Click Import to begin importing the clips.

Fortunately, there are several ways to do just that.

What size image can you get?
It takes far fewer pixels to create a video image than it does to create a printed image. This is partly because a video screen is somewhat forgiving. TV screens are big and self-illuminated, each pixel can be any color you want, and you tend to view them from far away.

Print images, on the other hand, have much more detail. You view them from closer distances, and creating a colored dot involves a complex process of combining lots of smaller dots of just a few colors. Consequently, when you shoot video with any video-capable device, you’re not capturing as many pixels per frame as when you shoot with a still camera. This would even apply to a 23-megapixel DSLR camera in video mode.

For example, when I shoot a still frame on my Canon S90, I get an image that’s 3648-by-2736 pixels. At 240 pixels per inch (ppi), which is what most photo inkjet printers need, I can print that image at 15.2-by-11.4 inches. However, when I shoot standard definition video with the same camera and extract a single frame, I get an image that’s 640-by-480 pixels. At 240 ppi, that file only produces an image of 2.6-by-2 inches.

If your camera shoots standard definition video, you’ll find that the low pixel count makes extracting stills a somewhat dubious proposition. Fortunately, many cameras these days shoot HD videos, which have higher resolutions.

The Panasonic GF1 shoots 720p HD video, from which you can pull a still image that’s 1280-by-720 pixels—good enough to get an okay (180 ppi) 4-by-7-inch print. The Canon 5D Mark II’s 1080p HD video produces an image that’s 1920-by-1080 pixels, which creates a 8-by-4.5 inch print at 240 ppi. (Note that both of these examples are a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means the image will need to be cropped if it’s destined for a standard 4:3 or 3:2 frame.)
Before you extract a still from any video, consider how big of a print you want, and then assess whether your camera can deliver a usable image. If you don’t mind a little softness, or lack of detail, then extract away.

How to extract the frame
There are several ways to go about capturing a single frame from a video.

Get a Screen Grab If you’re working with SD video (which has a resolution of 640-by-480) you can do a screen grab. Open the movie in QuickTime Player, and make sure you’re viewing at actual size. To do this, choose View -> Actual Size, or press Command-1.

Press Command-Shift-4, and your cursor will turn into a crosshairs. Click and drag to pull a selection marquis around your video window. When you release the mouse button, an image file will be written to your desktop. If you have a big enough monitor, you can even do this with HD footage.

If your video won’t fit on your screen, then you’ll need to use some extra software, such as Snapz Pro X or Screenflow, to write out a still frame.

Export from iMovie To export a still using iMovie, first import the clip into iMovie, then create a new project. In the Project pane, scrub through the movie by moving your mouse over the clip. When you find the frame you want, right-click or Control-click and choose Add Freeze Frame from the drop-down menu. A new clip will be added to the end of the segment. Right-click of Control-click on this frame and choose Reveal in Finder from the menu. A Finder window will open that shows the newly created JPEG still image file. Hold down the Option key to drag a copy of this file to wherever you like.
Use Aperture If you have Aperture 3, you can create a still by importing a movie into an Aperture project, playing it or scrubbing through until you find the frame you like, then opening the little gear menu on the right side of the playback controls. Choose New JPEG From Frame, and a new still frame will be added to your project. Click on this frame and choose File -> Export Version to save it as an image file.
On the iPhone If you take videos on your iPhone, MovieToImage is a $1 app that makes grabbing stills from these files snap. No trip to the Mac is needed. Use the app’s simple scrubbing interface to locate the precise frame you want. When you find the perfect shot, tap the Save button in the bottom right corner of the screen. The still will be saved to your Camera Roll.

Give it your best shot
When choosing a still image, you want to follow the same compositional ideas that you use when taking still photographs. Be sure you have a subject and a background, a shot that fills the frame, and nice light. While no substitute for a good still camera, you should still be able to get a nice still frame if your gizmo of choice shoots quality video.