A more detailed guide can be found at Apple support.

1. Bringing your movie from your camera into your computer: a. Connect the firewire cable to your camera and to your computer. This is the fastest and most desireable way to connect these two devices. Also make sure your camera has power, either by using a well charged battery or connect it to an outlet.
b. Make sure your camera is turned on and in VCR mode. You slide the button down for the VCR position.
c. Overview of Screen A. iMovie Monitor: Watch your clips play in this window. You can play clips in the monitor once you have some to drag from your shelf.   B... Srubber Bar. Drag the playhead along the scrubber with the inverted triange to move through a clip.   C. Mode Switch: Click to switch between a camera mode and an edit mode. D.. Playback Controls. Use these controls to rewind play, stop or play full your clip full screen on your monitor.   E. Volumns Slider for your computer's speaker.	F.. Additional Tools and Views G.. Trash Drag unwanted clips to the trash to delete..Video and audio clips may be retrieved until you Empty the Trash. H.. Disk Space indicator: This is the amount of free space left as your work. You should always have at least 2G of iMovie left for proper performance.
c. Open the camera and click the eject button. Insert the cassette you wish to transfer to the computer and where you see the finger in the picture, press to the left, pushing the cassette into the camera. Caution: do not push down on the mechnism. A gentle push and a little patience will keep your camera in good working order.
d. Open iMovie and under the File Menu, select New Project. To bring in video from your camera, move the iMovie mode button to the left and your screen should say camera connected. You can now hit the play button on the screen and see your movie. Make sure your movie is totally rewound and you can use the double arrows on the left to rewind at a fast speed. To import any movie clips, click the Import button. Your clips will appear on the "shelf" to the right. This is temporary storage for clips you plan to use in the movie.  Unused clips can be dragged to the trash. Anytime you paused during your filming or importing, you created a new clip.	When connected to the camera, move the blue lever to the left so it is on DV camera.
2. Editing your clips   a. When you are working on a movie in iMovie, it's called a "project" because it's in an editing format and not its final viewing format like Quicktime. Your next step is to drag down one or moreof the clips on the Shelf to the clip viewer NOTE: There are two views in your clip viewer:                           The frame is the view to use most of the time. Use it to edit your clips, adding text, working with effects and transitions. However when working with audio, go to the clock view. Click on the play button on the playback controls. You can also drag the playhead (scrubber bar) to move to any point in the clip. If you wish to include any part of this clip in your movie, you need to drag it to the clip viewer. The order that you place the clips on the clip viewer, is the order they will appear in the movie. You can drag and drop clips to any order
b. . To Delete Unwanted Video: If you wish to remove some footage from your clip, click and drag your mouse just below the scrubber bar under the iMovie monitor. Crop marks will appear.  To move the crop marker in small increments, click the crop marker and use your arrow keys to movie the clip forward or backwards. Choose clear from the Edit menu and the part you selected is deleted. A new clip will appear that contains the part of clip that you wish to keep.
c. Splitting and replacing video To split a video clip first select the clip on the clip viewer. On the scrubber bar, drag the playhead to the place where you wish to split the video (use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move in very small increments).          Choose Split Video Clip at Playhead from the Edit menu (Edit/Split Video Clip at Playhead). The split off segment of Clip 19 would be named Clip 19/1               To Insert a different clip or picture between any two clips, drag and drop the click intbetween the two clips on the player..
3. Create A Still-Image Clip   You can create a single image from your clip, save it and insert it into another document or your movie.   On the scrubber bar, drag the playhead to the image you wish to capture. Choose Create Still Clip from the Edit menu (Edit/Create Still Clip). Click once on the name of the new Still 01 clip on the shelf, and type in an identifiable name like victory.jpeg. This picture may then be inserted into your movie.   The default duration of this still image is 5:00 second. You can change this length if you wish You can now insert you image into your clip viewer. Just place it between the clips, in front or at the end     If you wish to take a still clip from the movie to export for use in other documents, move your scrubber bar to the desireable frame, then go to the File menu and select Save Frame As (File/Save Frame As. If you are thinking of using your still for the web, save as a jpeg.
4. Adding Transitions Transitions can smooth the change from one scene to the next or be used to indicate the passage of time between clips. To add a transition click on the transition button. Select a transition and preview it to see what the effect looks like. Adjust the Speed slider.  The longer you make it the more footage you will need to make that actual transition.  Drag the transition's blue icon to the clip viewer and place it between the clips you wish to effect. You must have enough footage for the program to work with so if it won'let you make the transition, consider a shorter transition time or using different clips. It will now take a while to render the footage. A thin red line on your clip indicates the progress in rendering you images. If you wish to remove a transition, select the blue transition bar and then press your delete key.
5. Add Titles You can add text to your movie clips with this feature. You may want to add a title, ending credits or comments along the way to clairfy a conversation. Select the clip on the clip viewer to which you wish to add the text Click on the Titles button and the Titles dialogue box will appear. You can place a title over a section of a clip or create it as a separate clip with a black background. If you want the title to appear over a clip, click the clip in the clip viewer. Click the Titles button Select the text effect. Some text effects have a directional feature in which case you will have an option to select from the Direction button. Write your text in the scrolling text bar. Add additional rows with the + bar and erase any extra text that may remain from a previous action. Select the speed of your text effect with the sliding bar under the preview window.  Drag the title from the list to the clip viewer. If you want the title to appear over a clip, place it before that clip. A title icon appears under it. When the progress bar disappears, the rendering is done and you can continue to edit. If you wish to place your text on a blank screen, select Over Black and when you drag the text to the the clip viewer, place it down before or after the clip of your choice.  To Undo a title that is already in place, highlight the clip and go to the EDIT menu where you will find undo add title (Edit/undo add title)
6. Adding Effects to your video     iMovie offers video effects that can enhance your movie. One effect is to create a Black & White tone on one or more of your clips. Other effects include:Adjust Colors, Sepia Tone, Brightness/Contrast, Sharpen, Soft Focus and Rain. If you are using System OSX, you can download additional effects and transitions at http://www.apple.com/imovie To use an effect Select the clip (or multiple clips with the Shift key) that you wish to add an effect to. Click the Effects button Select Effect (i.e. Black & White) in the Effects panel Click the Preview button to see a preview of the effect in the iMovie monitor. Click Apply if you wish to use that effect. It will take a while for your clips to be rendered. You can also have your effect fade in and out of your clip by adjusting the effect in and effect out buttons in the Effects window.
7. Working with Audio To work with audio, Make sure your clip viewer is in the clock view   Click on the Audio tab under your shelf. Some sounds and effects are included with the program. To use one, just drag it to the clip you wish to add it to and drop it in a sound track.. a. Record a voice clip If your computer has a built in microphone and almost all Macs do, or an external microphone connected, you can record your voice directly into your movie. To record a voice narration in your movie: Position the playhead where you want the narration to begin. Click the Audio button Click the Record Voice button in the Audio panel. Speak into the microphone. Use the volume meter (above the Record Voice button) to determine how loud you should speak. (50 - 75%) To end the recording, click the Stop button.  b. Recording music from a CD You can add music to your movie by recording it directly from a CD into the movie. Click the Audio button Insert the audio CD into your computer's CD-ROM drive. Select a Track in the Audio panel. Then you can do one of two things. `1) Drag the audio CD track from the Audio panel to the audio track 1 or 2 in the timeline viewer or 2) Click the Record Music button on the Audio panel to start recording music into your movie. To end recording, click the Stop button. c. To Import an Aiff or MP3 (quicktime) audio file into your movie: Position the playhead in the timeline viewer to the place where you want to insert the audio file. Choose Import File from the File menu. Select your music  file and click import. The music clip appears on audio track2 in the timeline viewer. d. To Add Sound Effects Click the Audio button Drag a sound effect from the list in the Audio panel to the desired position on audio track 1 or 2 in the timeline viewer. e. Removing an audio track If your video clip already contains audio when you imported it, you can remove the audio from the clip. To extract Audio, drag your video clip to the clip viewer and look at it in the timeline viewer mode. (timeline view mode displays the movieís video track and two audio tracks). Select the video clip that contains the audio that you wish to extract. Hit your delete key.  If you wish to copy a clip and paste it without the sound track, select the clip you wish to copy, go to the Advanced menu and click extract audio. (Advanced/Extract Audio)	These purple bars represent audio. You have two audio tracks to work with in iMovie. You can slide the strip to add audio to the clips above it. You can shorten the duration of the music by pushing on the arrows at either end of the purple bar.
8. Some Additional Features  a) You can reverse a clips direction.Select the clip on the clip viewer and then go to the top menu View Advanced/reverse direction b) You may wish to slow down or speed up a clip. Select the clip and then go to the clock view of your clip viewer. on the bottom you will see faster (hare) and slower (tortoise) and you can adjust the speeds accordingly. If you have a clip and you want only a part of it slowed down, remember you can split the clip at playhead and now put that affect on the remaining segment.
9. Saving Your iMovie  You can save your iMovie in different formats and on different media. Saving your movie is different than saving your project. If you wish to further edit your movie you must keep the raw data that is in the project as well as your exported movie Once exported, your movie is not edible in iMovie.  There are different ways you can Share your video. You can email it, use it on a ilife homepage *subsciption, back onto a video camera, to iDVD, as a quicktime movie and to Bluetooth. You can save your movie back to digital tape and its length can be as long as your digital tape.  You can export it to Quicktime if you want to put it on the web, save it to a CD. Use this method for putting it on your website. SHARE/QUICKTIME/WEB You can save it to easily send in an email. You can save it to iDVD. You need to have a DVD burner for this. a. Saving a movie as a Quicktime File Choose Share Movie from the File Menu Choose QuickTime from the Share menu Choose a movie format from the Formats menu (the smaller the file size, the less space it takes up and it is ususally better quality). Click Share and Save. b. Recording a Movie back to a DV Tape Connect your DV Camcorder to your computer as previously described in this document (Step 1) Put the tape you will be recording into the DV Camcorder Choose Share Movie from the File Menu Choose Camera from the Share to menu Click Share