How To Add Credits With iMovie

You can use iMovie titles to add static frame or scrolling credits to the end of your video projects. There are some tricks to being able to edit the text effectively and to add backgrounds and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to add end credits to your iMovie Projects.
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So let's say you've completed a great project in iMovie and now you want to add a professional looking end credits at the end of your video. Well you can easily add two main types of end credits in iMovie. So here I've got just a couple of videos I put together and let's say I want to put the end credits after them. I'm going to use Titles for this. You may think of Titles as text that appears over a video or maybe before a video. But you can use them for end credits as well. There are two main types of Titles that will work well for end credits. One of them is called Scrolling Credits right here. The other one is just the one called Centered. Let's start with Centered and we'll get to Scrolling Credits later. 
I'm going to drag and drop one of these after my video. So what happens here is I've got this four second clip that is just text. You could see I've got in the Preview area not only can I see what's there but I can Edit it. If you can't edit it right now, like this, all you need to do is double-click here in the clip and now you're in Editing mode. Now you can change this text easily and different styles for the text as well. First thing I want to change is I don't want to have larger text on the top and smaller on the bottom. So let's go and delete this smaller line here until I've just got the one line. Let's say let's add something before this. So I'm going to put something like that and then hit Return and then I'll put a name here and that is starting to look better. But I want this to be smaller. So I'm going to select this right here and I'm going to choose a smaller font like that. So now I've got a smaller font and larger font like that. It looks pretty good. Let's change the font as well. I don't like that one. Let's use something more standard like a version of Helvetica. Like this. You could also decide whether or not it is Bold or not or whether it is outlined or not. You can even change the color to something else. So now I've got this and if I were to position the play here and Play you can see it does a nice fade-in and then it plays for about 4 seconds and fades out. Four seconds is probably too long. Let me select this and I'm going to shrink it down onto 2 seconds. That's probably a little bit better especially if I want to get through a bunch of names in the credits. 
Now if I were to drag Centered again over here it's again four seconds. It's got this same font here and I have to change everything like I have to do it each time. BUT I don't. I can instead of dragging from here I can simply Copy and Paste. I'm going to select this here and I'm going to Copy. I'm going to go to the end here and Paste. Now you can see I've got a copy of the first thing and I can just keep pasting. So I'll paste a bunch of them and just have a whole bunch extra here. So now I can go through. Go to the second one, say, and then change that. Carefully just edit the first line, keeping that font size. Go to the second one. Change these two lines here as well and I can keep going. So now my end credits look like this. Of course I can underlay some music on this. Another thing I could do is add a background to this. Let's say I don't want it to just be a black background. I can go to Backgrounds here and then let's go to a background that actually animates. I'm going to take Blobs. I'm going to stick it here at the end. Yeah, this is going to be after these. I'm going to extend this a bit here and select it and let's go into the color settings here. Let me change this to something else just by tinting it and changing a bunch of things about it. Get it to something like that. So let's say I have this nice background that I want the credits to be over. Now I'm going to select all of these, just Shift Click to select them all, and I'm going to drag them up and make them overlays over this. Then in addition to that I'm going to add a transition and do a cross-dissolve here at the beginning. So now I goes from the end of the video, cross-dissolves into this background and then the credits will show over it. Since this is an animated background you'll actually see animation behind. You could use one of these other backgrounds that is also animated like this one here or this one or actually just any video you've got. If you have extra video you want to use you could just have that as the background here or maybe shoot something specifically to use as the background for your credits and put it there and then have the Titles as overlays rather than as the main timeline like this. 
Now let's look at using Scrolling Credits instead. I'm going to direct Scrolling Credits here to the end. Unlike using Centered here you can just have one element. Now the idea is the same. You go in here and you can Edit this text. But editing it here is really tricky. It doesn't work very well. So what I recommend doing is doing Command A to select All. Command C to Copy. Then switch to TextEdit. In TextEdit create a new document like that. Let's expand it to the full size. Make sure it is Rich Text. So you see all the stuff up here? If it is Plain Text under Format you'll see Make Rich Text here and you can switch to that. Then paste in the credits. Go to View and Zoom Out so it is easier to see everything because it is a pretty wide document. Now you're going to change things. You can use the Title here. I'm going to get rid of that but then add a bunch of blank spaces so the scrolling kind of comes up from the bottom. Then I'm going to setup things here. Maybe something like that. Let's change the font too. I'm going to select All, go from Gill Sans and let's change it to a version of Helvetica like that and I can decide whether it's bold or whatever. I'm going to Copy and then go back to iMovie. 
Now in here I'm going to double click to select the text area and then Paste this in. So now I can Play this and I can see it here come up from the bottom like that and do everything I want. I highly recommend you don't Edit in here but instead Save this document. Save it as End Credits you know somewhere where you can get to it later so if you ever need to change the credits you can go and change them here and Copy and Paste back in. You know, change the font size for that and maybe center it and maybe add a couple of blank lines here and you can put, like, a copyright message or whatever you want down there. Go in here and Paste it in and you could see now it has got that at the bottom. You can add all sorts of things. Now it is still going to be tricky. You're still going to run into issues where sometimes you Copy and Paste and the formatting isn't right. It's very frustrating. But if you work with it long enough you'll get the hang of it. 
Also note that the speed of the scroll depends on the length of the clip. It's this speed right now because I've given it 9.5 seconds to cover this amount of text. If I wanted it to be slower I simply drag the end there, give it 19 seconds and now it is going to be much slower. If I wanted it to be faster just give it less. You can also do the same thing here, taking this and putting it with a background behind it like this. Drag it up and now you've got this background here and the text is going to scroll up. You'll probably going to want to change the color there to make it a dark color. You get the idea!
Now some other things you may want to think about. One is combine these. A lot of times in end credits you'll see the first few names, like Directed By, Written By, Starring and all of that come up individually. Then it goes into a scroll. Nothing wrong with doing that. Also instead of using the text you can make your own graphics in any image editing app you want and bring those in as photos. So if you want your credits to appear over, say, six different images showing different names and pictures and symbols and all of that you can create six different images, bring those in like you would do a photo slideshow in iMovie and put that at the end. 
Speaking of slideshows you may just actually want to create this as a slideshow in Keynote. Instead of using iMovie at all use Keynote where you can do all sorts of things with text and transitions and backgrounds and have that all setup as a slideshow that doesn't require clicks. It goes from slide to slide after a certain amount of time and then export that as a video and attach that to the end of your iMovie project. So when you want to edit the credits you're editing it in Keynote which is far easier to do and you could be a lot more creative. Then when you want to make changes make them in Keynote and reimport a new export from Keynote into iMovie. So there are tons of different options and ways to be creative on your Mac even without adding any third party software. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Add Credits With iMovie”

Mick

2 years ago

Thanks Gary. Really informative. This adds a nice additional element to my home videos for the family. Regards Mick

Bill McKinnery

Thanks, Gary. I enjoyed this little tutorial because I have worked with adding "credits" to my movies for some time and I don't know why I never thought of doing the trick of pasting a text file into the moving "credit" title. That title slide is a bear to edit in its base mode. Thanks again.

Comments Closed.

How To Add Credits With iMovie

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Add Credits With iMovie”

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