Building Video Titles Using Mac Keynote

Instead of using the limited title options in iMovie, you can build almost anything you want in Keynote as a presentation. Use text, transitions, builds and animations to make your title sequence. Then export as a video to use in iMovie over a background.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at building video titles in Keynote. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So if you make video projects in iMovie or any other app you may use the built-in tools to create titles. But another way to do that is to use Keynote. You usually think of Keynote as a presentation tool. But what are opening titles and end credits other than a presentation. It's actually really easy to build them and customize them in Keynote and I think you can get them to look a little bit more like real TV show and movie opening titles and closing credits than you can actually using iMovie's tools.
Let's start off here in Keynote. I'm just going to choose the basic black presentation using the wide 16 by 9 ratio which is probably what you're using to build your movies. I'm just going to use that and then I'm immediately going to go to Document and then Slide Size and choose Custom Size and make sure I'm creating it at the same size I'm doing my video. So if I'm doing 4K I'm going to want to do 3840 by 2160. Now it is going to give me this introductory slide here. I'm going to just get rid of the text that is on there and add my own text. So for these examples I want to keep it really simple. But you could really put whatever you want here. So I'm going to create some text and I'm going to type it in. Let's go and select all the text in it. Go to Format and then text and let's make the text a lot bigger than this. Maybe set it to a Bold style like that or even choose another font if you like. I'm just going to keep it simple here. Create something like that. Then I'm going to Option Drag to create a second one and type something in there and then maybe make this even larger. Now I'm going to take these two, select them both, and center them. Just get it to look like what I want it to look like when you see these titles. 
Now typically when you have titles like this they kind of fade in and fade out one after the other. So we can do that using Transitions on the slide. But it's not ideal. Let me show you how that would work. First I'm going to create a new slide and choose a blank one to put it before this. Then I'm going to choose a new slide and put it after this. So I have two blank slides here. So it fades from black to the title and then back to black. So going from here to here I need to select the first slide. Go to Animate. Change the effect to Dissolve. Then I can change the time. Let's make it just one second here and have it start Automatically. We want to use automatically for everything here because this is just going to play automatically. It's not a presentation where you're going to click to everything. When you export to video it really doesn't matter. But we want to preview it as we're going to see it. So always have start transitions set to automatically. Then we're going to have this appear and then we want to have an effect to go from here out to the next slide. So we'll do Dissolve as well. Let's do something a little faster like .5 automatically. Now when we play this we get this. Great. But the only problem is that we have three slides here. If we want to do the next one we would Copy and Paste or Option Drag, create another one and it is going to be like every other slide will be blank, then a credit, then blank, and then a credit.
So instead let's go all the back to when we just had one slide. Instead I'm going to select both of these pieces of text. Under Animate, for build-in, I'm going to add the effect Dissolve directly to the text itself. So the slide doesn't get a transition. Now I can set the time here. Let's leave that at 1 second. Then I'm going to click the Build Order button here. This is a very important interface. We're going to be using this a lot. So here you see both transitions. Directed By is dissolved in and the name is dissolved in. I'm going to select the first one, change the start to after transition. Select the second one and change the start to With Build 1. So they both build together and you can tell they join to indicate that. When I preview you could see how they both build at the same time. Now let's select both of these and go to Build Out and add Dissolve for Build Out. I'm going to set the dissolve to .5 seconds here and now I'm going to go in here and make sure that the first one here doesn't start on click but after Build 2 with a delay though. Let's delay for one second. Then the fourth one, the name here, let's have that go with Build 3. So these two are together and these two are together and there's going to be this one second delay between steps 2 and 3. Let's preview it. Great. Now it is one slide and it does what we want. 
The next thing we want to do is click here and select the entire slide and set the transition to automatic. So the slide isn't waiting for a click. Now we can just select this and do Command D and duplicate a bunch of times. We can change the names in here and if I play it, it is just going to go from one slide to the next with the one second fade in, the half a second fade out for the text on each slide. So we can really quickly build an opening sequence like this. 
Now we don't just have to use the dissolve. We can do lots of other things. I'm going to select this and Duplicate it and here on this second slide but it gets tiring doing it for top text and the bottom text here. So what I'm going to do with both those selected go to Arrange and then Group. It will group those together. This will clear out the build order because those items no longer exist at the top level. We just have this one group. Now with this group selected I can select a Build-In.  Instead of Dissolve let's use Fade and Scale. It creates an effect like this. Pretty cool. It even has a shine on it if you leave this checked. Let's speed it up by going to 1 second and then let's change it here so it starts after the transition. Then we're going to go to build out, add an effect. I can do the same thing or I can dissolve out. Let's just do the same thing. Fade and Scale. But this time it's just going to be a quick half second and I'm going to set this to do after build 1 with a one second delay. So you can see I have simplified things. I just have a build in and a build out right here. That's it. Now when I preview this it looks like that.
Alternatively, we could change the build out to be something else. Like, for instance, we could use Scale and it will look like that. Or Scale Big. Let's do that and look what happens. Goes really big. So we can use that instead. So let me play that and that is a good alternative. 
Now here's another one to try. I'm going to duplicate this slide here. Unfortunately the build I want to use now doesn't work on groups. It only works on text. So I'm going to go in and ungroup this. Now with both of these selected I'm going to add the build-in effect called Trace. It's all the way here at the bottom under Special Effects. It look like that. Let's go and speed it up to one second and let's go and set the first one here from On Click to After Transition. This one from On Click to With Build One so that they build at the same time. I'm going to select both of these. Build-out I'm going to also add Trace and then I'm going to set them both to do it a little faster. Half a second. This first one here is after Build 2 but with a one second delay. The second one is With Build three. So now we get something that looks like this. Of course you can just duplicate this slide over and over again and just change the name. I'll create a Copy of this and I will change the build-in to instead Keyboard. Now it gets typed. But in this case I don't want to happen at the same time. So the first one happens and then the second one happens after build one. Then we'll go to these two. They're still set to Trace. I can use Keyboard if I want. Let's do the same thing here. This is after Build 2 but this one is after Build 3. So they happen sequentially instead of at the same time. Now we get this. You can just change the build-out to a fade out or something if you would rather. 
Some of these really need the text to be grouped. So I'm going to go again and group this and I'm going to add the effect Move In. Move In goes like this. If I didn't have these grouped because they are a different widths they would move in at slightly different rates. So let's change this to after transition with no delay. I don't like the bounce so I'll get rid of that and let's add a build out for this and we could do move out and the same thing. I want to get rid of the bounce. I'm going to keep the same time. Change this to after Build 1 with a one second delay. So now we get this. Note you can go top to bottom as well as left to right.
But what if you wanted to have scrolling credits instead. Well, you could do that pretty easily in Keynote as well. You can do it in a way where it is easier to Edit things than in iMovie itself. So I can use something like this for instance. Let's bring these a little bit closer together and I'm going to move it here to the top. I'm going to drag to create more of these. You can use View and then Zoom and then Zoom Out, it's Command Shift Comma. So you could see more of this. But the general idea is that you create a whole sequence here like this. Select them all and then you're going to do Group and it is one item. Now that you have these grouped you're not going to use a Build-in or a Build-out. Instead you're going to position it here just below the bottom. You're going to do an Action. The Action you're going to do is Move. When you do a Move action you have a starting position and an end position. You could drag here and see that red line. That red line goes from Start to the End and it can kind of lock there, not going to go left or right. Like that. So you can see how the move goes from here to here. It is following this red line. Let's change Ease In and Ease Out to nothing and preview it. You can see how it scrolls up like that. Change the Duration to slow it down. So to make this a lot slower we'll go to ten seconds and then we preview and you can see it scrolls up like that. 
Now even with these grouped you can still go in and Edit individual pieces of text inside the group. But if you like, you can just simply have one text box instead. Then I'm just going to create a bunch of different lines like this and then I'm going to select them all. Change the spacing here to be exactly and then have them be exactly some point. Like, for instance, a 100 point here. Then I'm going to Option Drag and duplicate this. I'm going to make sure left justified here and I can change this to Names. Then paste this a bunch of times. I can increase the text size if I want of this and it is not going to mess with the line spacing because I've set it to exactly 100 point. So I can have these two things side-by-side like that. Then I could group these together and make that my scrolling text. There are a lot of different ways you can do it. 
So now I've got it done and it's time to Export. But first you have to decide on your background. Right now we have a black background behind all of these. If that's exactly how you want the sequence to look, fine. You can Export. It will have a black background. If you'd rather have a transparent background so you could put other video behind it in iMovie then Select All of the slides here. Make sure every single slide is selected. Even if there are ones at the end you're not planning on using or anything. Then go to Format and change the Color Fill to No Fill. It's critically important that every single slide be set to No Fill. Only then, when you go to Export Movie will you see the option under Custom Resolution here to do Export With Transparent Backgrounds. You have to set the compression type to Apple ProRes 4444 and then make sure this is checked. Then you want to set the resolution to whatever it is you want to use. Let's do Full Resolution here. Now none of this really matters because everything should be automatic. So, go to Next and this will Export. We'll just call it Titles here. We'll save it to the Desktop and it is going to create this movie. Now that we've got it here we can open it up in QuickTime Player and we can see the result. It's going to show a black background here in QuickTime Player because it doesn't have anything else to show behind it.
But now if we go into iMovie and if we want to use this just as it we can drag it into the main timeline. Doing so will again use that black background here. But if we want it to actually appear transparent over something we would put a video there and then we would drag this on top of it. Since it is transparent now the black background goes away and you could see the titles appear like that. Note how the text sometimes blends in with the background. You've got to know what it is you're planning to put this on top of. In this case there's a little bit too much white in the background here. So probably in Keynote I may want to have selected this and for the text here either assigned an outline, like that. I can assign a 1 pixel or 2 pixel black outline or go to Style and assign a Shadow, a drop shadow and make that maybe a black drop shadow there. Just something to make that text standout. You want to do that, of course, before you create your first slide if you're going to duplication a whole bunch of them. So you just do it that one time and then follows along with every slide you create. 
So this is how it would look with the various different styles we tried. Of course you would probably just use one stuyle. There you go. Those are the basics. But as you saw there were tons of different Build-in and Build-outs that you could use and of course you can use different fonts. You could even put images or illustrations alongside the text. You just drag and drop whatever graphics you have in there to be included and make any titles you really want. It's kind of limitless as to what you can do. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: One Response to “Building Video Titles Using Mac Keynote”

Bill McKinnery
2 years ago
Hi Gary, I'm doing a video to memorialize an event, and trying to use the titles provided in iMovie has been a challenge because often I couldn't find exactly the kind of title I wanted. Your explanation of how to use Keynote to make many different kinds of title slides and other helpful slides has been very helpful. Thanks for providing some more insight into the capabilities of both Keynote and iMovie.
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Building Video Titles Using Mac Keynote

Comments: One Response to “Building Video Titles Using Mac Keynote”

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