Create Custom Video Text Captions For iMovie With Keynote

While iMovie's title options are limited, you can create almost any sort of text caption with animation in Keynote and then easily apply it to your iMovie project.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to create some really amazing video text captions using just iMovie and Keynote on your Mac. 
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I've got a multi-clip iMovie project like this. I want to put some really cool text narration over it. I could use the titles that come with iMovie. But I want something a little bit more than that. You can do a lot more with text in Keynote than you can in iMovie. Then you can bring that text into iMovie. Sometimes it may seem like there are a lot of steps to go from Keynote to iMovie. But if you set it up right you can make it a rather easy and versatile process. 
So in Keynote here I want to choose a project that's either basic black or basic white. Now I want to have a white text over the video so I'm going to choose Basic White which would seem to be the opposite of what I want. After all white text on a white background isn't going to be visible. But you'll see why I'm doing this in a minute. Now in the document here I want to make sure I'm using Widescreen because that's what my video is. Then I'm going to get rid of the default text there. I'm going to add a text box and then add my first piece of text. Now I want to set the text font and style so I'm going to make it a lot bigger than this and set it up so it goes across a few lines here. So let's settle on something like maybe 70 point and I'm going to make it Bold. I'm going to Left Justify it and place it near the bottom like this. Like I said before I'm going to make it white so it's white text over the video. But then I can't see it at all here. In fact I won't be able to see it in the video either if there is some portions that are white. I know I've got that because here in the first clip I've got some white clouds and I've got some very light things in other clips as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Style and under Shadow I'm going to choose a Drop Shadow. I'm going to set it to a pretty large blur, 20 point here, 100% opacity and No Offsets so it's not actually casting a shadow at an angle. It's just a glow all around the text. We're going to set it to Black. Now you can see how I can see the white text perfectly fine even though it's a completely white background. 
Now the next thing I want to do is I want to have an animation where this appears on the screen gradually. So for this first one I'm going to go to Animate and then for Build-In I'm going to Add an Effect. I'm going to add the Keyboard effect for this. I can preview it like that and see how it types every letter. I want to turn off the blinking cursor because we won't be able to see that very well. I do want to stick with the text going forward. I want to set the Duration to something pretty long. I'm not worried about the exact amount of time that I'm going to be using this in the movie. Right now I just want to make sure it's long enough. You'll see how I'll be able to adjust the time in iMovie later on. So I'm going to have this over 8 seconds. Now we can preview it and see how it appears letter for letter, like that. Now before I go any further what I want to do is I want to set the Format for the slide to be No Fill. This is VERY important. You absolutely have to do this else none of this will work. 
Now I'm doing it here for the first slide. So now I can select that first slide. Go to Edit, Duplicate Selection or just Command D and then create a copy of it. The format background for this will also be No Fill. So I don't have to mess with it later on. Every slide needs to be set to No Fill. Now I've got some new text for this next slide. I'll Paste that in. I've got to adjust it a little bit as it's three lines instead of two. Let's choose a different animation. So I'm going to animate here and I'm going to change and choose Dissolve this time. So I'm going to set it to do, instead of text animation by object, by word. So now as I preview it you can see each word appears one at a time dissolving in overlapping with each other. It's a nice effect. I'm going to keep the Duration pretty long here. Let's go to the next slide. I'm going to Paste some text in here. Adjust that. Let's set this one now to Move In. We'll keep it By Word but we'll go right to left. Now if I preview it the words come in like that. I don't like that little bounce there for what we're doing so I'm going to take that away and just leave it like this. It's moving much too slowly. But don't worry about that like I said before. We're going to adjust that in iMovie. Let's duplicate this one and paste in the fourth piece of text. I'm going to change this to something a little more artistic. I'm going to do Pop and then preview it like this and the words come out like that. Let's do one more. I'll change the text here and let's use Sparkle now for this. You could see it appears like that. Let's do left to right and say by Paragraph. Then we're going to break this up and hit a Return here at the end so it's a new line, a new paragraph. So now when we preview it it's going to draw the first one and then the second line separately. 
Now before we Export it I'm going to do one more slide. I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to Delete text from this one completely. So this is just a blank slide. Now let's go to Export. I'll Export as a Movie, Self-Playing, All Slides. Go to the next slide after 5 seconds. So there's going to be a 5 second delay between slides. That's why I want that blank slide there. I want the last piece of text to basically just stick there for 5 seconds before it goes to the last slide. Now for Resolution let's go to Custom and we're going to set it to 4K resolution. Which is this 3840 x 2160. So it will work in iMovie if I'm doing 4K or if I'm doing 1080. Then I'm going to change the Compression Type to Apple ProRes 4444. When I do that I should have a checkmark here for Export with Transparent Backgrounds. If you don't see that it's because you didn't set the background of every single slide to No Fill. So go back and do that. Now I'll go to Next and I'll Export this. I'll just Save it out here to the Desktop.
So now here on the Desktop I can actually use QuickLook and take a look at it. It will even show it semi-transparent. So in iMovie I want to bring this in. I'm just going to Drag and Drop it here. Now, of course, this doesn't match the timing of this at all. As a matter of fact it's way longer than the clips that I have. That's no problem. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to just the very beginning when the text starts to appear, right there. I'm going to Click there and do Command B to split the clip right there and get rid of the excess there at the beginning. I'm going to drag it over right before I want it to start. So you can see how it starts showing the letters like that. I'm going to go all the way to the end to just when it's done. Right there. I'm going to Click again and do Command B to split it. So this is the first bit of text as it slowly appears. You could see it's too long. I want it to be shorter than this first clip here. So what I'm going to do, with it selected, I'm going to Click here on the Speed Controls and I'm going to go to Speed Custom and I'm going to speed it up. Let's try 150%. You can see how now it finishes right about here in the clip. Let's go a little bit faster. 160%. There we go. So now it will all appear in this amount of time and now I can move this main clip right behind it. Because remember I've got 5 seconds where basically the text just stays there afterwards. So I can go all the way to the end. When I get to right there at the end, just at the transition, I can Click and then Command B to cut. So now it's got a few seconds here where it draws on the screen and then it just stays there. Now we go to the next portion.
So let's get to the beginning of this one here. You could see it just starts dissolving onto the screen right about there. I'll do Command B and get rid of that. Bring this on and then go to where it's all done, right there, Command B again. Select it. Let's speed this up. Custom. Let's do 160 again and see if that's works pretty good. I want to go even a little faster. 170%. Then I'll bring this there. Use the extra bit and cut it right there. Then I'll go find the next part which starts right about here. Command B. Get rid of that. Move this over. Now we've got this text coming in. It finishes right about here. Text is done moving in. Command B. Let's speed that up. 160. Maybe 180%. There we go. Bring this in here. Just like that. Cut that out. Find out where the next part begins. Cut this part out. Move this one over. Find out where this one ends. Right there. Then speed this up. Try 180. Then bring this in like that. Cut it. Do it one more time for this. Starts right here. Bring that in. Now sometimes you run into an issue when you get to the end here. If I tried to split right her it wouldn't work because there's nothing underneath. If you run into that you could always temporarily add a black background underneath there so you can split it. So I'll extend that background there. Then cut it. Speed this up significantly. But actually I want to pay a little more attention here. This second part is really slow because it's a smaller amount of text. So I actually want to split it in-between them like that. Go to the beginning of this next one. Then I'll speed this one up some amount like say 160 and maybe make it 200. This part here I'll speed up way more than that. So I'll speed up say 400. So this one appear rather quickly there. I'll drag this over and I've got the little bit here at the end. I can cut it there. I can then get rid of this and I can get rid of this extra bit I had right here. 
Now it looks something like this. It appears and then it stays there and then jumps to the next one. Now we can Fade Out by selecting this last part here. You see these little dots here at the top. I can drag them over and when I do that it will fade in and fade out. I don't want to do that so I'll Command Z to Undo. Hold the Option key down and select the Blue Dot and just have it Fade Out. I'll do that for each one of these. So it fades out a little bit at the end. So now, for instance, we can check this one here. We'll just play that and you can see the text come in, it stays there, then it fades out.
So now I've been able to create these really cool titles here. Of course I'm just doing it in a particular style here. I just have the white text at the bottom. It could be at the top. It could appear in the middle. You could have one or two words pop-out in the center of the video. Keynote is like this big canvas here. You could put text anywhere you want and apply all sorts of different animations and things to the text. So really the sky's the limit on what you create here. Then when you bring it into iMovie you can speed it up, slow it down, cut it apart and get it working just like you want. You don't export a ton of different pieces in Keynote and bring them all in individually. You can just have one Keynote project that basically works along with this iMovie project. Now I can grab some thematic music. Put it underneath this. I get a pretty decent opening sequence for just ten minutes of work. (Playing music with video).

Comments: 6 Responses to “Create Custom Video Text Captions For iMovie With Keynote”

Chris Bell

3 years ago

Is any of this method available on the iPad with iOS? I’ve got a friend who’s a nascent video editor putting together school presentations for classrooms. She has iPad capabilities only. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

Chris: You can't do it with exported video because you can't export transparent video on the iPad. You can just stick with the built-in text titles for iMovie or see if another video editing app will fit your friend's needs better.

Travis Braithwaite

Does this technique in Keynote work for bringing it into Final Cut Pro?

Travis: Yes. But in FCP you have the option to do a lot more with text using the built-in titles.

David Timmons

Chris, if you want to do this solely on iPad, set your background color to a pure green color. Then when you export the Keynote slides and bring them into iMovie, you can add them as green/blue screen clips to remove the background.

Tom Rieke

Many thanks for this excellent advice! You solved several of my most puzzling problems.

Comments Closed.

Create Custom Video Text Captions For iMovie With Keynote

Comments: 6 Responses to “Create Custom Video Text Captions For iMovie With Keynote”

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