Creating a Cinematic Black Bar Opening Effect in iMovie

There is no transition in iMovie that lets you reveal video behind two horizontal black bars like you sometimes see in films. But you can easily build a black bar opening effect using a simple Keynote animation as an overlay.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create this cinematic black bar opening effect using iMovie with help from Keynote.
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So a popular request is how to get a black bar opening effect in iMovie. This is where the screen starts black and it opens creating a little sliver of the video behind it and then growing and growing until you see the entire thing. You could see this used in film sometimes. Unfortunately there is no transition in iMovie that lets you do this. Pro level software often includes a transition like this but in iMovie it's just not there. But it's easy to create as an overlay in Keynote. Once you have it you can reuse it as much as you like.
First we'll be working in Keynote to create the animation. So you're going to start with a presentation using the basic white. Make sure it's set to widescreen 16x9. Now we're going to get rid of the default text here. So select each one of those and delete it. Then we're going to create a rectangle shape. Click here. Choose the rectangle. Move it to the top left so it snaps in place. Then drag it so it goes all the way across. We want to make sure it fits exactly half the screen. So move it up and down. You want to make sure it's a height of 540. That's half of 1080. We're going to Copy and Paste. Make a second copy of it and we're going to place it there at the bottom. So we have two rectangles. One covering the top half and one covering the bottom half. 
We want to add animations to these. I'm going to select the one at the top and then I'm going to go to Animate in the right sidebar. Then to Action, Add An Effect, and Choose, Move. You can see it'll add a sample movement there where it's moving from the left a little over to the right. That's not what we want at all. So we want to grab the right end here and we want to have it so that it moves up above what's going on. We don't have to get everything exact. As a matter of fact I'll get things very wrong here. I'm going to change that to Position. The X position is going to move zero and the Y position is going to go negative 540. So it's going to move up exactly enough to get it off of the screen. We can test it hitting the Preview button. We want to set the acceleration to None so it's linear. So it moves like that. 
Now we want to do the same thing to the bottom rectangle. So select that. Add An Effect, Move. Then we move the right side here so it goes down and we'll perfect it over here changing X to zero and Y to move all the way down to the bottom of the 1080. So now we can Preview that and we can see that one goes off to the bottom. We want also set the acceleration to None there. So we can see it move perfectly like that.
Now we want to click on Build Order. It will show us both of these movements here. The first one which moves to the top. The second one which moves to the bottom. We want to select the first one and set it to start not on click but after the transition. So it starts immediately as soon as the slide appears. The second one we want to change that  to With Build One so it happens at the same time. See it groups them together. Now when we click Preview both of them happen at the same time and they both stretch apart.
Now let's make one final modification to these. I'm going to select the first one and make the Duration something longer than one second. You may want two or three seconds but I'm going to make it really long. I'm going to show you why later. I'm going to make it ten seconds. Then I'm going to select the bottom one and make that ten seconds as well. So now when I Preview the entire thing moves very slowly like that. Now I need to make sure this is transparent. So instead of the black rectangles moving apart and then showing white they basically show transparency so you can see the video behind them.
So I'm going to click outside of the rectangle. So click just above it right here and then select Format. Now I'm looking at the slide layout because I clicked on the background instead of an element. If I click on an element and you'll see I'm selecting that element. If I click on the background you can see I'm looking at slide layout. I want to change the Color Fill to NO FILL for the background. This is very important. You have to do this or it won't export as transparent. Now we can go to File, Export To, Movie. Here we can select the resolution as Custom. We want to set that to 1920 x 1080. We've got to do that manually, unfortunately. Select Apple Pro Res 4444 and make sure Export with Transparent Background is checked. So you have to have this checked and also have set the background to No Fill. None of the rest matters since we only have one slide so there isn't a next slide or next build. Then we can hit Next. We can export this out. Notice that I've also saved Keynote file so I can go back to it if I want to make some changes in a future time.
Now we have movie. If I select it and hit the spacebar to use QuickLook you can see it does the animation there and it kind of gives you this kind of glassy look here in the middle just to show that it's a transparency there. So in iMovie here I have a video here in the timeline already. I want to just drag and drop the overlay video and put it on top so it's an overlay. Once I have it in there I want to make sure it's flush left here so it starts at the beginning. I can preview it here. I can slide across and you can see how the video is revealed. So I can shrink this here. There's some extra at the end that Keynote adds right to the point where the overlay is fully transparent.
 I can change the speed of this. Ten seconds is probably too long here. So I can select it. Go to Speed here in the overlay controls. I can change the speed to Normal or make it faster. So I can make it 2X to make it five second long. 4X to make it two and a half seconds long. I can go to Custom and set a percentage to make it something a little different. I could even make it slower so I can make it longer than ten seconds if I want. So now with 2½ seconds you can see it seems to be a pretty good speed for this. I can also reverse it if I want. So I can actually have it go from completely revealed and close in on it. So you can use this as a transition at the end of a video.
So you can use the same overlay with different speeds and reversing it. You can also create another Keynote animation that does the same effect but going from the middle to the sides. Or you can get creative and use a shape and movement almost anyway you want in Keynote to create all sorts of different effects going from a black screen to revealing your video.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Cinematic Black Bar Opening Effect in iMovie”

Ian MacGregor

5 years ago

Very nice effect! I've been learning more about iMovie and MacMost has been great in teaching new things. Thank you,Gary!

Dave

I've tried this multiple times and keep getting a black background in the mov file. I have started over from scratch with the same result. Everything looks fine in the Keynote preview. Then I choose the No Fill background for the Slide Layout background then export the file as 1920 x 1080, Apple ProRes 4444 and checked the Export with transparent backgrounds. I see that after the No Fill background is chosen in Slide Layout the Keynote preview now shows a Black background.

Gary Rosenzweig

Dave: What exact version of macOS and what version of Keynote?

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Creating a Cinematic Black Bar Opening Effect in iMovie

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Cinematic Black Bar Opening Effect in iMovie”

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