How To Add Pop-Up Text In iMovie

If you want to go beyond the title text feature in iMovie, you can create your own styled text in Keynote or any image editing tool and use the resulting image as an overlay. Then you can use picture-in-picture keyframes in iMovie to animate the text popping in from one side or scale as it moves. You can use this technique with any transparent image for a variety of effects.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. I'm going to show you how to add any text you want to an iMovie project and have it pop into place with some animation.
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So the titles that are available on iMovie are quick and easy to use but they don't always get you the effect you want. Sometimes you want specific text in a specific location and you want to animate onto the screen. Sometimes this is called pop-up text where it just moves in from off of the frame and moves back out again. You can use any image editing app you want to create text and put it as an overlay in iMovie. I'm going to show you how to do it in Keynote but you can use PhotoShop, Acorn, Pixelmator, Infinity, anything you want to create the transparent text background. Then I'll show you how to bring it into iMovie and animate it.
So let's start off in Keynote. Now we want to choose a wide theme because that's going to be 16 x 9, the same ratio as most video. I'm going to start with just the standard black template here. I'm going to get rid of this sample text here and add my own text to it. I'm going to use a text box. It will be here in the middle. I'll type some text. Then I'm going to make it much larger. As a matter of fact I'm not going to be afraid to fill the space with it. Even if I don't want the text to actually be this big in the video I want it to take up as much of this screen as possible.
Now I can set it to be any kind of font that I want. So I'll make it something kind of fancy. I can change its color and I can even add outlines. Do all sorts of things you normally couldn't do with text. So after I've got it looking like I want I need to do a very important step here. I need to click on the background, just outside of any element, and under Format I need to change the background for the slide layout for the document itself to No Fill. This is an important step. If you don't do this you're just going to get a big black rectangle with some text in it. I just want the text by itself.
So now that I've made the background invisible one of the cool things I can do is if I have multiple pieces of text I want to include in the video I can do them all in one Keynote document. So I'm going to Control click here and duplicate this slide here and I'm going to put some other text here as an example. I can have fifty different pieces of text here. Now I'm going to go to File, Export To, and I'm going to export as images. Here I have to choose the format PNG. Jpeg format will not give me transparency. I want to make sure that the checkbox for Transparent Background is selected. Then I'll go Next and I'll Save this out to the desktop and call it Movie Text and export it.
It's going to export each one of these slides as a different image. If I Hide Keynote here I can see there is the folder and here I've got two PNG's. You can see that they're transparent because there's no black background there. The two pieces of text are there. Now let's go into iMovie. In iMovie I've got a project going already. Instead of using titles I'm going to simply bring these images in as overlays. So I'm going to move over the window here a bit and I'm going to drag and drop this PNG onto of the video. I'm not going to put it into the main timeline like this. I'm actually going to stick it on top of it so it's an overlay.
Now I can position it where I want and I can stretch the beginning and end. You can already see that this just appears over the background. It's transparent. So now I'm going to change a few things about this. First I want to click on the video overlay settings here. With that selected I'll change to Picture in Picture. Now I want to change the transition to zero seconds so it doesn't actually dissolve or zoom or anything over any period of time. It just appears. 
Then I want to click here in the Cropping settings. It might be set to Ken Burns by default but I want to change it to Fit so in other words turn off all the Cropping settings. Then I'm going to go back over here to the Overlay settings so I've got this piece of text. I want to position it where I want and stretch it by pulling the corners to be the size I want. So say this is where I want it to be when it fully appears. Now all I have to do is have it transition in so it slides in from the right.
Notice this little interface here. These two arrows with this little Plus button inside of a diamond. That's for adding Key Frames. This is what we're going to use to animate. It's a really powerful feature in iMovie that a lot of people don't know is there. It only works if you've got a Picture in Picture overlay. So I'm going to position the cursor somewhere near the beginning of the clip here. If you don't see this little interface here and you don't see these blue dots around the Picture in Picture double click on the clip here to actually make sure you activate it.
Now I'm going to find its starting position and I'm going to put it just off to the right side of the screen. You see I can still see the box even though I can't see the text. I'm going to hit the Plus button to add a Key Frame. Now I'm going to move the line so it's right about here and I'm going to add another Key Frame and change the position to be where I want it to be. So now when I scrub over this I can see it starts off to the right and then it moves into place and stops. I'm going to go towards the end here, double click to set the position there, and then I'm going to click in here, add a little Key Frame there. Don't do anything with the position there. I want it to move to another area and add another Key Frame there. So I'll click in there and add another Key Frame and move it back out. So now at the end here I've got it moving out. 
There are four Key Frames in this. The first one is just on the right side. The next one has it in position and so does the third one. The fourth one has it off the screen. I can use these arrows to go between all of these. So I can see there's the first one, the second one, third one, and fourth one. So four Key Frames. Play around with this and practice this so you can get this right because you can have it appear anywhere. You can have it come off from the left side of the screen onto the right side of the screen. Up and down. You can resize so you can actually have it be a smaller size in one of the Key Frames and then go to a larger size on another Key Frame.
Let's do another one. I'm going to select this and remove it. I'm going to move the second piece of text here. Then I'm going to change it so it's Cropped to Fit. Then change it so it's Picture in Picture. I'm going to take away any transition. Now I'm going to have it start in the upper left hand corner. I'm going to go and set the Key Frame there, Add a Key Frame, and I'm going to shrink it so it's really tiny and even off screen there. Then I'm going to move the line over and then I'm going to Add another Key Frame. This one is going to be the bottom right hand corner and it's going to be pretty large like that. Then I'm going to move again towards the end and create a new Key Frame. Notice that sometiimes I have to select the Picture in Picture for the Key Frame controls to appear. So I'm going to keep that as the same but I'm going to go to the end and add another Key Frame and then this one is going to shrink off to this side right over there.
Now my complete animation looks like this. So you can do so much with this. But first you really have to master using that Key Frame animation with overlays in iMovie. So practice with that. Then you can use it with text. You can use it with graphics. You can do all sorts of cool special effects that you probably didn't think were possible in iMovie before.

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Add Pop-Up Text In iMovie”

Douglas Brace

5 years ago

Interesting timing because Macworld released a similar article article on this today.

Gary Rosenzweig

Douglas: I recorded this last week, so...

Gary, I was not my intention to say that you copied off them or that they copied off you; only mentioning that you both released something similar on the same day.

Douglas: I know. No worries.

Granville Routledge

Great, started to use this idea, but can't access the key frame buttons. I am in iMovie 10.1.2 Even if I click Picture in Picture, must be dumb!

Granville: So you are using 10.1.2? Any reason you aren't on 10.1.12?

Sorry Gary, can’t read either! Yes, I am on 10.1.12. Just tried again, and the buttons have appeared! Weird, Thanks for your great tutorials.

Ron L

Thank You, Gary! I have been using iMovie for years but never learned about this. You have just removed hours of "title" frustration for me. Excellent. Go Dragons!

Comments Closed.

How To Add Pop-Up Text In iMovie

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Add Pop-Up Text In iMovie”

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