How To Use Video Overlays In iMovie For iOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using Overlays in iMovie for the iPhone and iPad. 

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So many times in the past I've showed you how to use Keynote on a Mac to create overlays that you can then use in iMovie. Things like text or symbols or graphics. Anything you want to put up over your video and have at least semi-transparent. You can do the same thing using only your iPhone. You're using the same two apps there. iMovie to do your video editing and Keynote to create the overlay. 

Let's start off here in iMovie. Let's create a new project. I'm going to make it a movie project. Then I'll go to my Photo library and it asks me to select a photo or video to start with. Actually I could select multiple ones. But let's just select one here and I'll hit the checkbox there. Let's create a simple movie here that just has one clip in it. Now you can see here the Timeline at the bottom and the Preview there at the top. Now the idea is that we want to add an overlay that goes on top of this video. 

So let's switch to Keynote and create a new Keynote presentation that we're going to use as an overlay. I'll choose the basic black layout there. So first let's get rid of the boxes that are there so we start off with a blank slide. Now let's create a new textbox. I'll hit the Plus button at a the top and make sure I've selected at the top the Text and Shapes and then go to Basic and Text is the first one there. I'll put some text there in the middle. Let's zoom in by pinching with two fingers outward, there, so now I can see this text. Tap it twice. Now I can enter in some text. I'll do My Overlay and I'll tap off of it.

Now I can tap it again to Select and I'll hit the Paintbrush there at the top so I can then set Text Properties. Let's make it something a little more interesting. I'll set the Font here to something else and let's make it Bold and let's make it much larger and anything else you want. Then I'll hit the X button there. Let me shrink down the slide so I can see the entire slide again. Let me position this in the middle. It will lock to these little guides here. Now I might not want to place this text in the exact middle of the video frame but that's okay. We'll have a chance to move it. For now let's go and export this out.

So I'm going to hit the Paintbrush tool at the top without this text selected. I'm going to go to Appearance and this will allow me to change things about the slide. It's important that you DON'T have anything selected when you do this otherwise it's going to give you properties of the element you have selected. With nothing selected it will give you the slide itself. So here under Background I can select background and I can choose No Fill. It's very important. This won't work without that. Now we want to go and Export this.

So I'm going to tap on the button at the top right and I'm going to select Export. I'm going to select Images and now I get to select several things. Slide Range, the type of file. I want to make sure I've chosen PNG as the file type. I also want to make very sure at the bottom I have transparent Backgrounds turned On. Without setting the background to No Fill and setting this Transparent Background switch to On we won't get a transparent overlay. It's very important that you do both of those. Now let's Export.

Now you're going to get a lot of options here for exporting. The one we want to use is Save to Files. This will save it as a file. Now you can save this anywhere you want in your iCloud Drive. I'm going to save it into the iMovie folder. But you can create a folder in your Documents folder called Overlays. Anywhere you want. Just remember where you save it. It's just like saving it on the computer. You need to remember where the file is saved so you can access it later. At the top you can see the name there. I'm going to select that so I can set the name to something else. I'll call it My overlay. I'll hit Done and now Save. 

Now let's go back to iMovie. Switch to that and let's add this overlay. I'm going to hit the Plus button and I'm going to select Files at the bottom. Now I need to go to the same place where I saved that file. So in this case it's in the iMovie folder and there is My overlay. I'm going to tap that to select it. It's going to say Add to Movie or More. I want to tap More because I want to add it a special way. I don't want to just add this as a regular photo or video to my iMovie project. I want to add it as picture-in-picture. This is the only option that will give you a semi-transparent overlay. 

So I'll add that and now you can see it adds it to the top there. You can see I can select it there. It's over the regular video. I can make it larger or smaller. I can drag it left or right. Notice you can see it there in the video. Now with it selected you can see I have three options. Magnifying Glass, a cross with four directions, and a box. I want to use the middle one. The cross there with four directions. This allows me to position and resize the overlay. Notice while I'm working with it it's opaque. It's not transparent anymore. But that's okay. I can move it around and put it where I want. I can also use two fingers to shrink or grow it. So I can make it nice and big. Maybe put it here in the upper left hand corner instead of the center. Then I just tap the same button again and now it sits there. I can do that as much as I want to actually move it around to get it in the exact spot. 

Now we can make all sorts of overlays like this. So if I go back to Keynote here I can actually edit this slide or maybe  let's just add a new blank slide and maybe use this Keynote presentation as kind of my scrapbook for overlays. So I'm going to add here something like, let's say, a shape. I can go and do a symbol like this. Put a trophy there. I can then go and zoom in here. I can select the trophy. I can make it larger. Might as well make it as large as possible since I can resize this very easily. Let me get it in the center of the slide here.

 I can change properties of it. So let me hit the paintbrush. Let's go and change the style. Change the fill. Maybe something like a gradient fill like that. The idea is the rest of the slide is going to be transparent. So we confirm that by hitting the paintbrush with nothing selected. Go to Appearance and check the background and set that to No Fill. You can see that's on a slide by slide basis. So by creating a new slide that had a black background I had to change it to No Fill. Let's go and Export this second slide. I'll tap the three dots there. Export, Images, instead of All Images I'll just select Slide 2, from 2 to 2 there. Then I'll make sure it's PNG. Make sure Transparent Backgrounds is checked. I can Export. Select Save to Files. Give this a name. Hit Done. Save.

Now I can switch to iMovie. Let's add this in as an overlay. I'll hit the Plus button there. Files. There's the Trophy that I created. Let's hit More. Picture-in Picture. Now it's sitting right there as an overlay. You can see that's an overlay there. I can reposition this where I want it to be. Like that. If you want to have more than one overlay happening at the same time it's simple. You just add both of those overlays to the same slide in Keynote. So I might have a trophy or a thumbs up and some text in the same slide. Then export that as a special overlay to be used at that portion of the video and have that as the single picture-in-picture on top of my existing video.

So have tons of other overlay ideas on videos I've done in the past with the Mac. You can create little pop-ups, little thumb ups, little emojis that appear in different parts of your video. Text that you have appear in a way that you can't do with titles in iMovie. You don't have to use Keynote if you don't want to. Any graphics app that will create a semi-transparent image will work. For instance I tested out the Pixelmator app and I was able to export a transparent image from there. Use that as an overlay in iMovie in exactly the same way.