7/10/09
12:19 pm

MacMost Now 264: iMovie 09 Titles

Learn the ins-and-outs of titles in iMovie 09, which include title overlays, in-between clip titles, lower thirds, and more.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at how to use titles in iMovie 09. Using titles in iMovie 09 is one of the ways in which it excels compared to its more complicated professional counterparts. It's very easy to drag and drop some titles onto your video or in between clips and set some options and get some really cool looking titles in your movies. Let's go and take a look at how to use them. So here's an iMovie 09 project, and I've clicked on the T here to choose titles. Now, I can go ahead and drag and drop a number of different t-title styles here onto my project. And there's two main ways that you can add a title to your project. Let's go and take a look at the first one which is to add it as an overlay on top of the video. So you click and drag a title and you put it either at the beginning, the end, or over an entire clip. You drop it there, now you can see here on the right that the text actually appears over the actual video that's showing. Second way to do it, is to put it before after clip so I can put it right here and I will then get to choose a background since there's nothing for the title to be over, I can choose something like this curtain background and I get a period of about four seconds here and the title text is over that background. Now once you have titles, you can go ahead and double click on them in the preview window to the upper right and change the text. And notice how it put it all in that basic font. There I can undo that and you can see how I originally got a title and a subtitle so I can only select those parts. And just change those and have two different font sizes in the same title. You can also go ahead and click on the show fonts button here. This brings up this little window that uh has two modes. The first is to go ahead and use one of these basic modes where you can go ahead and change the font very easily, change the color very easily, it's a special interface just for iMovie. Or you can click on the system font panel button at the bottom left and now you have much more complete control over everything that uh has to do with this title and you can make your own fonts and everything like that. You can also go back to the iMovie font panel here. Now you can change the style of a title by dragging another one to the same clip area and it will replace it but it'll keep that same text there. So I can chose this one, I can chose this one here. Now, in cases where there are animations, like in this type of title, I can scroll back and forth in the project like this. I can also go ahead and select the title here and click on the play button which will just play this segment here. You can see the background moves here as well as the text. Now if you simply want to change the background or the timing of a title, you can click on the little control here at the bottom left of the clip and choose clip adjustments. And this gives you the ability to change the duration, so I can change this to say six seconds. I can also choose a new background for that particular title. And now, the changes will be reflected here, immediately. You also have titles that you can use as credits such as the scrolling credits type of title. When you add that, you actually get the choice of uh adding as much text as you want for a continuous scroll. And you also have some other ones such as the far far away type as well and you have lots of really cool ones. Another type of title is called a bottom third. So this isn't a title that appears in the middle of the screen but usually at the bottom of it. So you've got this lower third right here, you've got several other variations of it. You can add that there and you can see that the text appears, usually over video and it's at the bottom of the screen and you can use that to basically subtitle text, to put uh something about the place that the video was being shot without actually interrupting it by putting something between a clip. And you've got some pretty uh advanced ones here like for instance this organic lower one. We'd actually put some nice text and some animation there at the bottom, you can see it building like that. So another thing we can do with most types of titles is we can change the fade in and fade out, and see it fades in at the beginning, it fades out at the end. You can go ahead and alter that by looking at the project properties in the file menu under the timing set of preferences. You can go ahead and set the title fade duration for different amounts. So I can have it do more or less or appear right away. So that would give me no fade at all, and it appears immediately. Now, any time you have a title whether or not it's over a piece of video or over just a background, you can adjust it to have it appear at more or less of a clip, like I'm doing now just by dragging and dropping start and end. You can also go ahead and actually shift your video completely so I can move this title off this background here and onto this clip. Now there's one type of title in particular that's a little different from everything else. It's the date time title. If I drag that over a clip and drop it onto it, it will actually display, in the bottom left, the date and time that this video was taken, or at least the time stamp that it has on file. You can't really alter this in very many ways, but it's a really quick way to put this time stamp over some home video. So there's a quick look at how to add a titles in iMovie 09. Yeah, it's not as feature complete as something like final cut is but it does allow you to add titles very quickly and they look great. And there's plenty of different options to chose from, so it's perfect for making your own videos for presentations, or for home movies, things like that. Til next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 77 Responses to “MacMost Now 264: iMovie 09 Titles”

Eirik

15 years ago

Great video

Jeff

15 years ago

Cool!

bobbunch

15 years ago

Great work Gary. Love your podcast. your a true inspiration

mike

15 years ago

Gary. very clear and useful. Have you advice for making your own title or adapting and saving an existing one. I just need a bit more room for a clear education context set up of content about three lines. Also How do you get the text transcipt by hand or automatic?
Thanks again

Comments: 77 Responses to “MacMost Now 264: iMovie 09 Titles”

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