iMovie Titles

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Titles in iMovie.

I'm using iMovie 10 and I'm going to show you the use of Titles. You can click on Titles in the Content Library and it will bring up all the different title types. There are many of them. You can see examples here and you can even roll over them with the cursor. If you wait a second you will see a sample on the right, like that. So you can kind of see how each one looks.

You have a lot to choose from starting from some very basic ones all the way to ones that have special effects and visual things.

There are two ways to add titles. One is to have the title as an element by itself. So dragging and dropping it to the very beginning of the video here. Then it will just be on a black background. Or you can drag it and have it over as an overlay over a video here. You can see now the title is there like that.

There is two different ways to do it. You can do either one with almost any of these titles here except some of the specialty ones. Some of them are built specifically for that like for instance having kind of a bottom third there on top. It wouldn't make much sense to use this by itself but as an overlay for this video, we will see it appear here in a second as it renders to the preview. You can see it is there at the bottom and it makes more sense that it is over the video rather than by itself.

So let's add a title and see how we can adjust it. I'm going to select a specific title here, the Centered one. I'm going to drag that in as an opening title here. We'll see that it puts just two lines of text in the center of the screen.

Now I can, with it selected, click adjust here at the top and then I could edit it right here on the preview screen. So I can select the text here. I can change its font and size and various other things about it. Change the color as well. There is a lot you can do here just by editing this. I can also do various things like add a second line, for instance. So there is a lot you can do here adjusting the font and the look of it.

Now that's not always true. With some of these you are not going to be able to do that. Typically the ones that animate in some way you will not be able to adjust the font. Only the ones that are static.

So we've got this centered one here. We've got this lower third one here. This one is similar in that we should be able to edit the text because it is a non-animated one. So I will click inside of the preview area and now we can see how we can adjust the text there because that is a non-animated one.

There is some that are somewhat animated but you can still change the text. For instance, Pixie Dust here, there is an animation going on behind the text so it allows me to change the text itself. So you really have to play with each individual one. Each has kind of its own separate properties.

For instance, we'll use the Far Far Away one here, and to edit the text in this you will see it switches views here and I can certainly edit this text a little easier here than actually seeing it in that kind of 3D view. So I can go in here and edit it and change lots of different things about the text.

A lot of times you can create custom titles here if you just get a little bit creative with the settings. For instance, here I'm using the upper one and if I were to edit that you can see that I can add as many lines as I want. I can even skip lines. So I can put some text there at the top and some at the bottom and I can even justify it over on the right selecting it all. So I can put some stuff here on the right side instead.

So there is a lot of different things that you can do if you just play around with the text. Add spaces, add blank lines, play around with the justification, things like that.

Now it is important to realize that you are not limited to just the titles here. You can import any photo or image that you want. So, for instance, I can create a graphic in PhotoShop or Pixelmator, and in fact I've done so. It is called Sample Title and I've made it 1280 x 720 so it fits the size of my video. I can just drag and drop this png and you can make it something with a background or, in this case, I made it something with a transparent background. So now I've got my graphic in here overlaying the video. So it is kind of a cool thing that you can do with any graphic or create your own titles and have them come in and use transitions on these to have them fly in or out.