Section 16.2. Inserting and Rendering a Title | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

16.2. Inserting and Rendering a Title

When you've taken into consideration all the options described so far in this chapter, you probably have a good feel for how this title is going to look once it's inserted into your movie. Now it's time to commit it to digital film.

16.2.1. Dragging the Title into the Movie Track

To place the title you've selected into Movie Track, proceed as follows :

Decide where you want the title to begin .

Begin by pressing the Home key on your keyboard, which simultaneously deselects all clips and rewinds the Playhead to the beginning of the Movie Track. Now you can drag the playhead along the Scrubber bar. As you do, a bright red, inverted "T" cursor slides along your Clip Viewer (or a duplicate Playhead slides along your Timeline Viewer) to indicate your position.

Consider the location of your title carefully . If you're superimposing it on a solid-colored background or a still image, no problem. But if you're planning to superimpose it on moving video, choose a scene that's relatively still, so that the video doesn't distract the audience from the words onscreen. (The exception: If you're using one of iMovie's "see-through" lettering styles, you may want to choose active video to deliberately call attention to the " cutouts .")

Be particularly careful not to superimpose your titles on an unsteady shot; the contrast between the jiggling picture and the rock-steady lettering on the screen will make your audience uncomfortable.

Sometimes, such as when you've selected a title style that fades in from nothing, it's OK to put the title squarely at the beginning of a clip. At other times, you'll want to position the title a few seconds into the clip.
If you've selected a starting point for a title that's in the middle of the clip, position the Playhead there and then choose Edit Split Video Clip at Playhead .

It's a fact of iMovie life: A title can begin only at the beginning of a clip, never the middle. To make the title seem as though it's starting partway through a clip, therefore, you must turn that spot into the beginning of a new clip by chopping the clip in half.

This is not the only time the title feature will be chopping your clips into smaller clips, as Figure 16-6 illustrates.
Drag the name or icon of your chosen title style from the list of titles directly onto the Movie Track, as shown in Figure 16-5 .

Drag it just to the left of the clip you'll want to play underneath the title text. All clips to the right scoot rightward to make room for your cursor.

16.2.2. Rendering Begins

Now iMovie begins to render the title effect. In other words, it creates a new clip that incorporates both the original footage and the text you're superimposing.

In some ways, this title-rendering process resembles the transition-or effect-rendering process described in the previous chapter. For example, you can stop it by pressing either the Esc key (in the upper left of your keyboard) or -period.

Figure 16-5. Drag the name of the title you want out of the Titles list directly into the Movie Track.
The clips in the Clip Viewer or Timeline Viewer scoot to the right to make room for the title you're inserting.

The longer the title is to remain onscreen, the longer the rendering process takes. But exactly as when rendering transitions, you can continue to do other work in iMovie (or even in other programs) while the title is rendering. In fact, you can play titles before they're fully baked, to see what they'll look like in your final movieanother handy preview feature that doesn't require you to wait until the rendering is finished. You can even have several titles rendering simultaneously, although iMovie slows down quite a bit if you have more than, say, three titles rendering at once.

The bright red progress bar creeps along the bottom of the clip, as shown in Figure 16-6. In other words, a title in the Movie Track doesn't have its own icon, as a transition does. Instead, you get to see a miniature illustration of what it's going to look like. (Tiny lettering appears directly on the superimposed clip icon to help you identify it as a title clip.)

As soon as you've finished dragging a title into the Movie Track, the affected clip's name instantly changes. It takes on the words of your actual title (or as much as will fit; if the name is wider than the clip icon, you see an ellipsis "like this"). If the clip was called, for example,"Chris closeup,"iMovie renames it "Shoestring Productions presents ," or whatever your title says. (You can see this effect, too, in Figure 16-6.) As a bonus, a tiny letter T appears in the upper-right corner of the "slide" in the Clip Viewer, a friendly reminder that you've applied a title to it.

16.2.3. How Titles Chop Up Your Clips

As Figure 16-6 illustrates, it's not enough that you split your clip if you want the title to begin partway into the footage. iMovie may chop up your clips on its own, according to this scheme:

If the title you've specified is shorter than the clip, iMovie splits the clip in two. The first portion gets the title text embedded into it; the second portion is left alone.
If the title is longer than the clip, iMovie steals footage from the next clip to the right (see Figure 16-7). In fact, it continues to eat up as many additional clips as necessary to fulfill the duration you've specified for it. This powerful feature means that you can make a single title sequence extend across a series of short clips, still images, transitions, and so on. (By contrast, the transitions and effects described in Chapter 15 limit their appetites to single clips.)

Figure 16-6. If you want a title to begin partway into a clip (top) instead of at the very beginning, you must first chop the clip into two pieces (middle). During rendering, a progress bar keeps track of the rendering progress (bottom).
After the title has finished rendering, you'll find that iMovie has automatically made yet another clip splitat the end of the title (bottom). The result: After you're done inserting a title, that portion of your movie occupied by the title has become a clip unto itself.

iMovie may still chop up the final clip in the sequence, however, to accommodate the tail end of the title sequence.

Tip: If the title is long enough, it can gobble down a number of individual clipsand turn them into a single title clip in your Movie Track. This can be a sneaky way to organize your movie, as described in the box on the facing page.

Figure 16-7. If your title is longer than its clip, iMovie steals however many seconds of footage it needs from the next clip and incorporates it into the first clip. If you look carefully at the durations of these two clips before (top) and after the title has been applied, you'll see that the second clip has been shortened by one second, and the first clip lengthened, when the stealing process is over (middle).
If you try to apply your title to a too-short clip when there's no subsequent clip from which iMovie can steal frames , on the other hand, you get the error message shown at bottom.

16.2.4. Checking the Result

When the rendering process is completeor even before it's completecheck out the effect. Click the title clip in the Movie Track and press the Space bar to view the title clip, or Shift-click the clips before and after the title clip (and then press the Space bar) to see how the title looks in the context of the clips around it. Or just drag the Playhead back and forth across the title to see how it looks.

If the title isn't quite what you wantedif it's the wrong length, style, or font, or if there's a typo, for exampleyou can change its settings as described in the next section. If the title wasn't at all what you wantedif it's in the wrong place, for exampleyou can undo the entire insertion-and-rendering process by highlighting the title clip and pressing the Delete key (or choosing Edit Undo, if you added the title recently). The original footage returns, textless and intact.

16.2.5. Editing a Title

Editing a title is easy. Click the title clip's icon in the Movie Track. Then click the Titles button, if the list of titles isn't already open .

Now you can adjust the title style, the text of the title itself, the title's timing, the direction of motion, or any other parameters described in the first part of the chapter. When you're finished, click the Update button just below the Preview button. iMovie begins the rendering process again, putting in place a brand-new title, and splitting the superimposed footage in a different place, if necessary.

Note: The good news is that your ability to edit the title isn't subject to the availability of the Undo command. In other words, you can revise the settings for a title at any time, even if you've saved the project (and therefore wiped out your Undo trail).But if you've applied multiple superimposed titles, as described in the box below, you can revise only the most recent title you've applied to a particular clip.

16.2.6. Deleting a Title

As noted previously, a title clip is just a clip. You might wonder , therefore, how you can remove a title without also deleting the footage it affects.

Yet sure enough, iMovie remembers what your clips looked like before you overlaid a title. You can click a title clip at any time, press the Delete key, and then watch iMovie restore the original footage. True, pressing Delete on a conventional clip deletes it, but pressing Delete on a title clip simply deletes its "titleness." The clip to its right merges back into its formerly text-overlaid portion, leaving only one clip instead of two.

Now, if you've moved the clip that follows the title clip, and you then delete the title clip, iMovie will still put back the underlying footage that it consumed, but it may no longer be where you expect it to be. The program can't "splice" the footage back onto the beginning of a clip from which it was split, because iMovie doesn't know where that clip is (you might even have deleted it). If you move the clips back into their original sequence after deleting the title, the footage will still be continuous, but there might now be a cut or break where the title ended, as if you had split the clip at that point.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
Behind-the-Scenes Undo Magic

iMovie can restore an original clip when you delete a title that you've superimposed on it, even weeks later.

Yet as noted in this chapter, iMovie creates titles by modifying the original clipsby changing the actual pixels that compose the image. So where is iMovie storing a copy of the original, for use when you decide to delete the title?

In the project's Media folder, that's where (see Section 13.7.1.1). There you'll find the original clip from the camcorder (called "Clip 1," for example), untouched. There you'll also find a new clip (called "Typewriter 1," for example), bearing the name of the title style you used. This clip contains the modified portion of your original clip.