Chapter 7. Titles, Captions, and Credits

7. Titles, Captions, and Credits

Text superimposed over footage is incredibly common in the film and video worlds . You'd be hard-pressed to find a single movie, TV show, or commercial that doesn't have titles, captions, or credits. In fact, it's the absence of superimposed text that helps identify most camcorder videos as amateur efforts.

In iMovie, the term title refers to any kind of text: credits, titles, subtitles , copyright notices, and so on. You use them almost exactly the way you use the transitions or effects described in Chapter 6: by choosing a text-animation style from a list, adjusting its duration using a slider, dragging it into your Movie Track, and waiting while iMovie renders the effect.

But you don't need to be nearly as economical in your use of titles as you are with transitions. Transitional effects and visual effects interfere with something that stands perfectly well on its ownthe footage. Transitions and special effects that aren't purposeful and important to the film may well annoy or distract your audience. When you superimpose text, on the other hand, the audience is much more likely to accept your intrusion. You're introducing this new element for its benefit, to convey information you couldn't transmit otherwise .

Moreover, as you'll soon see, most of iMovie's text effects are far more focused in purpose than its transition and effect selections, so you'll have little trouble choosing the optimum text effect for a particular editing situation. For example, the Scrolling Credits effect rolls a list of names slowly up the screenan obvious candidate for the close of your movie. Another puts several consecutive lines of text in a little block at the lower-left corner of the screenexactly the way the text in MTV music videos appears.

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Tip: Using the Titles feature described in this chapter isn't the only way to create text effects. Using a graphics program like AppleWorks or Photoshop Elements, you can create text "slides" with far more flexibility than you can in the Titles feature. For example, the built-in Titles feature offers you a choice of only 16 colors and limited choice of type size. But using a "title card" that you import as a graphic, you're free to use any text color and any font size. You can even dress up such titles with clip art, 3-D effects, and whatever other features your graphics software offers.Credits that you import as still graphics in this way can't do much more than fade in and fade out. When you bypass iMovie's built-in titles feature, you give up the ability to use the fancy animations. Still, the flexibility you gain in the look, color , and size of your type may be worth the sacrifice. For details on this technique, see Chapter 9.

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