Adding Titles

The ultimate goal of making titles is to introduce or otherwise enhance your movie. You could have a title at the beginning, a rolling credit at the end, and any number of titles in between to introduce different scenes (reminiscent of silent movies?) or sections (such as a training video).

If you think back, earlier in this chapter we talked about the two different ways that titles can work: either displayed against a black screen (Over Black), or as an overlay displaying directly over video. Either approach can be fun and work in different situations, but you might want to start out with a standard Over Black title (by clicking the Over Black check box).

Task: Adding a Title to a Movie

Adding a title to a movie is as easy as adding a clip to a movie; it's a very similar, almost identical process. In factit is identical. As Austin Powers might say, drag and drop, baby!

1. Open an iMovie project and drag a clip into the Timeline. If the Clip Viewer tab is visible, just click the Clock icon in the lower-left corner of the screen to display the Timeline tab.

2. Click on a title of choice in the Titles palette, and drag it down into the Timeline until your video clip moves aside to make room for the title (see Figure 15.7). Drop the title into the open space.

   Figure 15.7. Dragging a title from the Titles palette down to the Timeline in front of the video clip.

   

3. Notice in Figure 15.8 how the small red bar travels from left to right underneath your title to indicate that the title is being processed .

   Figure 15.8. A little red bar going to the right underneath the title in the Timeline indicates that your Mac is processing your title.

   

4. Now that your title is in the Timeline, try clicking on the playhead and dragging it through your title to get a quick glance at how the title animates (see Figure 15.9).

   Figure 15.9. Dragging the playhead to check out the title, just as you would check out a video clip. In essence, iMovie uses the settings in the Titles palette to generate video clips for you.

   

   

   To experiment with a title that you have created, try changing a setting in the Titles palette, and then clicking the Update button in the Titles palette.

   
   

When you've dragged a title into the Timeline, you can click in the Timeline to select it (it'll change to blue) and make adjustments to it. Then you need to click Update for iMovie to process it and give you a preview.

You can actually layer different titles in iMovie. For instance, you can add one long-duration title that is set over black, and have other titles that aren't set over black cross over top of it.

iMovie can quickly build a miniature preview in the Titles palette when you make changes. But digital video takes a lot of processing power. So, in order for it to catch up with changes when you place it in the Timeline, it has to be processed before you can get the final preview of how it'll look on a television.