When you’re ready to try adding a title to your iMovie, you’ll be working in a new area of iMovie: the Titles pane. Until now, you probably spent most of your time simply capturing video and working with clips in the Shelf, the Monitor, and the Timeline. But now you’ll start switching back and forth between various windows in the Shelf. You get to the Titles pane, if you’re looking at clips in the Shelf, by clicking the Titles button.

When the Titles pane comes up, you’ll see a number of options, including ways to adjust the size and color of the letters in your title, as well as a list from which you can select different titles (see Figure 26.1).

Figure 26.1. The Titles pane.

But if you’re new to digital video, don’t worry about all the options. You can add a title to your iMovie simply by choosing one (such as Bounce In To Center) from the list, clicking on it, and dragging it into the Timeline.

Sooner or later, you’ll want to take advantage of all the things you can do to spruce up and modify titles to give your productions a customized touch. To get your feet wet, let’s take a look at a couple of the basic titles included with iMovie. Later, we’ll dive into adjusting and customizing titles.

Sample Title—Bounce In To Center

Near the top of iMovie’s title list is Bounce In To Center, and it’s a great starting place to play around with titles. In Figure 26.2, you can get a sense of how the text moves in from the top and bottom of the screen.

Figure 26.2. A sample title.

Sample Title—Centered Multiple

At first glance, Centered Multiple might sound like an abstract algebraic principle, but after you start playing with it, its value becomes apparent.

Centered Multiple is an example of a title to which you can add multiple lines of text. In essence, iMovie makes it easy to create multiple “screens” by enabling you to add additional lines of text to some titles.

On the left in Figure 26.3, you see the first screen (imagine the text fading in, pausing, and then fading out), and on the right, you see the next screen, where the same thing happens again.

Figure 26.3. A fade from left to right.

If you’re having difficulty picturing what’s going on, don’t be concerned. When you start playing in the program, it’ll become clear, and you’ll see the nice effect that this kind of title has.

iMovie makes it easy to enter text in titles like this one. As with the previous title we examined, the text you enter in the bottom of the Titles pane appears in the title (see Figure 26.4).

Figure 26.4. The text input area in the Titles pane.

With a multiple line title, you can click and drag the blue scrollbar down (the blue scrollbar to the right of the text) to reveal more lines of text.

If you haven’t tried them (although we aren’t officially in the middle of a task), the + and - buttons to the right of the title text enable you to add and remove lines of text, which generates more screens. This particular title is a nice way to have introductory screens fade in and out before a movie starts.

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of two basic titles, take a moment to consider all the titles you have available (see Table 26.1).

Table 26.1. Titles in iMovie

Title Type	Description
3D Spin	Two lines of text move as if rotating and twisting on a 2-dimensional plane.
Bounce Across	Two lines of text appear from either the left or right and move like a wiggling worm toward the center of the screen.
Bounce Across Multiple	Like Bounce Across, but with multiple screens of text.
Bounce In To Center	Two lines of text appear and move toward the center of the screen.
Cartwheel	Two lines of text, each letter rotating, move diagonally toward the center of the screen.
Cartwheel Multiple	Like Cartwheel, but with multiple screens of text.
Centered Multiple	Multiple titles fade in and out in sequence, one after another. It’s a nice movie-style effect.
Centered Title	A single title fades in and out.
Clip to Characters	Contains four options—Animated Gradient, Clip Image, Clip Video, and Starburst—where animation effects appear across the words in the title.
Converge	Two lines of text with broadly spaced letters gradually move to the left to form words.
Converge Multiple	Like Converge, but with multiple screens of text.
Converge to Center	Two lines of text with broadly spaced letters gradually move to the center to form words.
Converge to Center Multiple	Like Converge to Center, but with multiple screens of text.
Cross Through Center	Two lines of text start out with letters and lines reversed and rotate until correctly positioned.
Cross Through Center Multiple	Like Cross Through Center but with multiple screens of text.
Drifting	Multiple lines fade in from different directions.
Far, Far Away	Will scroll an entire paragraph of text “into the distance”; something like the original Star Wars credits.
Flying Letters	Letters of title fade into the screen to form words of title.
Flying Words	Entire lines of title fly in at one time. Nice effect.
Gravity	Two lines of text fall into place from one edge of the screen.
Gravity Multiple	Like Gravity, but with multiple screens of text.
Music Video	Enables you to put a music video–style paragraph of text that can appear in the corner of the screen. Useful.
Rolling Centered Credits	Enter multiple lines of text to get the effect you see at the end of movies. Very nice.
Rolling Credits	Similar to centered credits; different formatting.
Scroll with Pause	Titles roll on to screen, pause, roll off; helps with being able to read individual credits.
Scrolling Block	Will scroll an entire paragraph of text across the screen.
Spinner	Two lines of text spin in the middle of the screen as they increase in size before stopping right-side up.
Spread from Center	Two lines of text appear from a pile of letters at the center of the screen.
Spread from Center Multiple	Like Spread from Center, but with multiple screens of text.
Stripe Subtitle	A nice title to put in the corner of a screen to introduce a new section of a video.
Subtitle	Gives you the ability to add text to the screen to simulate the subtitle effect of a DVD.
Subtitle Multiple	Multiple subtitles.
Twirl	Two lines of text appear at the center of the screen with each letter rotating.
Typewriter	Creates the effect of words being typed on the screen with a typewriter.
Unscramble	A jumble of letters separates into two lines of text.
Unscramble Multiple	Like Unscramble, but with multiple screens of text.
Video Terminal	Creates the effect of words being typed on the screen with a computer.
Wipe	Two lines of text slowly appear, then disappear from one direction.
Zoom	Creates a zoom effect, moving close in on video.
Zoom Multiple	Multiple zooms.

By the Way

To help organize the long list of titles, some are categorized under a heading marked with an arrow, or a “disclosure triangle.” You can reveal or hide the titles under a heading by clicking the arrow.

Overlay (over Video) Titles

Another method you might want to try is to uncheck the Over Black option so that your title appears over a video clip, as shown in Figure 26.5. The only requirement is that you have a video clip in the project!

Figure 26.5. Clicking on a title with Over Black unchecked to see a mini-preview with the title displayed over a video clip.

Task: Selecting a Title

To begin working with titles, you need to know how to find a particular title listed previously in Table 26.1.

1. Click on the Titles button in the main iMovie window to display the Titles pane.

2. Click the blue scrollbar for the list of titles, and drag it down so that the title you’re looking for is revealed.

3. When you find the title you want to try, click to select it, as I’ve done with the Typewriter title near the end of the list (see Figure 26.6).

   

   Figure 26.6. The selected title will be previewed in the mini-preview window in the Titles pane.

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).

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).

As soon as you start trying out the different titles, you’ll want to know how you can adjust them, and Apple has done an excellent job again of making things easy and intuitive, yet flexible. Essentially, you can do no tweaking at all or as much as you want.

Transitions could be thought of as the bread and butter of video editing. Or, perhaps, as the peanut butter that makes scenes stick together.

When you deal with clips, if you choose wisely, one clip can in many cases cut to another without anything between the clips. To get a better understanding of the concept of a cut, try watching a few minutes of television or a movie and looking for the spots where the camera switches from one view to another—this usually happens most rapidly in music videos. Some people prefer cutting from one scene to another without any blending.

But there are times when you want to find a way for one clip to lead smoothly to another, and a transition is a perfect way to accomplish this. The following is a list of iMovie’s transitions:

Figure 26.11 shows the Transitions pane in iMovie, which can be easily accessed simply by clicking the Trans button. The Transitions pane enables you to choose a transition to use in your iMovie, as well as make some simple adjustments to the way the transition appears.

Figure 26.11. The Transitions pane.

Sample Transition—Cross Dissolve

To get a better understanding of transitions, let’s take a look at the Cross Dissolve transition. Simply put, a cross dissolve blends one scene into another.

We’ll start with a movie containing two clips. If we watched the movie as is, when one video clip ends, it would simply cut from one video clip to another. But a cross dissolve could help the scenes blend.

iMovie gives you the ability to drag and drop a transition between the two clips, and Figure 26.12 shows the transition. The transition appears between the clips.

Figure 26.12. Two clips “sandwich” the Cross Dissolve transition.

Essentially, over the course of a cross dissolve transition you see less of the first clip and more of the second. Figure 26.13 represents the blending of two video clips.

Figure 26.13. Cross Dissolve—At the beginning, you see the first clip. Toward the middle, you still see the original clip, but you also see a fair amount of the second clip, “merged in” with the original clip. At this stage, both clips are semi-transparent. At the end, you see the second clip.

Transitions are easy to work with. Just as with other enhancements that you can add to an iMovie, a transition takes a few moments to process, and if you add many transitions to your iMovie, you might have to wait a few minutes. But when the processing is done, you have a nice way to spice up your iMovie. It’s worth experimenting to find and develop your own style.

In general, there are three ways of working with transitions: adding, updating, and removing.

Task: Changing and Replacing a Transition

At some point, you might want to change a transition that’s already been added, and doing so is easy:

1. Open your iMovie project in which you have a clip (and a transition) that you want to replace. In Figure 26.16, you see our trusty sample project. In this scenario, we’ve decided that we want the fade out to be longer; that is, we want the fade to start earlier in the clip.

   

   Figure 26.16. Selecting the transition.

2. Click on the transition to select it; a translucent box appears around it.

3. Click on the blue Speed slider in the Transition window to adjust the Speed setting and change it to 4 seconds (4:00).

   By the Way

   The higher the Speed setting, the more seconds of space the transition will take up. So, if you want a longer transition, you want a higher Speed setting—toward 04:00. For a shorter transition, you want a lower setting—toward 00:10.

4. Click the Apply button in the Transition window. When the processing is finished, drag the playhead back and forth on the Timeline to see the effect of the adjusted transition, or position the playhead to the left of the transition and click the Play button below the Monitor window.

Compare the relative lengths of the transition and video clip in Figures 26.16 and 26.17. Notice how the transition in Figure 26.17, which has been adjusted to 4:00, is longer and therefore takes up more space in the Timeline than the original transition shown in Figure 26.16. The transition starts earlier in the video clip.

Figure 26.17. Viewing the results of the adjusted transition, which has to process first.

Replacing a transition works in a similar way, except that you choose a different transition than the one originally in place and add it by clicking the Update button. If the new transition can be applied where the old one was, the old one is removed to make room for your new choice.

Effects represent another way that you can enhance your iMovies by adding something to them. You take plain video and make it stand out or spice it up to create your own movie-making style.

For example, if you want to give a historic feel to a portion of your iMovie, you could use an effect to make the movie either black-and-white or a sepia tone to give it the feel of an early moving picture.

Sometimes the video you use might give you ideas. For example, there might be a scene in a movie that’s supposed to represent a person’s dreams, and you could use the Fog effect to give that scene a surreal feeling. Maybe you could even combine it with another effect to change the colors around, and when the person in your iMovie wakes up, everything returns to normal, and you don’t see the effects anymore.

In essence, to add an effect, you simply choose a clip in the Timeline and then choose and apply an effect—you can make adjustments anytime you want. If you want to add an effect to only a portion of your iMovie, use the Split Video Clip at Playhead command (for a refresher, see the section “Deleting Extra Footage” in Chapter 25, “Working with Video and Clips in iMovie”) to separate a portion of your video and then apply the effect to it.

Effects are similar to transitions and titles in that the magic happens in the relevant pane in iMovie (see Figure 26.18); the Effects pane gives you a convenient place to try out different things.

Figure 26.18. The Effects pane in iMovie.

If you like to keep things as simple as possible, you can simply choose an effect; but iMovie also enables you to customize each effect if you choose to. You might find that you start by simply adding effects with their default settings and then end up coming back to the Effects pane to try different options when you get ideas for how some adjustment could work better for a particular clip. Table 26.2 lists the effects available in iMovie.

When you use an effect in iMovie, you choose a clip, such as the one in Figure 26.19, and decide you want to do something to it. In this case, we have a video clip in which the picture came out a bit dark.

Figure 26.19. A dark clip before the Brightness/Contrast effect is applied.

But with a bit of tweaking, using the Brightness/Contrast controls, we can improve the clip so that you can see the subject a bit better (see Figure 26.20).

Figure 26.20. The clip after the Brightness/Contrast effect is applied.

When you try out effects, you can experiment without waiting for iMovie to process, or render, an effect, which can take several minutes. Then when you’ve made a decision, you can apply the effect and allow iMovie to render it, and you can continue to add other effects to that clip if you want.

In general, the options when working with effects are Preview, Apply, and Restore Clip.

Applying

Applying an effect is simply the process of going beyond the preview stage and actually having iMovie change your video clip by employing the effect on the clip you have currently selected. At this point, iMovie processes (or renders) the effect, which may take several minutes. The status of the processing appears as a red bar at the bottom of the affected clip in the Timeline (see Figure 26.21).

Figure 26.21. If you’re happy with the preview, you can click Apply.

By the Way

If you apply an effect to a clip that already has a transition, you will see a message saying that the effect will invalidate an existing transition and requesting your permission to re-render it. If you don’t click OK, the effect can’t be applied.

Restoring Clips

After you apply an effect, if you want to go back to how the clip originally was, choose Advanced, Restore Clip from the menu (see Figure 26.22).

Figure 26.22. An effect has been applied, and now the same clip can be restored to its original state.

Did you Know?

You can only restore a clip back to the state it was in when you last emptied iMovie’s trash.

After you’ve tried effects by simply applying them to successive clips, you’ll probably discover that you want to make things more interesting or customized.

Because you’ve already applied an effect to a clip, you will need to reapply the changed effect. To do this, select the clip you want to change the effect for, choose the effect you want to change, make the changes, and then click Apply. A sheet window appears in some cases to let you know that the new effect invalidates the previous one. You must choose OK for your new effect to be processed.

In this chapter, you found out how you can bring your iMovies one step closer to their Hollywood (or living room) debut by learning about titles, transitions, and effects. You learned how easy it is to make and adjust titles in iMovie. You also learned how iMovie enables you to add professional-looking transitions to a project, which can help digital video to look and feel more like a real movie. Finally, you saw how, in certain situations, an effect such as Brightness/Contrast can actually help you to see your video better if it was shot in a setting where there wasn’t much light.