Subtitles of the Movie

Adding text to a video clip is an important part of your movie. We use text for titles, credits, and subtitles. It's an important tool for providing information for your viewer. iMovie provides you with a wide choice of both static and animated title effects. All of the difficult work has been done for you, all you have to do is follow a few simple steps and you'll be able to produce titles, which would be the envy of many professionals. iMovie gives you a choice of no less than 18 terrific title effects. Let's take a look at the title window. From top to bottom we have first, the preview button. Click on this button to preview your title on the large clip monitor. To it's right here is a small preview window. When you select an effect you'll immediately see it's preview in this window. This window also provides you with the timing date of your title. Below the preview button is an update button, which you'll use if and when you need to edit a title after you've applied it to a clip. Next are two slider bars, these are used to control the duration of your title. The speed in the pause bars both have different functions. Now, notice each bar has a number on its left and right. This is because each effect has a different minimum time and maximum time allocated for that effect. This is how they work. I've selected the centered title effect for this first example. Notice, the button on the speed bar is just a little to the left and the first number in the small preview window is 1 second. The blue button on the pause bar is way over to the right and the second number in the preview button is 4 seconds. Therefore, the total number is now 5 seconds. These numbers tell us that this title will take 1 second to fade up. It will remain on screen for about 4 seconds. So the total time needed for this title is 5 seconds of course you control these numbers. Now, let's look at the title effect called music video. In this effect, the pause bar is inactive. So, the speed bar actually controls the total duration of the title for this effect. In this case, let's just increase it to 5 seconds. iMovie has made what could be a very complicated process, very easy for you to achieve. Below the speed bar is the title effect selector. Use the scroll bar to access those effects, which are located lower down on the list. Now, to the right here we have a direction button. This is used to determine in which direction an animation will start from right, left, up, or down. Next, we have three selection boxes. The first is used to select the color for our text. Click on this box and a color selector appears so, you can choose the color you want. This is a really neat feature because iMovie has already chosen only those colors which are being safe for using video work. Check this box, labeled black over and your text will be super imposed onto a black background. This style is normally used for credits and for rolling credits. The box labeled QT margins must be checked if you are using the NTSC format. NTSC is the video standard used in the USA. When checked iMovie will ensure that any text you create is located within what is known as the safe zone. This means it won't be cut off when viewed on TV sets. Moving down you can see the font selector. Click on the drop down menu and make your choice. To the right is a font size bar. Move the button to the left to make your fonts smaller and to the right to make them larger. Again, iMovie has chosen the minimum and maximum size, which it feels is artistically correct for this font. This last window at the bottom of the palate is where you'll type the text you are going to use in your titles. iMovie provides you with three options. Each title effect has one of these three options allocated to it. First, let's look at the centered title effect. Notice, it has two fields one above the other. Type your main title in the upper field and if you would like a second subtitle, type that in the lower field. The type size in the lower field will be automatically smaller. iMovie thinks of everything. Now, for the second option, we'll select the music video effect. Notice, now we have a large text box, which of course is what you'll need for typing longer blocks of text. Finally, let's select rolling credits to demonstrate the third option. You can see we now have available to us multiple fields. The difference here is that when you type text in the upper and the lower fields, the text will appear side by side in the title window and of course this is just what you need for credits and for rolling credits. When you need to add another line to your text, click on the plus sign here. If you need to delete a line, click on the minus sign. Well, that covers the titles window. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to create a title and to add it to a video clip.