iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Choose a Color for the Lettering

By clicking the tiny square beside the word Color, you get a little dialog box known as the Mac OS X Color Picker. (The notes on page 5 describe it in detail.) For now, the important thing is to choose a color that contrasts with the footage behind the lettering. Use white against black, black against white, yellow against blue, and so on.

Note

iMovie doesn’t limit you to TV-safe colors. If colors are too bright (saturated), the edges of the letters can smear and tear when played back on a TV.

Add a Backdrop

If you left your education to the Apple online help, you might assume that there are only two kinds of images that can underlie your titles: video footage or a solid black frame. Fortunately, there’s a third option that greatly expands your creative possibilities: superimposing your text on a still image, such as a photo or some gradient fill you’ve created in, say, Photoshop Elements (Figure 16-4).

UP TO SPEEDThe TV-Safe Area, Overscanning, and You

Millions of TV viewers every day are blissfully unaware that they’re missing the big picture.

In its early days, the little cathode-ray guns inside the TV worked by painting one line of the TV picture, then turning around and heading back the opposite direction. To make sure that the screen was painted edge to edge, these early TVs were programmed to overshoot the edges of the screen—or, to use the technical term, to overscan the screen.

TV technology is much better now, but even modern TVs exhibit overscanning. ...