iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Themes

Themes are transitions with graduate degrees. If you had experience with Themes in iMovie HD, you already know what they are: sets of professionally designed and animated transitions and titles that run throughout your movie, usually an opening-credit sequence, a special transition style, and a closing-credit sequence. Themes in iMovie look and work a lot like the cool animated DVD menus you can make in iDVD (Chapters Chapter 16 and Chapter 18). But iMovie themes don't require a DVD player; they're built right into your movie with all the same cool artwork and animations.

iMovie has five themes: Photo Album, Bulletin Board, Comic Book, Scrapbook, and Filmstrip. Each one includes custom transitions and titles.

Choosing a Theme

Anytime you create a new project, iMovie gives you the chance to apply a theme to it. The new project dialog box, shown in Figure 5-10, lines up the theme choices in a grid of skimmable previews. You can skim them to get some sense of what each theme has to offer.

Figure 5-15. Each of these themes has its own character and style. You can skim across them to get an idea of what your project will look like. If you want iMovie to automatically insert theme elements as you go, check the box "Automatically add transitions and titles" that appears when you click your chosen theme.

Once you click a theme in this window, you're offered the option of having iMovie automatically ...