iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Title Trouble

For some reason, titles and credits seem to have their own phalanx of problems and issues. For example:

Title Backgrounds Have Jaggies

The quality of the image behind a title in iMovie isn’t as good as it once was, especially if you burn the movie to DVD. The title looks great, but the background behind acquires jaggies, the stair-step lines along hard edges (Figure B-1).

Some things to try to minimize the jaggies:

• Place your title over video that contains natural objects instead of man-made objects. Faces, landscapes, and flowers tend to be better than roof lines, deck railings, and fences. Avoid objects containing straight lines and hard edges.

• Place the title over video that doesn’t move. A clip that zooms in on a building—or a Ken Burns clip that zooms in on a picture of the building—may look worse than a clip with no motion.

• When using a Ken Burns photo, import a large-dimension image, not small.

• Before importing the photo, soften the image a bit. Try iPhoto’s Edit → Adjust → Sharpness function, or Photoshop’s Gaussian blur.

• Before adding the title, export the clip to a DVCPRO - NTSC QuickTime movie, then re-import that to iMovie. (If your video is in PAL format, use DVCPRO - PAL instead.)

• Create a title “Over black” instead of a video clip.

Figure B-1. For some reason, as of version 6.0.1, iMovie introduces stairstepped, jagged lines in the video behind a title, as shown ...