iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Inserting and Rendering a Title

When you’ve taken into consideration all the options described so far in this chapter, you probably have a good feel for how this title is going to look once it’s inserted into your movie. Now it’s time to commit it to digital film.

Dragging the Title into the Movie Track

To place the title you’ve selected into the Movie Track, proceed as follows:

1. Park the Playhead where you want the title to begin.

   Consider the location of your title carefully. If you’re superimposing it on a solid-colored background or a still image, no problem. But if you’re planning to superimpose it on moving video, choose a scene that’s relatively still, so that the video doesn’t distract the audience from the words onscreen. (The exception: If you’re using one of iMovie’s “see-through” lettering styles, you may want to choose active video to deliberately call attention to the “cutouts.”)

   Be particularly careful not to superimpose your titles on an unsteady shot; the contrast between the jiggling picture and the rock-steady lettering on the screen will make your audience uncomfortable.

   UP TO SPEEDThe Color Picker

   Here and there—not just in iMovie, but also in System Preferences, TextEdit, Microsoft Office, and many other programs—Mac OS X offers you the opportunity to choose a color for some element, like your desktop background, a window, and so on.

   The Colors dialog box offers a miniature color lab that lets you dial in any color in the Mac’s rainbow. Several color labs, actually, ...