Week 5: Fine-tuning: Titles, Transistions, and Music

July 22, 2011 3 Comments

Your tasks for this week: (approximate time: < 1 hour)
1. Add titles
2. Add transitions
3. Add background audio

Introduction

The video is now ready for your final touches: adding transitions, adding titles, and background music.  I will also touch on some of the other super-fancy things you can (and maybe should, probably shouldn’t) do with iMovie.

Titles

Adding titles to your movie couldn’t be easier. Click and drag.  Got to  http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/ to see how it is done. Oddly enough, in that video they do not show that it is possible to drag and drop a title to before or after a clip. This will put the title on a black (or another color or pattern) background. The background options will pop-up when you drag it before or after the clip.

Go ahead and experiment by grabbing the Far Far Away title and dragging it to the beginning of your video. Is your text flying by too quickly? Lengthen the duration of the title and it will slow down. iMovie attempts to fit in all your content in the amount of time allotted.

Add a title to the beginning and end of the video.

Transitions

Transitions are used to, well, transition from one shot to the next.  For example, you can transition from a picture of a book your are recommending to a video of you discussing the book. Jumping from one to the next can be jarring for the viewer, so adding transitions can add to the quality of the entire video. Many, many types of transitions are available… I highly recommend using only ones that are not to, ahem, thematic.  Perhaps the Cross Dissolve or Cross Zoom or Fade to Black will work?

Instead of reinventing the wheel, go to this video made by Apple about how to use transitions http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/#transistions

Add some transitions between your clips.  If you only have one clip go ahead and add transitions between your clip and your opening and closing titles.

Background Music
The last “necessary” edit you need to do is to add background music. We generally only add background music to the beginning and end of the videos, but you are free to add it where you think it is needed. Again you can learn the basics of adding music at http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/#music. In iMovie ’11 the ability to edit the audio is really great. You should see the audio wave lengths underneath the video – if not click on this button.

Click on the audio and you can see little grey tab sort-of-things. If you move those around the fade-in and fade-out will be under your control. You can also raise and lower the volume with the black bar also in audio waveforms. Be sure to have the music fade out and in at appropriate times in your video.

I also like to add sound effects. However… they generally are not needed for library videos, but you have every right to prove me wrong.

Other goodness

Extra credit and extra fun time. I am going to introduce a whole bunch of other fun things possible in iMovie, but not required for this project. Feel free to add them if you think it will help the final product. I will go over uploading photos, cropping/rotating/Ken Burns effects, including voice over, slow motion, fast forward, rewind, and the flash and hold last frame special effect. I will also write just a bit on using the greenscreen.

Photos

Making a movie out of photos is one of the main uses of iMovie in the DML.  Patrons upload a bunch of images, add some music, transitions, titles, and have a pretty cool movie.  To add images upload them to the computer to iPhoto.  If you would prefer to pull them from the camera itself import it the way you imported the video footage by going to File>Import…  Then drag and drop to your video. If you would like to have your video “cut away” to a still photo, simply drop the photo over the section of video you want to cut away from. A pop up menu will appear and you will select “cut away.” The advantage of this is that the voice over from your video will continue to play over your still photo.

Cropping etc.

To crop/rotate or add a Ken Burns effect (a slow pan) click on crop button in the middle of the iMovie interface.  It looks like a two Ls on top of one another.  Cropping and rotating are just what they sound like.  Using the Ken Burns effect is really nice when dealing with images.

Voice Overs

Next to the crop button is a the voice over button in the shape of a microphone. If you plan on using voice overs make sure to use a decent microphone in a quiet place.  Voice overs are especially useful if you plan on not having a person be in the video at all.  Click on the voice over button and click on the clip where you want to have a voice.  iMovie will give you a 3 second count down and then start speaking.

Slow Motion, Fast Forward, Rewind, Flash and Hold etc.

These cool but somewhat flashy special effects are available under the Clip menu in the upper left corner.   Try them out.  I am not sure if they will be useful but they sure are fun.

Greenscreen

If you think having an interesting background such as water, stars, a waving flag, or a color is what is needed then try out greenscreen.

Watch this video to learn how to use it.

 

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