How to add lots of text in iMovie 3?

[Gordon B. Alley]

I'm currently using iMovie 3.0.1 to edit about an hour of old home 
movies for recording to DVD with iDVD 3.

All of the original media has been edited. I would like to provide an 
index to the movies on this DVD, to make it easier to find the record 
of a particular event, trip, relative, etc.

Having no experience with iDVD at that point, my original idea was to 
use the DVD chapter titles for this purpose, but it soon became 
obvious that having more than a reel number and a date for each 
chapter would be impractical.

My next thought was to create a short movie clip with scrolling text 
that would provide the index, so the viewer could watch the index, 
and then select the desired reel/date from chapter menus. I plan to 
use the Projector theme, and loop the index movie in the preview 
"screen" of the DVD menu (plus a button to play a full-size version 
that would be more-readable). The scrolling index text would be 
rendered over a timed clip from the actual movie.

But it appears that the Scrolling Block and similar Title effects are 
limited to about 256 characters, and my index currently is about 2500 
characters. I can cut that down some, but not enough to fit in one 
block. I guess I could split the text into smaller pieces, and the 
index movie into the same number of clips, and render a Scrolling 
Block over each those clips, but that seems a little tedious, and 
would probably look a little odd.

Is there a better way to accomplish what I want to do? I'd appreciate 
any suggestions.

Thanks.
-- 
Gordon Alley  <*>
<mailto:galley at texas.net>
<http://galley.home.texas.net>