[MacDV] How to add lots of text in iMovie 3?

[Scott Baldwin]

Gordon,

If you have a graphics program, like Graphic Converter  (or photoshop 
etc) open a new document, set the size to 640 x 480 and select the type 
tool.   Type what you need and save it as a high quality jpeg. iMovie 
can import this as a still.  An Appleworks paint or draw document would 
work but you really can't set the size precisely  in Appleworks.

You will have to fool around with the font and text size  to get it 
right, and it will probably take several "pages" (different jpeg 
documents) to get all the info you need.  import these into imovie in 
sequence and set the time duration of each jpeg long enough to read 
each page as the movie plays.

If you want to get fancy, create an appropriate still from your movie, 
import that into your graphics program, add your text over the picture, 
then reimport it back into iMovie.

Cheers,

Scott


On Friday, February 14, 2003, at 10:26 PM, Gordon B. Alley wrote:

> 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>
>
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