How to add lots of text in iMovie 3?

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 2/15/03 at 12:26 AM, "Gordon B. Alley" <galley at texas.net> transmitted
the following electronic message:

>
>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,

Probably pretty pedestrian, but have you considered making a slideshow
of the various title "pages", exporting it to QuickTime, and using that
in iDVD for your index?

I've used this technique for the chapter buttons when authoring a
presentation DVD.

--Dennis Cohen
  iLife Bible (April/May 2003)
  iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, & iDVD Bible
  MacOS X Bible