How to add lots of text in iMovie 3?

[Gordon B. Alley]

On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 19:22:16 -0700, "Erica Sadun" <erica at mindspring.com> wrote:
>At 9:12 AM -0500 2/15/03, Winston MacKelvie wrote:
>>Just a suggestion, I don't have Snapz, but I read that Snapz
>>captures movement, so, how about capturing scrolling AppleWorks text
>>pages (deselect Show Margins and Show Page Guides in Menu>Document)
>>and make it a regular movie clip? I wonder if one could video tape a
>>scrolling screen of text? Probably would have to be a flat panel
>>display. I might try this today.
>
>Warning, warning all you guys.
>
>iMovie uses DV compression which was *not* designed
>to show lots of text. In fact, text is an (ahem)
>textbook example of the worst possible data you can
>use for digital video. It combines high-contrast black
>& white with sharp horizontal/vertical edges.
>
>You can do as you suggest.
>
>Just prepare for it to look really really awful.
>
>-- Erica

As the OP for this thread, I want to thank all who chimed in with 
suggestions on how to create this Table of Contents for the old home 
movies I was preparing for DVD.

I ended up extracting a frame from each movie reel clip in the main 
iMovie 3 project, adding the contents for that reel as a text layer 
in Photoshop (Textile font in 24- and 18-point sizes), and then 
importing that frame into a new TOC iMovie 3  project. I put a 
1-second fade-in transition at the beginning, a 1-sec fade-out at the 
end, and a 1-second cross-fade transition between each pair of TOC 
clips. I adjusted the lengths of the frame clips themselves so that 
the total length of the TOC movie would be 30 seconds, matching the 
maximum loop length for iDVD 3's "Projector" theme preview.

After exporting the main iMovie 3 project, with its chapters, to 
iDVD, I imported the TOC iMovie project in iDVD, creating an 
additional button on the top-level menu.

I've finally completed my 1st DVDs. I'll share several observations:
* Don't forget to go into the Project Info dialog to set the name for 
your DVD disc, or else it will end up as "My Great DVD". No one will 
see it if they play it in a standalone player, but it shows up when 
you mount it on a Mac.  :-)
* When I saved my Photoshop files, I saved them as .psd in case I 
wanted to modify them later. It turns out that iMovie 3 will import 
.psd files, but it warns you that it can't apply the Ken Burns Effect 
to them. This is one way to avoid the KBE if it bothers you.
* Once I started the iDVD burn process, it took a number of tries 
before it every actually burned a disc (didn't end up with any 
coasters, though). The first time, it stopped after about 15 minutes 
with an encoding error of some sort, at exactly the moment that I 
swiveled my iMac flat-panel screen to the side; could have been a 
coincidence, I guess. The next two times, it ejected the disc with no 
error message at about the point where I expected it to start 
burning. Then I logged out and logged back in with the shift key down 
to keep most other unnecessary processes from starting, and was 
finally able to get iDVD to start and finish the actual burn 
(actually, I had it burn two additional copies, as well).

The final product looks great on my DVD player (used Apple-brand 
DVD-Rs). Even the text looks fine.

Again, thanks for the help and advice.

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