iMovie editing question

I’m starting to create my MindBite, I am trying to put letters over my video as it goes along, like a title. I want to place specific words over certain areas of one clip without having to cut the clip into two and adding a ‘title’. I am using iMovie. Do I have to make a clip for each word and then a title for each clip? That would make for a lot of transitions and may make the movie look choppy. Is there a way to have words fade in and out in one solid clip? Let me know if you need more clarification.

Also, in the play dough video the author splits the screen with half black and puts the ingredients on the black half. Was that done in iMovie or another program? If it was done in iMovie can you tell me how to do it?

First off, good questions. Hopefully I will be able to adequately answer them…

There is a way in iMovie to simply place a title on your one solid clip of footage and have it fade in and out, you shouldn’t need to chop up your original clip. There are multiple versions of iMovie, but bear with me, I think the steps below should work for you:

-Make sure you are in the timeline view, not the frame view (there’s an icon of a clock next to an icon of a film frame, click the clock to get into timeline view).

-Go to the editing tab, and go to the titles subdivision. Choose whatever title you want to use then, and here’s the key, make sure the OVER BLACK box is unselected. This should allow for you now to drag your title over your original clip and it will simply place it on top, like a band-aid, and not separate your original footage into multiple clips. You can play with the speed and pause functions to determine the length of the title over the clip.

Now, the playdough video was actually edited in a program called Premiere, so I don’t think its possible in iMovie to do the split-screen effect, sorry.

Alright, did some research and I found a website called “Stupendous Software’ that offers iMovie plugins that allow one to perform more advanced functions within the program. There is a specific plugin for a splitscreen effect that your can find here:

http://store6.esellerate.net/store/ProductInfo.aspx?StoreIDC=STR288250495&SkuIDC=SKU2936191240

The plugins cost $25 each, or $200 for the whole bundle that has tons of different effects for you to play with. Its up to you if you want to cough up the dough, but getting plugins like these are pretty much the only way for you to do something like a splitscreen effect in iMovie.

From my other post:

To your first question, I am happy to say that there is a way. Here are the steps:

1. In your timeline, select the clip that you want to add text to. Make sure you’re in timeline mode which is the clock (versus clip mode)
2. Go into the Editing tab on the right side of your project panels and select Titles from the top tab.
3. Click on any title you like and it will preview it in the viewer for you.
4. In the titles options, type in your text, change the speed to your liking and then for the tricky part.
5. In your viewer, drag the “in” and “out” triangles that sit by default at the beginning of your clip.
6. Place them where you want your title to go and preview.
7. Make sure the speed/length of your title fits the amount of space you’ve clipped in the viewer.
8. Once it is to your liking, select the check mark to the right of the preview line.

You can add as many titles as you want and put titles over titles AND you can delete them but if you have 2 titles on top of each other you delete in the order that they were made….so the last title gets deleted before the first title.

It’s great to learn how to do these things in iMovie and I totally understand your original frustration. I had the same problem too!

With the split screen stuff you have to download external plug-ins which will give you that effect. They are tricky to use, but you can find them here for free:

http://www.stupendous-software.com/Stupendous/SplitScreenPiP/Pages/index.html

Choose DEMO at the top and it will download the zip file. Once extracted, open the OSX-imovie6 plug-in called splitscreen and looks like a lego and drag it into your iMovie > Plug-ins folder. It should be under Library on the left-hand side of your shotcuts panel in your Finder. Refer to the instructions in ReadMe in the bundle.

Once you restart iMovie you should see in you video FX the new ss plug-ins. The last 4 in the bundle are without “demo text” and are free. But tricky to use. Let me know if you can’t figure it out. I can help.