

As it reaches the start of the text effect box, your text will appear and then disappear when the playhead reaches the end of the text effect. When you are happy with your settings, place your playhead somewhere in your timeline before the text effect starts, and press the spacebar to play your movie.

And the (currently) white square to its right allows you to change the font color.įinally, pressing the word Reset at the far right will reset any changes you’ve made, restoring all settings to the template’s defaults.

The O after the italic setting is an option to outline your text. If you click on the T, a new row of settings appears just below it, highlighted by the green oval in the screenshot below.įrom left to right, these settings allow you to change the font, the size of the text (set to “Auto” in the screenshot above), and then the usual alignment options as well as buttons to make the text bold ( B) or italic ( I). If you place your playhead (highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot below), over a clip which has a text effect above it, a T will appear (highlighted by the green arrow in the screenshot below) at the left side of the row of setting icons in the viewer. That out of the way, how exactly do you customize a template/title/text? So, honestly, I’m trying to help here, but if you can remember that text, titles, and templates are all really the same thing you’ll be fine… And I think of iMovie’s Titles as more like templates because each one is so customizable. Sorry for any confusion, but I think of titles as a special kind of text – the dramatic text that opens a movie. Speaking of jargon, Apple calls these text effects Titles, but I have been calling them templates. In editing jargon, this box is called the Text Effect because it is an effect that changes the appearance of any video below it, and in this case, the effect is to add some text. The template is now represented by the narrow purplish box just to the right of the green arrow. Then I dragged it onto my timeline, dropping it where the green arrow is pointing in the screenshot above. In the screenshot below I have clicked on the “Pop-up” template (highlighted by the red arrow), which turns its border yellow. We’ll talk more below about what kind of templates might work best in different situations, but when you’ve found the one you want, simply drag it onto your timeline wherever you want your text to start. This is particularly helpful for animated templates – where the text animates onto or off the screen. You can preview any template by slowly dragging your pointer across the thumbnail.

There are over 50 of them, so keep scrolling! Note that you can scroll up and down in the Media Browser to see more templates.
Add text on imovie series#
So regardless of what kind of text you might want to add to your movie, you start with the Titles tab in the Media Browser.Īfter clicking the Titles tab (highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot below), you will see a series of thumbnails (inside the dotted red line in the screenshot below), each representing a different title template. IMovie considers all text a type of title.
