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10. Editing in iMovie HD
i. Making a Title Sequence: All Digital Stories need a title that runs for six seconds at
the beginning; it fades in, holds for five seconds and then fades out. iMovie HD
provides many preformatted styles for titles but, just now, we will opt for something
traditional. (Note: you may find later that you have some time on your hands and, if
then you want to have a go at changing the way your titles look, you should. There
are 20 available formats many of them with multiple variations. But please don’t
waste time doing this now; ultimately your creativity will be measured by the way
you tell your story, not by how pretty the title sequence looks.)
So, begin by going to the Timeline and—in the Playhead track—move the Playhead
until it is at the 0:06:00 mark (zero minutes, six seconds and zero frames). Note: it’s a
good idea to “move in” a bit closer on your Timeline now, using the Zoom Slider in
combination with the big blue horizontal scrolling lozenge at the bottom of the screen.
If you find it hard to hit the exact 6 seconds spot, then get the Playhead as close as
you can with the mouse and use the left “home” and right “end” arrow keys on your
keyboard to move it one frame at a time forwards or backwards.
The reason for moving the Playhead to 0:06:00 is so that we can arrange for the Titles
to be up on the screen for six seconds before the voice-over starts to play.
iMovie HD has a gadget to help you align clips in the Timeline, it’s called the “Snap”
feature. To turn it on go iMOVIE HD > PREFERENCES and, under GENERAL, tick
the box labelled “Snap to items in Timeline”. You can, if you want, also tick the box
labelled “Play sound effects when snapping”. What Snapping does is give the clip
you are moving a “magnetic” attraction to the Playhead, to the last (or first) frame of
other clips in the Timeline and also to places in the audio track where a sound starts or
stops. With Snap turned on you will find that it is easier to make sure that all your
clips bond with each other and leave no unwanted gaps (known as “flash frames”)
between clips.
So click-select the voice-over clip and, pointing in the middle of the clip (not at its
edge) click-drag it along the Timeline until you reach the place where the start of the
speaking voice comes to rest just after the ghosted Playhead position at 0:06:00.
(Note in the following graphic that I have click-dragged the voice-over clip from the
lower to the higher of the two audio tracks… just to show that it doesn’t matter which
one it occupies. It’ll work just as well in either.)
(75 pages)
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