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Part Two: Editing in iMovie > Chapter 7: Titles, Captions,and Credits - Pg. 179

chapter 7 Titles, Captions, and Credits T ext superimposed over footage is incredibly common in the flm and video worlds. You'd be hard-pressed to fnd a single movie, TV show, or commer- cial that doesn't have titles, captions, or credits. In fact, it's the absence of su- perimposed text that helps identify most camcorder videos as amateur efforts. In iMovie, the term title refers to any kind of text: credits, titles, subtitles, copyright notices, and so on. You use them almost exactly the way you use the transitions or effects described in Chapter 6: by choosing a text-animation style from a list, adjusting its duration using a slider, dragging it into your Movie Track, and waiting while iMovie renders the effect. But you don't need to be nearly as economical in your use of titles as you are with transitions. Transitional effects and visual effects interfere with something that stands perfectly well on its own--the footage. Transitions and special effects that aren't pur- poseful and important to the flm may well annoy or distract your audience. When you superimpose text, on the other hand, the audience is much more likely to accept your intrusion. You're introducing this new element for its beneft, to convey infor- mation you couldn't transmit otherwise. Moreover, as you'll soon see, most of iMovie's text effects are far more focused in purpose than its transition and effect selections, so you'll have little trouble choosing the optimum text effect for a particular editing situation. For example, the Scroll- ing Credits effect rolls a list of names slowly up the screen--an obvious candidate for the close of your movie. Another puts several consecutive lines of text in a little block at the lower-left corner of the screen--exactly the way the text in MTV music videos appears. chapter7:titles,captions,andcredits 179