You know, iMovie's lower third titles get the job done,
but they're not very customizable.
You're pretty much stuck with what they give you. And honestly,
after watching many, many videos,
you can kind of spot an movie lower third title a mile away.
Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow customize an iMovie lower third title
to fit your branding or the look and feel of your video? Well,
here's a quick and easy way to customize an iMovie lower third title,
and you don't even have to leave iMovie to do it. All right.
So here we are in iMovie. I have this sample video clip on the timeline,
and I'm going to add a lower third title to this video by clicking on
the title section of the browser,
then clicking and dragging the standard lower third title
above my video clip in the timeline.
I'll go over and I'll fill in the text of the lower third.
Okay. So I'm going to go up and select the check mark to set my title text.
Okay. I'll preview in the timeline
and the lower third fades on and off, pretty standard stuff. Right?
Let's add some production value to this lower third by giving it a
custom animated background using the media and the tools that are
already here in iMovie. Okay.
So I'm going to go up into the background section of the browser,
and I'm going to go down to the underwater background and if I scrub
over it, you can see it's animated.
I'm going to click and drag the underwater background down to the video clip and
notice the lower third title jumps up and out of the
way to its own layer. Okay.
So I'm just going to place the underwater background.
So it sits right underneath the lower third title.
So if I scrub over what I have,
you can see the lower third title text sitting on top of the
underwater background, full screen. That's not exactly what we want.
So I'm going to park the play head on the underwater background
with the underwater background selected.
I'm going to go up to the top of the preview window and select the
video overlays settings.
And then from the menu on the left that says cutaway I'll select picture in
picture,
and you can see the underwater background clip becomes inset
in the preview window.
It is now a picture in picture element that I can manipulate.
So I'm going to click and drag on these corner points here to
stretch the underwater background, to cover the entire screen.
Then I'm going to click and drag the entire background down until it covers
just above the top of it.
At least covers just above the lower third title text.
I'll click the check mark at the top of the corner to lock in my changes in the
picture in picture. And now let's play this
Instant production value. Looks pretty good,
but I'm going to change a few things just to make everything just pop a bit
more.
So I'm gonna go back into picture in picture editing mode by making sure the
underwater background is selected.
Then going back up to the top of the preview window and selecting the now
highlighted overlay button, which brings me back into editing mode.
So now I'm going to click and drag the underwater background back
up until it fills the entire screen.
Then I'm going to click and drag on one of these corner points to shrink the
background down just a bit,
and then I'm going to drag it to the top of the screen.
So I can just manipulate it. Give me some room to manipulate it a little bit.
I'm going to grab one of the corner points and I'm going to drag it down all the
way. You can see it moving diagonally and then watch what happens.
You see that the underwater background flipped,
it flipped horizontally. So why did I do that?
Well,
I wanted to actually use these light rays in the image that
were actually on the bottom of the image as the actual background for the lower
third text title, just, uh, you know, makes it a little more subtle,
less busy than the caustic effect at the top of the image here.
All right,
now I'll just resize and position the underwater background as I did before.
Okay. That looks good. All right, let's play this back
Much better. The text just reads a little better,
but I'm going to do one more thing.
So I'm going to leave the play head parked on the background in the timeline
and I'll make sure it's selected.
Then I'm going to go back up to the menu at the top of the preview window.
And this time I'm going to select the color correction button
and I'll go down to the brightness slider control here,
and then I'm going to click and drag it to the left,
to darken my underwater background.
So the text can pop a bit more. All right,
let's play that back.
Nice. That's really nice.
And that's not the only modification you can actually make to this.
I could go over and grab the saturation slider over here and reduce
the saturation till it's grayscale. The image is grayscale,
or I can drag it all the way to the right to really amp up that blue color,
make it really saturated.
I could also grab the color temperature slider over here,
and I can drag it to the left to add blue or more blue to the color in the
image, of the colors in the image,
or I can drag it to the right to add yellow to
the colors in the image, which in this case gives us green.
I can also adjust my lower third background using clip filters.
This is really quick and easy.
So I'm going to reset the color changes I made first,
by going over and selecting the reset button,
then I'm going to go up to the clip filters button up here.
I'm gonna select that and then select the filter or rather the clip
filter drop-down menu over here.
And we get the clip filter gallery and we can already see a preview of what the
background will look like with different clip filters applied.
You can also just hover over each of the filters with your cursor to get a
bigger preview in the preview window of what the clip filters will look like.
So let's select, let's select Day into Night.
All right. Let's preview that... Sharp.
That looks really nice. Okay.
Let me quickly show you a bonus move you can do with this technique.
Take it up a notch. If you will. If we play this back,
you can see the lower third background is dissolving on at the beginning and
then dissolving off screen.
And that's because if we go up and we select the video overlay settings,
we have this transition style,
which is set to dissolve with a duration of half a second.
So I'm going to set this duration to zero seconds.
So that we don't have a dissolve.
And now with my background selected and in the picture in picture interface,
I'm going to animate the lower third background onto the screen using
keyframe animation here in iMovie.
So the first thing I'm going to do is go down to the timeline and I'm going to
place the playhead at the very beginning of the background clip.
Then I'm going to go back over and open up the picture in picture interface.
Then.
I'm going to go down to the underwater background and I'm going to click and
drag it straight down until it's off the screen.
I'm going to use the snapping,
these snapping guides that appear just to help me keep things straight.
Okay. With the background off screen,
I'll go up to this little keyframe tool in the top left corner of the preview
window and hit the little diamond with a plus sign in the middle to set a
keyframe to store the position of the background at this point in the timeline.
That's what keyframes do. Now. If I wanted to remove that keyframe,
I would just click this diamond symbol with the little X in the corner. Okay.
Next,
I'll go back down to the timeline and I'm going to click and drag the playhead
around one second.
In, just approximately there.
Now, I'll go back to the preview window and select and drag the underwater
background up to its final position.
Okay.
You can see a keyframe is automatically placed at that spot in the
timeline with the new position of the background stored.
So it does it automatically. All right. Let's preview.
This.
The background animates from the bottom of the screen. Kind of cool.
All right.
I'm going to actually delay the lower third text title so that it appears
after the background animates on by clicking and dragging the beginning of the
title, clip, I'm just,
I'm going to move the end point down a bit on the timeline.
See what that looks like.
Try another one here. It may take some trial and error to get the timing right.
Okay. Let's preview that.
All right.
Now we need to fix actually the ending of the lower third because it kind of
just cuts off at the end.
So I'm going to drag the end of the underwater background clip out a bit so that
it's still on screen after the title text fades out,
then I'm going to place the playhead at the end of the lower third title text
and select the underwater background clip again,
I'll go back up and I'm going to set another keyframe.
Then I'll go back to the timeline.
Drag the play head to the last frame of the background clip.
Now you may need to use the left and right arrow keys to nudge the playhead
into the right spot to the absolute last frame of the background.
There there we go.
Then I'm going to go back over and drag the background down off
screen. And again,
with the help of the guides keep things straight.
And as you can see on the keyframe tool,
a keyframe is automatically created for this change. Okay. Let's preview.
Fancy.
Now don't worry.
You don't have to go through all of that for every lower third in your
video,
you can just copy and paste the title and background clips to a new spot,
and then just revise the lower third text accordingly. In fact,
if you really want to be efficient,
you could save your lower third creation as its own iMovie project or better
yet create a collection of your custom lower thirds as its own iMovie project.
And then when you need them, you just open your custom lower third project,
copy the custom lower third you want to use and just paste it into the new
project. Pro looking lower thirds, using the media that comes with iMovie,
but you're not limited to these built-in backgrounds.
You can bring in your own still or animated background and use the
same process that I showed you here.
A simple and effective technique for adding your own branding to your videos in
iMovie.
iMovie isn't as powerful as Final Cut Pro,
it doesn't have all the features that Final Cut Pro has, but it's free.
And it's simple to use and with a little ingenuity and by watching some of my
tutorials, you can get some pro results. Thanks for watching.
And I'll see you next time.