Creating transparent overlays for iMovie

The trans­par­ent func­tion­al­ity is back again thanks to John Sadler, his excel­lent con­tri­bu­tion in the com­ments to get around a bug is marked red below. Thank you John.

Some­times you want to add graph­ics on top of your iMovie. Maybe you want to show an arrow point­ing at some­thing, maybe you want to encir­cle some­thing or to insert spe­cial text or graph­ics includ­ing bounc­ing let­ters or any kind of text. When doing so, you can make stun­ning pre­sen­ta­tions and movies with a very pro­fes­sional touch.

What you want to do is to add a trans­par­ent pic­ture or a trans­par­ent movie to over­lay the clips you already have. This can be done with trans­par­ent PNG files but I don’t think it’s the best way. The bet­ter way is to use Keynote for cre­at­ing the graph­ics. After sav­ing the pre­se­n­a­tion as a Quick­Time movie, it can be imported as a PiP (pic­ture-in-pic­ture) in iMovie, and resized to fill the screen. Dur­ing play­back in iMovie, it does not dis­play cor­rectly (on my Macs), maybe the pro­cess­ing time was not enough to do the PiP “live”, but after shar­ing the movie as “Export movie”, it turned out to do exactly what I wanted.

Detailed expla­na­tion

1. It is usu­ally impor­tant to posi­tion the over­laid graph­ics pre­cisely. You will there­fore need still pic­tures form the regions you want to add graph­ics to. The best way to do this is to add a still­frame from an EVENT, which is nor­mally located at the lower lower part of the iMovie window.Move the play­head (the red ver­ti­cal line) over a frame in the Event browser, and then hold down the Con­trol key as you click. In the menu that appears, choose “Add Still Frame to Project.” If you want to add other graph­ics to other places, repat this procedure.
2. You will now have a set of stills at the end of the event. Hold down the Con­trol key as you click on any of them and choose “Show in Finder”. You will then be taken to the folder where the still jpg is located.
3. Open Keynote and make sure to have the same aspect ratio as in the iMovie project. If the iMovie project is 4:3, cre­ate a slide show (cus­tom res­o­lu­tion) set to 640 x 480 pix­els. If the project is 16:9, set the res­o­lu­tion in Keynote to be 960 x 540.
4. Add slides and add the still pic­tures from the finder window.
5. Add the graph­ics. Finally!!! This is what you wanted to do.
6. Spend time to make lots of nice graph­ics includ­ing text effects, arrows. Add shad­ows in using the inspec­tor win­dow if you find it suit­able. Any­thing will trans­late will into iMovie!
7. When all your nice graph­ics is com­pleted, remove the still images.
8. Select all the slides in the slideshow in the left­most side of the Keynote win­dow. In the inspec­tor, push she slide but­ton, it is the sec­ond but­ton from the left. Push the Appear­ance tab.
9. Set back­ground to White  (New!!!) and set the Color Fill Opac­ity to 0% (New!!!) when the Color selec­tor win­dow opens.
10. Export as Quick­Time Movie. Check “Include trans­parency” and select “Fixed Tim­ing”. Default val­ues are okay, you can change tim­ings later. Select “Cus­tom…” format.
11. In the “Cus­tom win­dow” select Ani­ma­tion (or PNG), 25 for frame rate (or 30 or what ever you want to match to your iMovie project) and select “Mil­lions of col­ors+” (note the plus sign) and “No filter”.
12. Export the movie to the desk­top. You can pre­view it to make sure it looks like you want. If the back­ground suc­ceded to become trans­par­ent, it shows up as black in the Quick­Time movie. (If it is white, you have a problem).
13. Import the Quick­Time movie into the event and selct the regions that you want to copy to add to the movie edi­tor. Drag it to the clip where you want it to be inserted and place the mouse pointer ON the clip. A plus sign on a green dot will show up and when you release it, you will get a list of choices to choose from on how to insert the clip. Choose PiP.
14. Resize the clip to fill the screen and voila, you are done.
15. You can of course drag the PiP-clip to the left and the right to get the tim­ing good.

 

Again, please note that this type of over­lay may not show up cor­rectly when you pre­view and play the movie in iMovie, espe­cially if your Mac is slow. How­ever, when the movie is shared and exported, it will show up perfectly.