- Tip 1: Add Any Location to a Travel Map
- Tip 2: Learn the Best Keyboard Shortcuts
- Tip 3: Change Clip Speed
- Tip 4: Use Smart Titles, Maps, and Photos
- Tip 5: Mark Chapters and Send to iDVD
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Tip 4: Use Smart Titles, Maps, and Photos
The iMovie designers engineered some smarts into a few areas of iMovie '09 that aren't immediately apparent. For example, the Four Corners title may seem broken at first. The two lines of text you specify fly into the lower-left corner of the screen from the left and bottom edges. The text then flies out toward the top and right edges. However, add the Four Corners title again, and the text arrives from the top and right edges, hangs out at the upper-right corner, and then exits via the left and bottom edges. Do that two more times, and you'll have taken care of all four corners.
Another example is the Date/Time title. You can't edit it, but that's okay; it displays the clip's actual date and time at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 4. (It doesn't advance like a real-time ticker, though.)
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Figure 4 iMovie's Date/Time title shows the clip's actual date at the bottom of the screen.
Now let's turn our attention to maps. You can set a Start Location and an End Location for your interactive map. Assuming that you probably want to go back home at some point, iMovie automatically uses the previous map's End Location as the Start Location for the next map you make. This little convenience is great when you're putting together a journey with multiple destinations, making it easier to hop from New York to London to Madrid to Tokyo without having to reenter a lot of the same data.
Or look at the Ken Burns Effect that's automatically applied to photos you add to your project. By default, the effect slowly zooms out. But when you add another photo, the effect is reversed, and the camera zooms in on the picture. So, when you add 10 photos back to back, without doing anything else you end up with a nice series of pictures that smoothly zoom out, in, out, and so on.