PE1_iMovie

This week, my class is learning all about iMovie, one of the many fun products that come in Apple's iLife software suite. To help us truly understand the full scope of features that iMovie has to offer, our professor has assigned the iMovie 09 training series on Lynda.com.

The great thing about Lynda is that it gives you a detailed outline of the topics that will be covered, so that you can jump straight to the topics you need - or view them all from beginning to end, depending on your current needs.

One particular feature of iMovie that I have been eager to learn about is the application and customization of title slides. iMovie makes it really easy to drag and drop a template slide into your project, but I've found it a bit difficult to edit them to look exactly how I'd hoped.

In Chapter 5 of the iMovie series, there is a section on editing text properties. It has given me some great tips for saving time and further customizing my title slides.

First, before you can begin, of course you need to select a title slide template.

To do this, look to the tool pane in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Then click the "T" button to select the Text templates.

In the template window, select the template you'd like to add. Then, drag and drop it into position in your project.

Next, a box will immediately appear to ask you to change a background for your title slide. Pick a color - any color.

Now, once your template and background color are selected, you'll see a preview in the top-right panel.

And here comes the new exciting stuff...

Do you see the "Show Fonts" button in the top-left corner? 

If you click that button, it will open a separate window with a world of font options available.

You can choose to select from nine pre-selected font styles and nine font sizes, as well as color, alignment and text features, such as bold and itallics.

To take it a step farther, you can click the System Font Panel button in the bottom-left. That will open the complete set of font and color options, as well as advanced text formatting, like letter and line spacing and much more.

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Now, for all of you who are already well aquainted with these features, I challenge you to show me something new about editing text in iMovie that will undoubtedly blow my mind.

I can't wait to hear from you.