Need Help with a Movie Project

[Jovian9]

Hey everyone.

My wife and I have a pretty important anniversary coming up (all are important of course but this one stands out more b/c of the years). I have a large collection of digital videos that I am working on and narrowing down to about 5 minutes. That part ,while difficult to narrow down our entire lives together, is easy to do technically.

What I need help with is adding words/sentences/notes around the video. Ideally I'd like to have the video sit in the center covering most of the screen and then have a black bar that runs around the outside of the video so that I can display up to 4 different messages at one time. 1 message running across the top, the next across the bottom, the next across the left side, and the next across the right side. Kind of like subtitles or breaking news type stuff but in no way covering the video.

Does that make sense?

How can I go about doing this? What software allows such a thing? I'm obviously using Macs for this so it has to be Apple software.

I haven't used iMovie much since my kids were born (about 3 years) and it's been even longer than that since I've touched FCP (about 6 years). In the past I did use both quite a bit. But I'll use whichever it takes to get this done.

Any help would be appreciated. I've got about 4 weeks to get this done and plenty of time in that 4 weeks to buy the software, get the videos on my hd, and do any editing that needs done.

Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Why do you want to have four (4) different texts bordering the video? That is kinda overkill and the eyes and brain will not know where to look first, thus the viewer will be confused and can't even look at the image, that is shown.
Why not let it be simple and just use one line of text on the bottom (or top if necessary)? iMovie can do this.
Btw, Adobe offers a 30 days fully functioning trial of After Effects, which will do what you want quite easily.

 

[Jovian9]

Why do you want to have four (4) different texts bordering the video? That is kinda overkill and the eyes and brain will not know where to look first, thus the viewer will be confused and can't even look at the image, that is shown.
Why not let it be simple and just use one line of text on the bottom (or top if necessary)? iMovie can do this.
Btw, Adobe offers a 30 days fully functioning trial of After Effects, which will do what you want quite easily.

The song I am using for some of this video is a sentimental song for us. At any given time there are 4 different sets of lyrics going on at the same time in the song. She won't need to read them to know them. It's more of an effect to emphasize everything

Thanks for the tip on After Effects. I'll go look at that.

 

[DisMyMac]

Not sure if there is a great solution, however:

To get the black border, I'd use MPEG Streamclip (it's free). Enter negative cropping values for however many lines you want added to each side, then select whether to apply those values to either "source, destination, or scaling". Sorry my brain is fried after a long day, so I can't advise which option is best. I think destination, or maybe it doesn't matter as long as the numbers are symmetrical.

I'd select multi-pass and overkill the bitrate somewhat, since you're now re-encoding and not just defining stuff like within in a true editing program.

Next, import it into iMove, and lose your mind trying to make those captions work... I think it can be done, just make sure you press "show fonts" in the upper left corner of the preview window, and that will bring up the system font panel in order to set left/right font alignments. (Note- the text you want to align must be highlighted first.)

You'll probably have to use a carriage return between every character in order to simulate vertical text. It's awkward, so I would definitely use TextEdit to write everything first, and then copy/paste that into iMove. In fact make sure you SAVE the captions with TextEdit, because iMovie is known to randomly lose screen captions after quitting (the more complex the captions, the more they get lost).

I guarentee there is some nifty little PC program that does all of this beautifully.... Hope you enjoy your white-colored! iPhone while you are doing this, since that's what Apple cares about more than your Mac now.

 

[wonderspark]

If you had Adobe Premiere, you could just reduce the scale of the clips, and use the titler to add in as many lines of text you want, adding motion and fading them in and out willy-nilly. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

 

[Dave Braine]

You could do all that with keynote.

 

[Jovian9]

Thanks for the info everyone. I'm going to start with a trial of After Effects and see what I can do.

 

[cgbier]

If you still have FCP, use it. You can do all the stuff you want in Motion or even in FCP's Motion tab and the text generator.

AE is a very powerful program, but it takes very long to figure it out. Its UI is (IMHO) not as logical as Motion's.