Making Transitions and Titles

Movie-Making at Home: How-to's in Making Transitions and Titles

Those precious family videos that you took years ago need not go to waste. Now, with the advent of computers, making your very own movies out of digital pictures and videos is now possible. Making titles and the right way to do transitions has never been so easy.

Programs such as Windows Movie Maker is such an easy-to-use tool in creating home-made movies. They really come in handy when you want to create a professional-looking movie out of old video clips and pictures. So as you read along you will find how easy it is to make titles and transitions while making your personalized movie.

Let's begin with titles. How do you create titles with graphics that catch attentions and create interest in the viewer? First, you have to decide the locations where you want to add titles and credits. Titles may come before or after a digital picture or a video clip or it can even be added as an overlay.

Of course, you want to put a title at the beginning of your movie. You can now enter the title and if you want, even a subtitle. Just look at the menu and click on make titles or credits. Once you have done that, you will be asked where you want to put the title. If you want it at the beginning of the movie, click on add title at the beginning of the movie.

This time you are asked to type the text you want to add as your title and subtitle. Now you may add animation to your title by choosing from a wide variety of animation graphics.  Changing the text font and the color can also be done by clicking on the different options available at the bottom of the menu.

To see if you like what you have done, just click on title preview.  A preview window will appear on the right that will show the effects you have done. You may change the animation, text color and font by just clicking on the different options. Once you are satisfied, click on done.

You may also insert more titles in any part of the movie, in between video excerpts and pictures by clicking any option on the menu. To end your movie, add credits by doing the same thing you have done with the titles. Then you may now save the movie.

Now that the titles, subtitles and credits have been added, let's find out how transitions can be done so that moving from title to video clip to pictures can become smoother. There is a wide selection of transitions that you may choose from, a total of 60 different interesting transitions. Examples would be to fade or you may shift with different geometric shapes appearing on your screen.

The first thing to do is go to the Movie Tasks pane that is under Edit Movie. Click on the view video transitions. Preview the different transitions by doing a double click on the transition of choice. Simply drag the one that you like to the box where you want your transition to be between your clips. Now add a special effects by clicking on view video effects. Preview the effects and choose one. As always, drag your choice to any box in your video clips. View what you have done by looking at the star found at the lower-left corner of your clip. Do the same thing with the other transitions that you want to do.

You may watch the movie by clicking on play at any time during the movie. After you are content with all that you have done, viola! You have now successfully made your very own movie!! Wasn't that cool? Experimenting with the different effects, transitions and titles will be fascinating. You will really enjoy this! So good luck!