On the previous page I said:
How nice, I thought, if I could do this sort of thing:
Well, you can, and quite nicely, and, I think, very attractively and easily. You need some additional software, and you need it to create this sort of thing:
The first thing, which you may have spotted, is that my background colour is showing right through these two examples. That's because they're not JPEGs (.jpg)
but PNGs (.png). Portable network graphics. PNGs can feature a transparent background (unlike JPEG) which means that anything under the material shines right through.
This feature is the crucial and most important thing we're going for here, because not only does my web page peer through, but so does my movie.
So how do we make a pretty PNG for our movie?
We'll need software. It needs to be some sort of graphics creation software, and it needs to be able to feature a transparent backgroound and to be able to save in
PNG format.
I have no doubt there are numerous graphics programs out there which can do the above. One candidate easily springs to mind, and it's the ancient and venerable PhotoShop.
But it's my duty to report that I thoroughly and totally detest the utterly loathsome Adobe, and won't have any Adobe software anywhere near my machine. There are various reasons for this, but,
for example, just read up on what they're doing with LightRoom in October 2017.
Alternatives? Well, PixelMator is one example. I daresay there's a Corel product which will do the trick, and there's Affinity Designer, but the main products I've been using are:
Art Text 3. Very nice. I've used it on and off for ages now, and it's $30, which I think is very reasonable. "The Colours of Autumn"
above was created with Art Text.
Logoist. I've only just discovered this product, and currently getting to grips with it. Initial thoughts are that it's pretty good and really quite sophisticated. I made
"Jim's Films" with Logoist (no idea who Jim is, by the way). It comes with many preset get-you-started examples built-in. Best of all, perhaps, is that it's only $15 (as at October 2017) but I see
that it's usually $30.
So how do we get our beautiful creation into our iMovie epic? Well, I'm NOT going to teach you how to use Art Text or Logoist here; I'm assuming you've already got your hands on one of the products (or similar) and have created your artwork.
Just one point though: make sure the size of the artwork is quite generous in order to keep it looking crisp and sharp in the movie. For Art Text and a 4K movie I usually use a 2000 x 2000 canvas. Don't worry if that sounds big - once we
get into iMovie we'll be resizing it to taste; the large initial size ensures that it'll look good at any size.
I think we'll
move to a new page to continue with the detailed iMovie instructions.
