Sometimes... stuff happens

As I’ve been doing more video editing work lately, there was something always bugging me.  How to I easily get some kind of logo onto the video that would persist through the project?  It seemed like more work than it really should be after looking at some tutorial videos.  Once I figured it out… it’s not hard at all and I’d like to share.

When shooting a project I tend to film in HD and export to the web.  To be honest, 960x540 is probably the perfect resolution for HD web video ( even though it’s not technically HD at that point ).

The tutorial will start with opening your image editor of choice and start a project with dimensions of 960x540 and a transparent background.  I prefer Pixelmator for these kind of tasks so that’s what you’ll see today.

Now just add whatever elements you need with the placement you desire.  I am going to add a small logo to the left hand corner.

Now go ahead and export your image as a transparent PNG

Then you’re done with your image editor and can close it down if you feel it necessary.

Open up your project in iMovie

There may be a better way to do this but just grab your newly created PNG and drop if on the timeline.  Here you’ll be presented with some options.  You’ll want to select cutaway.

Once the cutaway clip is added to the timeline, adjustments can be made to how long you want to it appear.  Just drag to desired position.

If you’re like me, you never changed the defaults on your project so pretty anything that can be Ken Burns’d… will be.  Now we’re going to turn that off.

Click on the adjustments button on the bottom left corner of the cutaway and select Cropping, Ken Burns & Rotation.

In the preview window you’ll see some red and green outlines and the Ken Burns button will be highlighted.

Select the ‘Fit’ button and the outlines should disappear.  We chose ‘Fit’ because in our image editor, the image was already created at the correct resolution that we needed.

All done!  That’s all you had to do.  The only bad thing I noticed is that you can’t seem to line the cutaways right up to a transition.  If it’s too close the transition doesn’t seem to activate.  If anyone knows of a better way, please let me know in the comments.  I’d love to hear how I can improve this technique.

Now if you want to create a watermark, you’ll do the same thing except you’ll adjust the opacity your cutaway.  Here is how to do that.

Click the adjustments icon on the left lower corner again and select ‘Clip Adjustments’

You’ll see the Opacity slider

Just slide back to your desired transparency and there you go!

I hope this proved useful to someone and like I said before, if anyone knows of a way to improve this technique… let me know.