Placing a text bar in my video?

[MistaDobalina]

In my video, I'm going to need to put a medium-large thick black line at the bottom of the video which will display various facts and sentences while the video plays. I don't want it to actually hide the lower 1/3 of my video and I don't want to just make it transparent either. I want the full video shown, though it would be smaller, with a black line at the bottom where I can present facts and figures.

How do I add this black line to my video and type text into it? I have new FCP, iMovie 6 (i believe), and LiveType 2.0. Do any of those have an easy option?

If not, can somebody please explain how I can accomplish this?

Thanks

 

[MistaDobalina]

Ok it is actually called lower thirds. You can do it in Vegas

but I don't have vegas.

 

[knightly]

You can use the shapes generator (lower right corner of the viewer -not the canvas, little film strip looking icon) to make a rectangle and then use a 4 point garbage matte to choke it to the shape you want drop that on the track above the main footage. Then use the text generator (same place on the viewer) on a third track.

you can fade the titles in and out, add textures to them by using clouds or flowing fabric kinds of footage instead of the shape generator. I've used partial 1/3s by adjusting the garbage matte to fit along the edge of a piece of clothing or other element in the scene.

You can adjust the opacity of the second track to show as much of the background image as you want too.

 

[Zensteve]

I think "lower thirds" is a text-alignment tool. Used to be, on earlier versions of Premiere, at any rate.

You have a few options:

In your Titles section, create the shape of a bar (colour it black) the width of the screen, place it onto a video layer... and position it so it looks like a strip at the bottom. (This will cover up a small part of the bottom of the video)

Not really a good idea unless you have a lot of spare time to idle, as you'll have to render every frame of your video.


It would be way easier to position titles, down there, just like sub-titles. If you do that, you need to make sure the letters have a stroke on them, and also maybe a wee bit of drop-shadow. This makes it much easier to read, especially if the letters are a similar colour to the video below it.


Since you said you want that bar to be "extra" (not covering any of the video at all), if you really want to do that you'll have to resize your footage within the actual canvas size of the film itself. I don't know of any easy way to do that. I get confused just thinking about aspect ratios.

The videos you've seen with that blank bar at the top and the bottom would be 16x9 footage placed into a 4x3 environment. Too wide to fit the edges normally, so they get squeezed closer together - which means the top & bottoms have to shrink as well (otherwise everything looks tall & extra-thin).