Adding Titles and Credits to Your Movies with Windows Movie Maker 2
Updated: November 13, 2003
Windows Movie Maker 2 for Windows XP includes features that make it easy to add titles and credits to your movies. You can add any text that you'd like, including the title of your movie, your name, the date, and the names of the actors. You can also place the titles anywhere you want—at the beginning or end of a movie, before or after a clip, or even overlaying a clip. You can also specify the length of time that the title will appear.
Figure 1: A project with a title that displays before a video clip.
Figure 2: A project with displays as an overlay title over a video clip.
Figure 3: A project with credits that appear at the end of the project.
Choosing the Title Animation
With title animation effects, you can control the way titles play back in your movies. For example, the Typewriter title animation displays title text one character at a time.
Windows Movie Maker includes three categories of title animations:
Titles, One Line
As the name suggests, the title animations in this category are best suited for titles that contain a single line of text. When you select a title animation from this category, the text area for entering the title appears as one large text box. The text you enter then appears all at once in your movie, even if your title actually runs to more than one line of text.
Titles, Two Lines
The title animations in this category work best for titles that contain two or more lines of text. When you pick a title animation in this category, you'll see two areas for entering text. The first line of text you enter appears first and then the second line of text appears shortly after the first line of text is displayed.
Credits
Movie Maker also makes it easy to add credits to your home movies. When a title animation is selected in this category, the text area for entering the credits appears as a small grid. Use the top row to enter the title of your movie. The rows below provide two columns where you can enter information about your movie. You can use the first column for entering titles such as director and scriptwriter, and the second column to enter their names, for example.
For each category, if the title will appear as an overlay, you'll see the notation (overlay) at the end of the title animation description.
Entering Titles and Credits
Here's how to use title and credit features of Windows Movie Maker 2:
1. | On the Tools menu, click Titles and Credits. –or- In the Movie Tasks pane, under Edit Movie, click Make titles or credits. |
2. | On the Where do you want to add a title? page, click a link that corresponds to the place where you want to add the title. |
3. | In the Enter Text for Title page, type the text you want to appear as the title. |
4. | Click Change the title animation, and then on the Choose the Title Animation page, select a title animation from the list. |
5. | Click Change the text and font color, and then on the Select Title Font and Color page, choose the font, font color, formatting, background color, transparency, font size, and position of the title. |
6. | Click Done, add title to movie to add the title to your movie. |
