Comments on: OS X tools for overlaying a copyright notice over a film

Question: OS X tools for overlaying a copyright notice over a film

mrbill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:07:34 -0800

I'm involved with a "currently in post-production" motion picture. I've got a MPEG of the film (although I can convert to any needed format), and need to overlay a text copyright notice over the entire film so that its visible at the top or bottom of the screen. Can anyone suggest tools for doing this under OS X?

Free/shareware/donationware tools would be preferred, as we don't have the budget for Apple's pro-level video software. I've been doing a lot of work with iMovie and ffmpegX. :)

By: drezdn

drezdn — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:38:23 -0800

Using Imovie, you could make a strip subtitle with it on, but I don't think you can use one to go the entire length of the movie. You could put them every X of seconds or minutes. The one problem with using Imovie to do this is that it handles titles weirdly in my opinion (I haven't used it in a few months but when you add a title it has a strange way of dealing with the clips you add titles too).

I can tell you that in Pinnacle LE (a program my boss bought- not my first choice) it would be as simple as creating the title, then just stretch the title to last the whole length of the video.
But Pinnacle LE isn't free.

OR, if you way of transfering the video to XP, you could use moviemaker (included with XP) and just stretch the title to last the entire length.

By: hopeless romantique

hopeless romantique — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:53:56 -0800

Final Cut Express is only ("only", in comparison with FCP), $300. And well worth it, IMO, especially because making iMovies do something like that is far too tedious.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:07:21 -0800

hopeless romantique: This is one of those "doing stuff out of the goodness of my heart, on zero budget" projects. If the movie makes a profit I get a percentage, but neither the producer or I have the budget right now to lay out on FCE. Unfortunately I missed the "trade in old Adobe software for a free copy of FCE" deal about a year ago.

Thanks for the tip about Windows MovieMaker - I've got a Windows box available that I can dedicated to that for a couple of days. Hopefully it will allow saving in something other than Windows Media format.

By: stefnet

stefnet — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:14:42 -0800

How about this thingy? I've never used it, but it came up in a search. $30 is a little better than $300 at least.

By: RustyBrooks

RustyBrooks — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:39:43 -0800

I bet you could do it with my old favorite, MPlayer and it's side kick, Mencoder.
I know there is a way to add subtitles to a movie. Whatever you choose to use, that's probably going to be easier than a static copyright notice.

MPlayer is the movie player arm of the program, MEncoder is the re-encoder, which is *probably* what you need to use, although I'm not positive.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:41:51 -0800

Cleaner 6! Add "watermark" - will be on entire movie. Plus, you can make it perfect size (still looking good) for all sorts of viewings, DVDS, web, whatever. It's what cleaner does best. Drop any iMovie .mov/.mpeg on cleaner set your settings, wateremark would be under "image" and off you go. The watermark should be a .psd file.

can be found on those networks but you didn't hear t from me and might as well buy it as it's very useful

By: dabitch

dabitch — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:43:15 -0800

sorry, forgot the link: Cleaner 6.

By: dorian

dorian — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:25:48 -0800

if you are able to suffer using windows, there's not much that virtualdub can't do. can certainly burn in subs, and I believe there is even a logo/watermarking filter available.

also, it's free.

By: dorian

dorian — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:29:55 -0800

yep, logo filter

By: WolfDaddy

WolfDaddy — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:36:31 -0800

I second and third VirtualDub. Your easiest, free-est solution! Plus, it was developed in my old hometown.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 13:10:56 -0800

Dorian: I keep a Windows box around for when I feel a need to be sadistic. That's perfect - thanks a ton. askmefi++

By: superchris

superchris — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 19:25:52 -0800

ImageMagick is an old group of open source tools for image manipulation. It's not the easiest thing in the world to use to traditional mac folks, but it's a great toolset of command line tools for image manipulation. Here's how to overlay text on images. Getting your mpeg back to frames and back again would then be the issue.... OS X users love the command line, right?

By: mrbill

mrbill — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 19:41:40 -0800

A followup - Quicktime Pro will do it with a little bit of tweaking by hand.