Overview: iMovie themes

iMovie includes a number of Apple-designed themes that make it easy to give your movie projects professional polish and stylistic flair.

You can choose a theme for your project when you first create the project, or you can apply one at any time thereafter. You can also easily switch themes at any time.

All themes consist of the following elements:

  • An opening title, automatically added to your project, that consists of graphics that set the tone for the theme.

  • An end title, which is automatically applied to the last clip in your project.

  • Transitions between clips. By default, when you apply a theme to a project, iMovie inserts standard cross-dissolve transitions with occasional theme-styled transitions between most of the clips in your project. You can change this default setting to allow you to add transitions manually instead.

  • Special theme-styled titles and transitions that you can add to your project.

The Sports theme has some special features. It is meant to be used with projects with sports as the subject. For example, if you take video of your child’s soccer games, you can use the Sports theme to create movies with onscreen graphics that make ordinary footage look like professionally produced sportscasts. To use the Sports theme to its fullest effect, you need to use the Sports Team Editor to specify the team—create a list of players and their positions, upload player photos and a team logo, and so on.