Montage® themes and theme editing
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Studio’s customizable Montage® “themes” provide a powerful but easy to learn method of achieving slideshow, animation and multitrack editing effects. With themes you can quickly give your videos a more professional look while maintaining a coherent structure. Each theme consists of a set of templates that can be added to your project as “theme clips”. You can create attractive, visually consistent sequences that integrate artist-created titles and animations with your own photos and video.
Note: “Titles” created from a Montage theme are not related to those in the Titles section of the Album, or created with Studio’s title editors. Themes are easier to use, and can provide effects not available in ordinary titles. On the other hand, the title editors give you much finer control over the appearance of the titles.
The themes provided are each designed to cover a typical need. Within each theme, the available templates are designed to complement one another when used in the same project. For instance, most themes provide an Opening template and a matching Ending template. Many themes also provide one or more Segue templates for transitioning from one video or image clip to another.
The appearance of a theme clip’s Timeline icon reflects its structure. Here, from left to right, are an Opening, a Segue, and an Ending icon. The zig-zag edges correspond to the placement of full-frame video in the clip. The video at the end of the Opening, and at the start of the Ending, can be edited to match that of a Segue; thus the zig-zag also indicates graphically how the templates can be used together.
Each template defines a video or graphic sequence with blanks to be filled in by you. Most templates provide one or more slots for video or image clips. Many let you supply text captions for titles, and some have additional parameters for other special properties.
Theme templates are stored in their own section of the Album. The first step in using a chosen template is to bring it into your project as a theme clip. As usual, this is done by dragging the icon from the Album to the Movie Window.
In the Movie Window, the theme clip is treated as an ordinary, self-contained video clip. To customize the clip – to fill in the template’s blanks – you will use the Theme Editor tool.