Text overlays, cards and variants

Tools → Overlays. This puts text onto a finished video, and it can produce many versions of the same piece with different words.

The text

Overlay text is what appears. Overlay font and Font weight style it.

Legibility beats style every time. Thin type vanishes under compression. If you cannot read it on your own phone at arm's length, nobody can, and that is a thirty second test almost nobody performs.

Making it readable over footage

Background box puts a plate behind the text, with Box RGB for its colour. Text laid straight onto footage fails the moment the picture behind it goes light or busy.

Background darkening (0-1) dims the whole picture under the text instead, which is a softer answer when a hard box looks wrong.

Blur strength blurs behind the text. Background scale sizes the treatment.

Pick one of these and commit. Stacking all of them produces a muddy rectangle.

Placement

Overlay platform preset sets the target shape, and Output width and Output height the size.

The editor warns when text lands where a platform will cover it. On vertical feeds the bottom fifth carries the caption, account name and buttons, and the right edge carries the like and share column. Export With Placement Warning exports anyway when you have decided the warning does not apply.

Take the warning seriously the first few times. It is catching the single most common reason a title is invisible to everybody but its maker.

End cards

Card backdrop styles the closing card. Hold final frame during end card freezes the last picture underneath it rather than cutting to a blank.

Generating variants

This is the part that saves real time.

Alternate hook text (one per line) and Alternate end cards / calls to action (one per line) take a list. Opening seconds to replace says how much of the front each alternate hook stands in for. Generate variants then produces every combination.

Each one becomes its own job in the queue and its own file, so you can put five openings against three calls to action and get fifteen versions to test without building any of them by hand.

Include edited captions carries your caption work through into every variant rather than making you redo it.

The command

Copyable overlay command arrays shows exactly what will be run, selectable so you can copy it. When a variant comes out wrong, that is where to look.

Watermarks

Watermarks live in Tools → Effects rather than here, under Choose Watermark Image. Keep one small, keep it low opacity, and keep it out of the corner the platform's interface covers. If it distracts from the content it is too big, and if it is easy to crop off it is in the wrong corner.