Titles, shapes and watermarks
Add Title
Add Title in the toolbar creates a title clip on its own track, starting at zero and running for three seconds. The status bar tells you what to do next: type your words in Properties, and drag it on the preview to move it.
It arrives reading "Your title", which is a placeholder and not a suggestion.
The five text presets
The Add menu offers five, and they differ in size, weight and default placement rather than in what they can do.
- Title, large and central.
- Lower third, a name and role in the lower portion of the frame.
- Caption, small text for a line of speech.
- End card, for the last few seconds.
- Quote, for pulled text.
Pick the nearest one and adjust. Changing Text preset in Properties restyles an existing title without retyping it.
Text properties
Title text is the words. Font family lists the fonts installed on your machine, which means a font you can see here may not exist on someone else's computer. That does not matter for export, because the text is rendered into the picture.
Font weight and Alignment do what they say.
Thin fonts vanish under compression, because the encoder treats a one pixel stroke as noise and smooths it away. Use a medium or bold weight for anything small. See Text people can actually read.
How long to leave it up
Long enough to read twice. Four to six seconds for a name and title. Read it aloud twice at a comfortable pace and you have your duration.
The default three seconds is fine for a short title and too short for a sentence.
Shapes
The Add menu offers Rectangle, Ellipse, Line and Arrow. They behave like any other clip: they sit on a track, they have a duration, and they can be dragged on the preview.
A semi transparent rectangle behind a title is the standard fix for text over busy footage, and it is worth the small ugliness because it is the difference between readable and not.
Watermarks
Add → Add Watermark takes an image file. Add → Add Text Watermark takes words.
Either one is pinned, which means it goes on a dedicated track that stays above everything else and runs the full length of the project. Extend the timeline and the watermark extends with it. You do not have to remember to stretch it.
Keep it small, keep it low opacity, and keep it out of the corner the platform's interface covers.
Positioning on the preview
Drag any title, shape or watermark directly on the preview. Turn on Safe Zones while you do it, and keep anything that has to be read inside the inner box.
On a vertical platform preset, the bottom fifth of the frame carries the caption, the account name and a row of buttons, and the right edge carries the like and share column. A lower third placed in the actual lower third is covered.