Add text to a video

Seven styles to start from

The Text button under the preview adds the Title style straight away. A style is only a starting point. Everything about it can be changed afterwards, and the change applies to that one piece of text, so two titles in the same style can still differ.

Fonts, color and what goes behind the words

• Font: Clean, Bold, Classic, Typewriter or Handwritten, plus Bold, Italic and CAPITALS.
• Size: from small print to letters almost a third of the frame high.
• Line up: Left, Middle or Right, for text over several lines. Press Enter in Words to start a new line.
• Color: eight ready colors, or any other from the color picker.
• Behind the words: None, Shadow, Box or Outline. Box and Outline take a color of their own.

Over a busy picture, bare text is hard to read. A Box works over anything; an Outline keeps more of the picture visible around the letters; a Shadow is enough over calm, darker footage. White on a dark box is the safe choice when you cannot check every frame.

Timing and movement

Each piece of text has its own place on the Text lane. Starts at and Lasts take seconds to the tenth; or drag the text along the lane, and drag its ends to make it shorter or longer. Edges snap to the playhead and to other items, so text can start exactly with a clip.

Fade In and Out ease text on and off screen, up to 3 seconds each. That is all the movement there is: text does not slide, bounce or type itself out, and it stays where you put it while it shows. For a title that changes halfway, split it with S and change the words of the second half. Duplicate (Ctrl D) copies a styled title to right after the original, quicker than styling a second one from scratch.

Text keeps its times when you move or trim the clips beneath it, so add it once the cut is final, or nudge it along afterwards.

Readable on every screen

Text is sized as a share of the frame's height, so it looks the same at 720p, 1080p or 4K. A few rules of thumb:

• Keep words away from the edges. On vertical videos, TikTok, Reels and Shorts lay their own buttons and captions over the bottom and the right side.
• Give each title time to be read: roughly a second for every three or four words, and never less than two seconds.
• Check it small. Make the Octoolo window narrow and play the video: if the text is hard to read there, it will be on a phone too.
• Contrast matters more than size: white or yellow on a dark box reads at a glance, while pale text over a bright sky can vanish.

Logos belong on the Pictures lane, where a PNG can be sized and made partly transparent with See-through. And for many lines timed to speech, write them in a subtitle file and add them as captions in one go.