Adding text on top of your video

Captions follow the speech. They come from the transcript and change as each line is said. A text layer is something you write yourself and pin to a stretch of the video: the opening hook that tells people what the Reel is about, a chapter card halfway through, a name strap under a guest, a price you want on screen for five seconds.

Keeping the two apart pays off in practice. You can change the caption template as often as you like without touching your titles, and you can move, retime or delete a title without disturbing a single caption.

Open Text from the rail on the left of the editor. At the top of its panel, + Add text drops a plain text box onto the video. Below that, under For this moment, are the designs, each one already filled with the words of the caption under the playhead, so you judge it with your own content rather than sample copy. Press a design and it lands on the video at the playhead, with its settings open on the right.

The designs include these, among others:

The settings on the right open on their Edit tab. Under Content, the Design list switches the layer to another design, and every field of the design has its own box: a Lower third has Name and Second line, a Chapter has Label and Title, and most of the others have just one. Type into a box and the video updates as you go.

Further down, Style sets the font, the text, accent and background colours, an outline and its colour, a shadow, a dark card behind the words, capitals, letter spacing, line height, and how wide a line may run before it wraps. Position & size covers size, left and right, up and down, rotation and opacity, although dragging the layer on the preview is usually quicker. The Animation tab next to Edit controls how the layer moves.

Buttons at the top duplicate the layer, delete it or close the settings. Under Arrange there is a switch to hide a layer, and a hidden layer is left out of the export as well as the preview, which is handy for keeping an alternative title ready without showing it.

A new layer begins at the playhead. To change when it shows, use Timing in its settings: Starts is the moment it appears and Lasts is how long it stays. On a computer the layer also gets a block of its own on the timeline, and dragging that block or its edges does the same job by eye.

The Text panel keeps a list headed On this video, with every layer you have placed, its start and end in seconds, and a cross to delete it. On a phone, where the timeline has no lane for layers, that list is how you find a layer and select it again.

Give a hook the first two or three seconds, then take it off; a title that stays for the whole Reel competes with the captions for attention. Keep text and captions in different parts of the frame, the hook near the top and the captions in the lower middle, for instance, and turn on the safe-area overlay so neither ends up under the app's buttons. Placing captions covers the overlay and the grid.

Short beats long. On a phone, a layer that people have to pause the video to read has already lost them. If a title needs more than about eight words, the rest probably belongs in the post's description instead.

Text comes with every paid plan: Shuru, Josh and Superstar. On Free the tool shows in the rail with a lock, and pressing it shows you the plans that include it.

The rest of the rail, Elements, Infographic, Media, Audio, Sounds, GIFs and Adjust, comes with Josh and Superstar. So a Shuru account has captions and text, and the wider editor begins one step up. Prices and the full feature list are on the pricing page.