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Special pick: Movavi Video Editor Plus

If we had to choose just one app from the table above, it would have to be Movavi Video Editor Plus. With a free trial and versions available for macOS and Windows, Movavi’s video editing software provides professional-level features and tools in a user-friendly interface that’s easy to learn. Whether you want to add a text box, overlay captions, or write text on videos for other purposes, Movavi Video Editor Plus is a robust tool that gives you everything you need to create really cool videos – without the steep learning curve of some other software options.

Text adder software for your desktop or laptop

Movavi Video Editor Plus

Best for: Adding text, filters, transitions, and professional editing details to videos

OS: macOS, Windows

Movavi Video Editor Plus is a robust video editing platform. It offers a range of features for beginners and professional video creators. Some of the key features include titles, filters, transitions, chroma key, stabilization, and voiceover tools.

iMovie

Best for: Entry-level video editing for personal use

Apple’s iMovie is a free video editing tool that comes with all Mac OS laptops and desktops, and an iOS version is available for iOS mobile devices. It is only compatible with Mac OS and iOS devices, which limits its usefulness to a lot of video creators. While it’s a user-friendly option for new creators, seasoned editors sometimes find its lack of functionality frustrating.

Adobe ® Premiere ® Pro

Best for: Professional-level video editing

OS: macOS, Windows

Adobe ® Premiere ® Pro is a full, professional video editing platform that’s used for feature films, TV, YouTube, and social videos. Best for more experienced video editors, Premiere ® Pro is not the most intuitive program around, but it does include a range of Adobe fonts, audio and video transition options, color grading tools, and tutorials to help users adapt to the software.

Best for: Basic edits for video creators looking for a free option

OS: macOS, Windows, Linux

VLC was originally a freeware media player, but it has since been expanded to include video editing features and tools. This open-source platform is non-linear, and many users report having difficulty learning how to use it when they first get started. It’s built and supported by volunteers, so support is sometimes difficult. Users can often find answers to their questions about editing challenges in VLC message boards.

How to add text to a video online

Fastreel

Best for: Professional-level video editing without downloading editing software

Fastreel by Movavi is an online video editing tool that lets you add words to a video without downloading any software to your computer. Along with writing capabilities, Fastreel also lets you create short or long video clips with transitions, titles, and other features and effects that make a professional-looking video. And, if you’re creating a video for personal use and don’t mind a watermark, you can do it all for free. Or you can pay a fee per video or per month to edit videos online without a watermark.

Veed.io

Best for: Adding text to videos online

Veed.io is an online video text-adding application. To use it, you just upload your video and add the text you want. Veed.io has some customizability, as you can upload your own fonts and brand colors, but if you don’t already have the fonts you want, you may have to buy them or stick with the limited selection from the app.

Kapwing

Best for: Adding text or watermarks to videos online for free

Kapwing is a free online video editor with an emphasis on simplicity. It supports photos, videos, and GIFs, and is best used for adding branding, watermarks, or text to short videos or GIFs.

Biteable

Best for: Adding captions and animations to videos online

Biteable is an online video editing and text writer application. It allows you to make simple edits to videos online by uploading your footage and adding captions and other effects over a video.

Adobe ® Spark ®

Best for: Adding captions and titles to videos online

Adobe ® Spark ® is an online tool that allows users to upload images and videos and add a caption, message, and/or other simple edits. After adding text and other effects, users can download their videos and upload them to YouTube or other sharing platforms.

How to add words to a video with Movavi Video Editor Plus

Adding text to a video is a good idea if you want to make your clip more personal, artistic, or even humorous. With Movavi Video Editor Plus, you can do it in just a few clicks. Just read this guide and see for yourself how easy it is to use Movavi’s software!

Step 1. Download and install the program

Download Movavi Video Editor Plus and run the installation file on your computer. Once the program is installed, launch it.

Step 2. Add your clip

Click Add Files and select the video you want to add text to. The clip will appear in the Media Bin. Drag and drop your video onto the Timeline.

Step 3. Add a title to your video

There’s a whole gallery of title styles in Movavi Video Editor Plus. Beyond just a simple title, you can also add animated text to your video. Just go to the Titles tab, select the text style that you think fits best, and drag and drop it into place on the Titles Track. Drag on the edges of the item to adjust when the title should appear and disappear.

Double-click on the title and, in the Preview Window that appears, enter your text and adjust the font, size, and color if you need to. Click Apply when everything is set.

If you want to add a meme text to your video, create two titles and place one on top of the frame and the other at the bottom. If you want to add floating text to the video, choose a style from the Basic title category.

Step 4. Save the result

To save your clip, click Export. Name your file, choose the appropriate format, quality, and destination folder. When you are happy, click Start. Now you know how to put text on a video with Movavi Video Editor Plus.

In conclusion: what to look for in text-adding software for your videos

Hopefully, this article has helped you identify what to look for in an app to add text to your videos. To sum everything up, let’s talk about a few of the most important things to look for when choosing the best text-adding app:

How to Add Text to a Video (Quick & Easy)

Most of us don’t consider ourselves trainers, but at some point, nearly all of us will have to show a colleague or a customer how to do something. A video is a great way to show someone a process, teach new skills, or train someone on a new system. But sometimes, just showing what to do or how to do it isn’t enough. Adding text to a video can bring more clarity, help identify what you’re trying to show, or bring more life to your explanation.

But how do you do it?

Luckily, adding text to a video is incredibly easy.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

The Easiest Way to Edit Videos

From quick and easy cuts and annotations to more advanced editing, TechSmith Camtasia takes the guesswork out of creating beautiful, rich, and professional-quality tutorial, explainer, and training videos. And, with a drag-and-drop interface and a huge library of templates and other assets, there are no professional skills required!

Why add text to video?

Video works well as a learning tool because everything your viewers need to see is right there on the screen. You can literally show what you know. So why would you need to add text?

Turns out, there are a lot of reasons to add text to a video. Here are a few common ones:

I could go on, but you can see that text in a video can be a critical part of ensuring viewers get the information they need.

To be clear, when I talk about how to add text to a video, I mean adding dynamic text that’s actually part of the video. You could add a static image of text onto the screen, but it’s really much easier and more efficient to do it right in your video editor.

Bottom line: Adding text in your video editor makes it much easier to update and edit the text when needed.

Note: This blog is not about how to add captions or subtitles to a video. If you want more information on how to add captions on social media or other videos, check out this great blog: How to Add Captions or Subtitles to a Video.

How to add text to a video

One of the best things about TechSmith Camtasia is that unlike other video editing tools, it’s super quick and easy to add text to a video.

With Camtasia open, choose Annotations in the menu.

Choose the style of annotation you want to add and drag it to the timeline where you want it to appear.

Place the playhead over the area on the timeline where your annotation appears.

On the canvas, click and drag your text box to position where you want on the screen and use the handles to scale it larger or smaller as you need.

Double-click in the text box and add your text.

The Easiest Way to Edit Videos

From quick and easy cuts and annotations to more advanced editing, TechSmith Camtasia takes the guesswork out of creating beautiful, rich, and professional-quality tutorial, explainer, and training videos. And, with a drag-and-drop interface and a huge library of templates and other assets, there are no professional skills required!

That’s it. That’s how to add text to a video in Camtasia. It’s really that simple.

Also, this works whether you created your video in Camtasia or imported it from another source.

Beyond the basics: How to enhance your text for greater impact

If basic text is all you need, that’s great, but I’m guessing you’d like to learn how you can customize and animate the text in your videos.

Camtasia offers a ton of ways to enhance your text and help it have an even greater impact.

For example, instead of plain text, you can use an annotation such as an arrow, speech bubble, or a shape.

Basic enhancements

Want to change the font, size, color, or other properties of your text? With your text box selected, click the Properties button to open the Properties panel. Here, you can change all of the attributes and settings that determine how your text looks.

If you have one you want to use, select and apply it. You can make all kinds of changes, including the ones I just mentioned. Plus you can select a theme if you have one, change your text’s alignment, and more.

Select the film icon, and you can change the size of the text box, its opacity, rotation, and position on the screen. The rotation and position properties are particularly useful if you want to start animating your text.

You can also change most of the visual properties by clicking and dragging the anchor points on the text box right on the canvas, as well.

Increase or decrease the length of time your text appears in the video by dragging the edges of the clip on the timeline. Adjust when your text appears by clicking and dragging it to where you want it to be.

Behaviors

Want to add some motion to your text? You can do that, too!

Camtasia offers Behaviors, which are dynamic sequences of animations, and can help draw attention to your message or add some flare. Select Behaviors from the menu, and the list of available Behaviors will appear.

You can preview what each does by hovering your mouse cursor over each one. When you find one you want to use, click and drag it to the timeline and drop it on the text or clip you want to animate.

Transitions

When you add your text to the timeline, it will appear suddenly and disappear just as suddenly when its time is up. Transitions help soften this and add some style and elegance to how your text appears on the screen.

Select Transitions from the menu to see the available transitions. Just like Behaviors, you can hover over each one to see what it looks like in action.

When you find one you like, drag and drop it onto your text on the timeline. Transitions can be applied to both ends of a clip at once or to the beginning and end individually.

My favorite transition is Fade. It’s subtle and does a nice job of softening the appearance and disappearance of your text.

A word of caution: Whatever transition you choose, use the same one for all transitions throughout your video. Using different Transitions can give your video an amateur or unpolished look.

Lower thirds from TechSmith Assets for Camtasia

Camtasia comes bundled with a cool selection of free assets, such as intros and outros, music, icons, and more.

But Camtasia also comes with a nice selection of lower thirds. Also called chyrons, these are the combinations of text and graphics often used to identify people speaking on screen. If you’ve ever watched a TV news broadcast, you’ve seen a lower third.

While you can certainly use plain text for this, using one of these from TechSmith Assets will add style to your video.

Just select the one you want and click and drag it to where you want it to appear on the canvas. You can also drag it directly to the timeline, where it will appear on the lower left of the canvas by default.

And, of course, they’re totally customizable by opening the Properties pane.

Snagit can do it, too

Adding text to video isn’t exclusive to Camtasia. With Snagit’s Create Video from Images feature, you can create video from a series of screenshots or other images and then add annotations (including text and other callouts) as you record your video. It’s not the same process, but for more basic videos, the results can be just as impactful.

Keep accessibility in mind

As with any content, whenever possible, videos should be accessible to people with disabilities or who may use accessibility tools.

While a person who is blind or visually impaired may not be able to see your video, they may be able to learn through the audio portion of the video along with an audio description. That description should include anything that is only presented visually, including any text that appears on the screen.

Text me!

While a video without text can be impactful, interesting, and effective, adding text can enhance understanding and bring more clarity.

In fact, even if it’s just to indicate your video’s title, nearly all videos can be improved with text. Luckily, with Camtasia, it’s easy to add professional-looking text and effects!

The Easiest Way to Edit Videos

From quick and easy cuts and annotations to more advanced editing, TechSmith Camtasia takes the guesswork out of creating beautiful, rich, and professional-quality tutorial, explainer, and training videos. And, with a drag-and-drop interface and a huge library of templates and other assets, there are no professional skills required!

Ryan Knott

TechSmith Marketing Content Specialist and manager of the TechSmith Blog. More than 25 years of communications and marketing experience. Geek. Science and sci-fi enthusiast. Guitar player. On a mission to pet all the dogs. He/him. A few things about me: 1) Mildly (or not-so-mildly) obsessed with the movie Alien, 2) two rescue pibbles (Biggie and Reo), and 3) friend of ducks everywhere. Ask me about my seven+ years as a roller derby coach.

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How to Add Text to Video Quickly

Liza Brown

May 06, 2022• Proven solutions

As we already said besides adding video and image overlay to the main video, you can also add text to the video. Adding text is one of the professional ways to touch your videos. Adding text to the video will allow viewers to watch the video in a noisy environment and get the information as well, which also works perfectly when people hang out on Facebook to watch the muted Autoplay videos in News Feed.

Let’s check the below tutorial about how to add text videos first.

Part 1: How to add text to video in Filmora

While adding text to video will require some video editing software, you can find some online solutions but it’s not difficult and can be completed in a few short steps using video editing software like Wondershare Filmora. In this article, I will show you all the steps about how to add text overlay to video using Filmora.

Step 1: Import your video files

After launching Filmora, click New Project to enter the main screen. It is recommended to adjust settings such as aspect ratio and frame rates before getting started in the Project Settings window as shown below.

The default aspect ratio is 16:9, you can adjust the aspect ratio based on your needs and change it to 1:1 (for Instagram videos), 4:3, or 9:16 (videos shot vertically).

Click the «Import» button to select and add your video to the media library. For your convenience, you can also directly drag and drop the target video to the collection.

Step 2: Add Videos to Timeline and Locate the Video Frame

Next, you need to drag and drop your video clips from the media library to the timeline panel to edit. Before adding text to the video, you can trim, cut or delete part of the video based on your needs. Then Zoom in the timeline to show the video frame more precisely to locate the frames that should have a text overlay.

Step 3: Choose Text Presets and Add text

Click the Titles tab to open the Text& Title presets. There are more than 200+ text effects built-in Filmora, which cover various styles such as Lifestyle, media, seasonal, opener, lower 3rd, and end credits. Double click the titles preset to check the result in the Preview window.

If it fits your needs, place the Playhead to the position where you want to add the text and title in the timeline and then drag and drop it to the track above the video in the timeline.

Step 4: Change the Duration of the Text

In Filmora, the default duration of the text overlay is 5 seconds, but you can drag the edge of the text module in the timeline to extend it to fit the length of the video based on your needs. Or, you can select the Text in the timeline first and then click the Timer icon to change the duration of the text effect.

Step 5: Edit and Customize Your Text

Double click the Title frame in the timeline to open a window that allows you to do some basic editing of the titles. Here you can enter the text of your text overlay and change the text font, color, and size.

There is more than 20 text effect style for you to choose from. Just double click one Style to apply it in the text overlay and you will see the changes in the Preview window.

You can also click the «Animation» icon to change the animation of your title text overlay or drag and drop the text box in the preview window to change the position.

Advanced Text Editing

To customize the text overlay further, click the Advanced button to open the Advanced Text Edit panel. Here, you can also apply a preset and animation as well as customize the Text Fill, Border, and Shadow elements.

You can add more text boxes to the video as well as new text shapes such as circle, rectangle, round bubble and arrow. Besides that, you can adjust the duration of each text element by dragging the edge of the text in the Text timeline.

Step 6: Export the new video

After adding your text overlay, click the “Play” icon to preview the result. If satisfied, click the “Export” button and choose an output format from the list. You can change the video and audio parameters such as Bit Rate, Encoder, Resolution in the advanced settings.

From the video tutorial above we can see that adding text to video is easy, now let me show you how to add text to video step by step.

Part 2: How to add text to video with other software

1. Windows Movie Maker

Originally, it is developed by Microsoft and many users use it to add text to video. You can use Windows Movie Maker to add various text templates to videos. It supports changing text size, text font and color. If you like to highlight video message, adding text to video is the best way. You can also add text to the video in a different position. Left or right is at your choice.

2. Animoto

Animoto is an online tool to add text to video. Without downloading. You need to log in to import video and add text. You can change text style to make it fit with your video. If your video is young and happy, you should choose some funny text templates to add. All the style is based on your video. You can choose text animations to stand out in your video.

Besides adding text overlay, Filmora has more brilliant editing functions to edit and produce videos inside a wide selection of file kinds with ease for all the users. You can easily trim or split video clips, crop video screen size, apply unique effects to your video files, flip/rotate them horizontally or vertically. Now download and try it out!

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