Add Text Overlays to Video

Add Text Overlays to Video

Add static text elements: titles, chapter markers, callout labels, lower thirds: anywhere on the video canvas. Position, resize, and rotate with drag-and-drop. Control when they appear using the timeline. Style them with the same engine that powers captions.

How It Works

1. Create a text overlay: open the overlay creation dialog. Select “Text” as the overlay type. Enter your text and choose a style from the style picker.

2. Position on canvas: the overlay appears on the video preview with drag handles. Drag to move it anywhere. Use corner handles to resize. Use the rotation handle to angle it.

3. Set timing on the timeline: the overlay appears as a bar on its own track in the timeline. Drag the left edge to set the start time, drag the right edge to set the end time.

4. Add animations: apply enter and exit animations (fade, slide, scale) using the same system as captions. The text overlay fades, slides, or scales in and out at the configured timing.

5. Style it: the full caption styling engine is available: font, size, weight, color, background, shadow, border, letter spacing. Apply a style preset from the library or configure manually.

Key Details

Text overlays live on their own timeline track. They don’t interfere with the caption track. You can have multiple text overlays active at the same time, each on its own track.

Same styling engine as captions. Fonts, colors, shadows, backgrounds: everything available for captions works for text overlays. Style presets are shared between the two.

Drag, resize, and rotate are canvas-only. Interaction handles appear on the live preview canvas, not inside the Remotion export. The export receives the final computed position, size, and rotation.

What’s Next

• Image Overlays: add logos and watermarks
• Audio Overlays: add background music
• Caption Animations: the animation system shared with text overlays