How to Add Text to Video: The Complete Guide

Text is the cheapest upgrade you can give a video. A title tells people what they're about to watch. A lower third tells them who's talking. Captions make the whole thing watchable with the sound off — which is how a huge share of social video gets consumed.

This guide covers the full workflow in iLoveVideoEditor: basic text layers, styling, captions from SRT/VTT files, and the text animations that actually ship in the product. Where something doesn't exist yet, we'll say so plainly.

The four types of text you'll use

Titles

The big text at the start (or between sections). It sets expectations in under a second.

• Keep it short — under six words if you can.
• Give it high contrast against whatever's behind it.
• Leave it on screen long enough to read twice: 3–5 seconds is a safe floor.

Lower thirds

The name-and-title bar in the bottom quarter of the frame. The standard recipe:

1. Add a text layer and position it in the lower quarter of the frame.
2. Add a rectangle shape layer behind it at roughly 60% opacity so the text survives busy backgrounds.
3. Animate both in together (more on animations below).

Captions and subtitles

Timed text that follows the dialogue. Two flavors:

• Burned-in (open) captions — rendered into the video itself, always visible. This is what you want for social platforms where viewers watch muted.
• Sidecar files (closed captions) — a separate SRT/VTT file that platforms like YouTube display on demand.

Callouts and labels

Arrows and labels pointing at something on screen — essential for tutorials and product demos. A text layer plus a shape is all you need.

How to add text in iLoveVideoEditor

1. Open your project in the editor.
2. Press T, or use the Add Layer menu, to drop in a text layer.
3. Type your text.
4. Style it in the inspector: font, size, weight, color, alignment, letter spacing, and position.
5. Drag the layer's edges on the timeline to control when it appears and disappears.

Everything happens locally in your browser — no upload, and no account needed for basic editing.

Captions: the honest workflow

Let's be direct: iLoveVideoEditor does not generate captions from speech. There is no "auto-generate" button and no built-in speech-to-text. Anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a different product.

What it does instead is the second half of the job, and it does it well. Captioning is really two jobs:

1. Transcription — turning speech into a timed SRT or VTT file. Do this wherever you like: YouTube's auto-captions (export the .sbv/.srt from YouTube Studio), your podcast host's transcript export, or any transcription service.
2. Styling and burning — importing that file, making it look right, and rendering it into the video. That's the part iLoveVideoEditor handles.

The import flow:

1. Get your SRT or VTT file from your transcription source.
2. Open the import captions tool, or the captions mode inside the editor.
3. Upload the file, preview the timing, and adjust individual cues if anything drifts.
4. Style the captions — font, size, color, background — and export. The captions are burned directly into the video.

For the full walkthrough, including how to get a clean SRT out of YouTube, see our guide to adding captions to video.

Text animations that actually ship

The animation presets below are real — each one is a verified preset in the product. Apply them from the animations panel, and tune duration to taste. The animations documentation covers the full system.

• Fade Up — the text fades in while drifting slightly upward (about 0.9 s). The safest default for titles and lower thirds.
• Pop In — the text scales up from zero, overshoots to about 115% size, then settles (about 0.75 s). Good for punchy social titles.
• Slide from Left — the text slides in from the left edge while fading in (about 0.9 s). The classic lower-third entrance.
• Typewriter — the text reveals by expanding from compressed to normal letter spacing (about 1.8 s). Great for quotes and section headers.
• Bounce — the text drops in from above, overshoots below its final position, and settles with a bounce (about 1.2 s). Playful; use sparingly.
• Glow Pulse — a looping pulse of the glow effect intensity (about 2.25 s per cycle). Useful for highlighting a label that should keep drawing the eye.

Two honest notes. First, there's no per-character kinetic typography preset and no text-as-mask effect — if you need lyrics synced word-by-word, you'll animate separate text layers manually. Second, less animation usually wins: one entrance style per video reads as designed; five reads as chaos.

Typography rules that survive mobile

Most of your audience will see your video on a phone, shrunk into a feed. Design for that:

• Size for small screens. If it's comfortably readable at arm's length on a phone, it's readable everywhere. When in doubt, go bigger.
• Contrast is non-negotiable. The WCAG guideline for body text is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio — see the W3C's explanation. A semi-transparent background bar behind your text is the easiest way to guarantee it.
• Keep lines short. Roughly 30–40 characters per line. Long lines are hard to track and wrap badly on narrow screens.
• Respect the safe area. Keep text inside the center 80–90% of the frame. App UI — like buttons, progress bars, profile overlays — covers the edges on every platform.
• Limit your fonts. Two, maybe three per video: one for titles, one for everything else.
• Time it generously. Text should appear slightly before it's needed and stay until the viewer has finished reading. A good rule: reading time of the text, out loud, plus one second.

Start from a template

Blank-canvas typography is slow. The template library has 249 ready-made projects with titles, lower thirds, and caption styles already designed — open one, swap the text, adjust the colors, done. If you're building something programmatic, the same compositions are available through the API described in our developer guide.

And if the video also needs polish beyond text — trimming, transitions, effects — the effects and transitions docs list everything that's available.

Open the editor →