Titles and text

Adding one

Put the playhead where the text should appear and press T, or use Add overlay at playhead on the Overlay tab.

A clip appears on the Text and Overlays track. Drag its ends for how long the text is on screen.

Alternatively, the Titles tab in the library holds six ready made title styles. Drop one on the timeline and type into it.

Typing

Select the clip and type into the box on the Overlay tab. The preview follows as you type.

Styling

Font, Size, Bold, Italic and Text colour do what they say.

Box colour, Box opacity and Padding are the panel behind the text. At zero opacity there is no box at all, only the letters, which is what suits a title over a background. Raise it when the text has to sit over a busy part of the picture and stay readable.

Corner rounds that box.

Placing

Align sets where the text sits inside its own box. Left, Top, Width and Height place and size the box itself, and you can drag it on the preview instead.

Animation

Six choices: None, Fade, Rise, Pop, Slide and Type, and each plays over the first and the last seven tenths of a second of the clip.

Fade is safe. Rise reads as expensive. Pop is attention seeking, which is sometimes exactly right. Type spells the words out a letter at a time, counting them properly in Persian and Arabic as well as in English, and it should be used once per video at most.

Right to left

Reads from handles Persian, Arabic and Hebrew. Auto looks at the letters themselves and lays the line out right to left when it sees them, so in practice you do not have to touch this. Set it by hand when a line mixes scripts and gets it wrong.