Guide · OtterStudio

Add titles and captions to a video

A name under the person talking. A title at the start. A sentence that appears for four seconds and goes away. Text on video is a clip like any other in OtterStudio: it sits on its own lane, it starts and ends where you put it, and it is drawn into the export along with everything else.

Open OtterStudio →

Put some words on the picture

Move the playhead to where the words should appear and press Add text, in the header or above the timeline. A title lands at the playhead on a text lane of its own, marked T1, and the card on the right opens with the words selected so you can type straight over them. Press Enter for a second line; the box grows to hold it.

Text lanes sit above the video lanes on the timeline because that is where they are in the picture: a title is always drawn over the footage, whatever else is stacked underneath it.

Time it

Drag the text clip along its lane to move it, and pull either end to change how long it stays. A new title runs for four seconds; a caption for a whole sentence usually wants a little longer than it takes to read aloud. Split at playhead works on text too, which is a quick way to change the words halfway through: split, then retype the second half.

Choose a look

The Look row in the card is five whole styles. Clean is white with a soft shadow, which reads over most footage. Boxed puts a dark box behind the words, for busy backgrounds. Outlined is the heavy subtitle look, white letters with a black edge. Highlight is dark words on a yellow box. Serif is an italic title face. Pressing one changes everything except the size, so you can try them on a title you have already sized.

Below that are the individual controls for going on from a look: the font (a sans, a serif, a monospace and a heavy display face), bold and italic, left, centre or right, the size, the line spacing and the colour. There are six swatches and, at the end of the row, a picker for any other colour.

Background turns the box on and off and sets its colour, how see-through it is, the padding around the words and how rounded its corners are. All the way round makes a pill. Edge adds a thin or thick outline around each letter and toggles the shadow.

Place and size it

Drag the words around on the picture. They snap to the centre lines and the same corner positions the reaction-cam buttons use. Dragging a corner handle scales the words and their box together, the way a sticker scales. Dragging a side handle changes only the width, so a long sentence wraps onto more or fewer lines while the letters stay the same size.

Under Position in the card, the five buttons put the title in a corner or the middle. Under Size, the height normally follows the words; choose Fixed to set it yourself, which is how you make a bar across the bottom of the frame with the words sitting in it. Shrink the box to the words pulls a wide box in around a short line, which is what turns a boxed caption into a pill.

Fade it in and out

Under Animation, In and Out each offer a fade, a slide from any of the four sides, a zoom and a pop, with a slider for how long each takes. A half-second fade in and out is the usual choice for a caption; a slide up suits a lower-third. The same controls exist on video and image clips, so a logo can arrive the same way a title does.

Export

Press Export MP4 as usual. The words are drawn into every frame at the export's resolution, not pasted on afterwards, so they come out as sharp as the footage. A timeline with only text on it exports too: a title card on a dark background is a perfectly good video.

A note on fonts

The four faces are ones OtterStudio brings with it, so a title looks the same on every machine and in every export. Display is the exception: it uses a heavy face your computer already has, which is Impact on most of them.