Text, captions, graphics

Picture your video being watched on the bus, at work, and in bed next to someone asleep. A good share of viewers scroll with the sound off, and if a video has no captions, for them it doesn't exist. What follows is about text on screen: captions, titles, accents.

Captions matter

Without captions, part of your audience leaves straight away. With them, the video makes sense on mute, the eye catches on text and stays longer, and a mumbled line still lands. Captions in a second language help viewers who don't know yours well.

Nearly every editor generates them automatically: an "auto captions" button, a minute of waiting. But that's not where the work ends.

Checking auto captions

Automation gets names, technical terms, brand names and fast speech wrong. A misspelt product name in a brand video is a guaranteed revision, and sometimes a rejection. A common story: the automation changes one letter in the product name, and the finished video goes back for a rebuild.

So after generating, read every caption through. Yes, every one. Fix the words, add punctuation only where the meaning depends on it, and skip the full stop at the end of short lines. Make captions after tightening, which lesson two covered. If an "um" still made it into the text, cut it from the audio and regenerate the captions, or just delete the line. Check that lines break on meaning, not in the middle of a word.

Tip. Read the captions with the sound off, like a viewer. If something isn't clear without sound, rewrite the sentence.

Size and placement

Captions have to be readable on a phone screen at first glance. That means big: as a guide, no more than five or six words per line. Two lines maximum, one is better.

Placement: the middle of the screen or slightly below centre. Not the bottom quarter, where the platform's username and post text sit. Not against the right edge, where the icons are. Not in the top strip, where the title goes. The exact zones differ between platforms and change over time, so check in the app itself before posting. The framing lesson in the filming course covered those zones.

Text background. White text on a light background disappears. A thin outline, a shadow or a semi-transparent box behind the text all solve it. Any of the three works, pick one and use it everywhere.

Fonts

One font per video. Two at most: one for captions, one for titles. Bold and regular of the same font count as one. Three different fonts or more and the video looks like a lamppost covered in flyers.

Choose simple sans-serif fonts with no "personality". Handwritten, condensed and decorative fonts don't read on a phone. Before you set up your style, type a line with the accented characters of your language in the font you've picked. Trendy library fonts often don't include them and quietly swap in letters from another font, and it shows. For a brand video you need a font licensed for commercial use: free for personal use doesn't cover it.

Once you've set up your caption style (font, size, colour, background), save it as a preset. Every following video will look the same, and that's already recognisability.

Accents

Highlighting one word with colour or size, an arrow, a sticker, a short title. All of it works when used sparingly. One or two accents per video. If every third word is highlighted, nothing is.

Text animation follows the same logic. Appear and disappear, nothing more. Bouncing, spinning, exploding letters distract from what you're saying.

Mistake. Captions in one font, the title in another, accents in a third, plus stickers from the library. Each element is fine on its own. Together it's noise.

Brand logos and graphics

If the video is for a brand, the brand usually has requirements: a logo in the corner, a brand colour, a mandatory line of text. Ask before editing, not after. Keep the logo small, in the top left corner, just below the very edge, away from the right edge and the bottom zone. If the brief says nothing about a logo, ask: native-style videos usually go without one, paid placements often need it.

For a brand, deliver two versions: with captions and clean, with no text. That's the norm, because the brand may redo the captions in another language or in its own style.

Do this now

• Generate auto captions for one video, read them all the way through and fix every error.
• Set up your caption style: a sans-serif font that has your language's characters, large, with a background. Save it as a preset.
• Watch the video with the sound off. Note the moment it stops making sense and rewrite that caption.