Clean titles and text on a plain background
Okay. You've got your video shorter now, hopefully, and roughly the length it should be. Next problem: at some point you need to tell people what they're looking at. Who this is, what year, maybe a name on screen when Grandpa starts talking. That's titles and text.
I'm going to save you some time here. This is not the module where I teach you spinning 3D text or animated title cards that fly in from the corner. I don't do that stuff. If you want it, there are tutorials for it and you're welcome to go find them, but I'm not your person for it and I'd rather tell you that straight than fake my way through it.
What I do is clean text on a plain background. And honestly, for family history video, it's the right call anyway.
Why plain is better here
Nobody watching a video about their great-grandfather wants the title to do backflips. The footage is the point. The text is just there to hand you a little information and get out of the way. A name fading in over a black screen, held for a couple seconds, fading out. That's it. That's the whole trick.
Think about it like a caption on a photo in an album. You don't want the caption doing tricks. You want it legible and then gone.
The basic setup, step by step
- Pick one font and stick with it. Whatever comes with your editor is fine. Something plain, easy to read. Not a script font, not anything with flourishes — those look nice on a wedding invitation and terrible at video resolution, especially once it's compressed for sharing.
- Pick one background. Solid black is my default. Sometimes I'll use a dark gray if the video around it is warm-toned and black feels too harsh. That's a preference, not a rule — do what looks right against your footage.
- White text, decent size. Big enough that someone watching on a phone can read it without squinting. You'd be surprised how many people export a title that reads perfectly on a laptop screen and then can't read it on their mom's phone at all.
- Hold it long enough to read twice. I time mine by reading the text out loud, slowly, then adding about a second. If it's a name and a date, that's usually two to three seconds. If people are still reading when it cuts away, it's too fast.
- Fade in, fade out. Hard cuts on text look like a mistake. A half-second fade on each end looks intentional. Most editors have this as a one-click option on the text clip.
- Use it for what needs it and nothing else. Opening title. Maybe a name under someone's first appearance in the interview footage. A closing card with a date if you want one. You do not need a title before every single clip. That's not decoration, that's clutter.
Where this connects to the whole project
Here's the thing — all this only works if you actually know what you're putting on screen. This is where the labeling and dating work you did back at the start pays off. If you didn't nail down whose house that was, or which year, you're guessing now, and a wrong date on screen is worse than no date at all. It's permanent. People will believe it.
So actually, before you title anything, go check your notes. Don't guess because you're in the editor and it's late and you just want to finish.
A word on exporting, since we're here
This is as good a place as any to bring up something I learned the hard way. My first export ever came out as a 9-gigabyte file that wouldn't play on my mom's phone. I'd changed nothing on purpose, I just didn't understand the settings, and I paid for it. After that I started writing down my export settings every single time — resolution, format, bitrate — in the same journal where I log my bread temperatures, which sounds odd but it works. I open the journal, I see what worked last time, I use it again. You don't need a fancy system. A sticky note taped to your monitor is fine. Just write it down somewhere you'll actually look.
Text and titles are cheap to fix if something's wrong. A whole re-export because you guessed at settings is not cheap, time-wise. Get it right, write it down, move on.
Before next time
Go back through your timeline and figure out where you actually need text — not everywhere, just where someone watching cold would be lost without it. Bring that list next time and we'll build the titles together.