How to Add Text to a Video for YouTube

To add text to a video for YouTube, record the Short first, then tap Text. It's a post-recording tool, so you're placing each line against footage that already exists rather than guessing where it will land.

Open the free Add Text to Video tool →

Add text to a video for YouTube with the Shorts tools

Text sits in the group of tools you unlock after recording, alongside Sound, Stickers, Voiceover, Captions, Text-to-Speech, Layout and the Timeline.

The Timeline is the half people skip. It edits when text is shown in your Short, and it holds video, text, stickers, music and voiceover in one place. A line that appears for three seconds and leaves reads as deliberate; the same line pinned across the whole clip reads as a watermark.

Where text survives in a vertical frame

A Short doesn't play in a clean rectangle. The title, the channel name and the action controls are drawn over the video in the feed, which means the extreme top and the extreme bottom of your frame are the least reliable places to put anything that has to be read.

Keeping key text in the middle band of the frame isn't a published specification. It's a consequence of how the feed is laid out, and it's easy to verify by opening any Short and seeing what the interface covers. Check yours in the feed rather than in the editor preview, because they're not the same picture.

Text that moves, on a real timeline

Montaj treats text as a timeline object: animated text you place, with a start and an end you set, on the same timeline as the clips, the B-roll layers and the cuts. Because it's a layer rather than a stamp, moving it means dragging it rather than deleting and redoing it, and 100 steps of undo sit behind every attempt.

Everything renders on your device, so the frames you're checking are the frames that get exported. That's the practical difference from trying to add text to a video for YouTube in a preview that isn't quite the final one.