Speaker 1: Hey friends, Will here. A quick tutorial for you today and something that I see a lot of people getting wrong around YouTube and elsewhere, which is how can you put text over video and make sure that it remains legible and that you can read it properly. Really easy if you've got really dark video, but if you've got quite light video, then often you can struggle to read the text. So that's what I've got for you today, a few tips on how we can keep text legible when overlaying it to video. And hopefully you can use these when you're creating Instagram stories, YouTube videos, any kind of content really. So let's dive into my screen and get straight on with it. So what we've got in here is just a few examples. I've got some random stock footage and the first thing I've done here is you can see I've put this text animation over the top of this drone footage and straight away you can see this is the problem that we're running into. It's like, how do we make sure we can actually read what this text says? So the first thing that I see people do is say, oh, well, obviously I'll change the color and then that way it will be readable, right? So we might go something like this, right? Now obviously that does make it more legible, but I don't think that looks very nice at all and a great designer once told me that whenever you're putting text over an image or video, then keep the color white because that is going to be the nicest way to present it. Now obviously that does run into some challenges, but if we can overcome those challenges, keep that text white, I mean, I will say obviously this is a stylistic choice. You may have branding or something that you're working to and in those instances it's fine. I'm not saying never use color, but if you're only choosing to use color to keep it legible, then there's probably a better way to do it. So that's the first thing that I see people do, using colored text to try and make it more legible. The next thing that I see people do quite often is to try and use some drop shadow. So here's that same clip with the same color and what a lot of people do is they jump up into the inspector tab and they jump over to the text window. They go to drop shadow here and they turn that on and say, great, I can read that now. But in my opinion, I think that looks like trash. So yeah, not so great. However, a couple of quick tweaks to the drop shadow and we can get it looking pretty good. So for example, on this one, if we come into the drop shadow back into the inspector and we say show and we get this blur setting and we ramp this blur right up and tweak the opacity until we're happy with it, then now that's kind of a bit more acceptable. Now in this particular instance, I still don't think that's the best use case for it. So I'm going to turn that drop shadow off again because I think the best way is actually to use an overlay. So what I'm going to do here, again, we're back to our original unreadable footage here. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to come into my text panel over here, scroll right down, you're going to find solids and we're going to grab a custom solid and we're going to place that above our clip, but under our text. So now it looks like this and we're just going to leave it black. We're going to click on that solid, come across to this tab here, the movie, and then we're going to drop that opacity until we're happy with it. So I'm going to bring this down to about 20%, maybe 20, 23, let's call it 23. And now look how much better that text looks, lovely and nice and legible. And you don't really even notice that the background has got darker. If we jump immediately to our original one here, then yeah, okay, you can tell it's got a little bit darker, but so much better. So that is my preferred approach there. It won't always work. So in that instance, let's jump to the next clip that I've got here. So on this particular clip, this is probably like, this is one where like it's almost legible, but it's not quite legible. So this is actually perfect for the drop shadow technique that I shared with you earlier. So if I click on this text layer, come across to the text settings in the inspector, turn on my drop shadow here, and then never that default drop shadow, awful. We're going to ramp up the blur on that, drop the opacity a touch, and now just that little bit more legible, but not obvious. So that is that one. So drop shadow can work sometimes. It's nice. Best to use it in my opinion, when the text is almost legible enough, but you just want it to be a little bit more sort of clear for the viewer. The overlay technique, great, or the final method I'm going to show you is really good if the text is towards the edge of the video. So it could be over to the left hand side, it could be near the bottom. And what that is, is to use a gradient. So here you can see I've got this bit of text here animating in over this random clip, and you can't really read it, especially where the milk jug is, it gets particularly difficult. So on this one, what we're going to do is kind of go back over to our generators, and we're going to find gradient. This is a standard thing, so it comes with Final Cut Pro. We're going to drag a gradient, and again, we're going to put that gradient above our video clip, but below our text. And then in the gradient, we're going to set one of the colors, we'll just set it to black. It's not quite black actually, that's black. And then the top one, we're going to set to white, like so. And you might say, well, that does not look very good, that's fine, we're not quite finished yet. Then what we're going to do is we're going to come into the gradient, we're going to go to the movie tab here, and we're going to change this blend mode to multiply. And then we can also tweak the position of the gradient, so we can move these points around, get it exactly how we want it. And then we can drop the opacity of that gradient right down until we're happy with it. And again, we're looking for that point where the text is perfectly readable, but it's not impacting the video too much. So there you go. So a simple gradient coming up from the bottom just means that that text is so much more readable. And you can do that, as I say, we can change that gradient if you had sort of a text or an element coming in from the left-hand side, you can drag that gradient however you want it to come over the video clip. And that blend mode is the magical bit there that means that you can see the video through it. So that is it. A few tips for text over the top of video and making sure that it's readable. I hope that was helpful. Just as a summary, try a drop shadow, try an overlay, try a gradient, and try to keep your text white unless it's a very deliberate stylistic choice that you want a different color. Otherwise, white text is always going to look cleaner and nicer over video. So that's it for today. A few quick tips. Hope you found that helpful. Other than that, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.