2.6 – Adding and Editing Text and Captions Lesson

Lesson Overview

In video projects, text and captions serve many roles—introducing topics, highlighting points, and making your content accessible. This lesson focuses on using Pictory’s text and caption tools to improve the clarity and coherence of your videos. You will learn the main steps for adding new text (like titles or key points) and how to adjust the look and feel to match your message. More importantly, you’ll see how to keep your on-screen text and captions looking consistent across every scene, avoiding the distracting jump from one style to another. Pictory also enables you to save favorite text styles or create new templates for ongoing use, saving time on future projects. This lesson is especially relevant for anyone needing to add subtitles for accessibility or move captions away from sensitive visual areas—such as faces or important on-screen graphics. By understanding these foundation skills, you’ll have more control over the appearance and function of the text in your videos, regardless of your audience or intended platform.

Who This Is For

Anyone aiming to produce engaging and clear videos will benefit from this lesson.

• Content creators adding educational overlays or key points
• Marketers developing branded video content
• Educators captioning tutorials or lectures for wider accessibility
• Social media managers looking to improve video reach
• Teams needing consistent styling across multi-scene projects
• Anyone who wants to tailor captions for clarity and audience needs

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Customizing text and captions is a critical step after your video’s main content has been assembled and before the final export. For example, once your video scenes are ready in Pictory, you’ll use these tools to add titles, logo overlays, or highlight key terms. The ability to save and reuse styles ensures consistency across projects, which is important for branding. If you’re preparing video for social platforms, easily moving or hiding captions means your content is suitable for platforms with different display requirements or silent autoplay. A consistent text style set at this stage also saves time later, because you won’t need to correct mismatched captions after export.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditionally, adding stylized text or captions to video involved manual, scene-by-scene edits—leading to errors and inconsistent results. Pictory simplifies this: Instead of adjusting each scene separately, you can apply the same text style or caption formatting to all scenes with a single action. For example, if you decide to update your caption placement or text color, these changes carry through every scene, not just one. This not only reduces editing time, but also ensures every part of your video looks aligned and intentional. For those working on multiple projects, being able to save and reuse styles boosts efficiency and helps maintain a professional look. The visibility toggle for captions means you can quickly adapt a video for voiceover-only formats without clutter or extra steps.

Practice Exercise

Open an existing video project or create a new one in Pictory.

1. Add a heading text box to one scene, set a unique font, color, and add an animation.
2. Save your customized text as a new style. Apply it to another scene using the saved style.
3. Select your captions, reposition them (try moving from bottom to top of the frame), and use the option to apply this position to all scenes.

After these steps, compare your scenes:

• Do your text and captions look consistent?
• Did the apply-to-all feature save you time compared to manual changes per scene?

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds on your previous work setting up scenes and basic editing, taking a deeper look at refining your content’s presentation with text and captions. Mastering these skills improves video clarity and audience impact—an essential part of the editing phase. Next, you’ll explore branding elements, like adding custom logos or changing your intro style, to further personalize your videos. Continue with the course to unlock the full potential of Pictory’s editing and customization tools.