Adding animated text to video can be a great way to make your stories really stand out from the crowd.

There’re some super easy way to do it that I want to share with you today. Let’s get started.

  1. Animate Text in Video with Movavi (Recommended)
  2. Animate Text in Video for Free with iMovie
  3. Best Text Animation App for Android & iPhone: Legend

1. Animate text in Video with Movavi (Recommended)

Professional tools like Adobe After Effects are super powerful when it comes to making professional animated titles, lower thirds, credit rolls, dynamic typography and much more.

However the editing process is super difficult for a beginner or intermediate user to master. Sure enough some stock websites do offer premade customizable templates for After Effects users, the cost for a professional tool plus extra template fees can get too high.

There are many user-friendly video programs out there that make it easy to add animated text to video in a much more cost-effective way. One best option is Movavi Video Editor, an all-in-one home video editor that has powerful functionality and a fully stacked feature set.

Movavi offers a library of hundreds of stylish premade animated text and caption styles for you to choose from, all are fully customizable.

It is quite simple to add text animation to video. Follow these instructions after downloading Movavi Video Editor for either Windows or Mac OS:

Step 1: Movavi Video Editor Installation

After downloading the installation file, open it. To finish the installation process, follow the directions in the pop-up window displayed on your screen.

Step 2: Load Your Video into Movavi

Once the software is open, select “Create Project in Full Feature Mode.” On the main dashboard, click “Add Media Files.” Find the video files you intend to edit. Your timeline will now display these files.

Step 3:  Add Animated Titles and Text

On the left side of the dashboard, click the “Titles” tab to see a list of animated text titles at your disposal. To determine which one is ideal for your project, you can click the icons of each preview in the media player.

After you’ve selected a style you like, drag it into the dashboard’s timeline. The text can be repositioned in the timeline, so you can place it wherever you desire.

Click on the inserted title twice to enter your text. Afterward, the sample text in the preview window should be double-clicked. From there, you can paste or type in your text.

To make the caption more readable and relevant to the video, it can be repositioned along the video frame.

Step 4: Personalize the Text

The text in the timeline should be double-clicked if you want to enter the editing mode. In the preview window, the text can be personalized:

  • To change the speed and length of the title animation, click the button labeled “Clip Properties.
  • Enter the text appearance, size, and alignment after choosing a font family by clicking the “Font Properties
  • You can pick a color for some or all of the wording. You can also add outlines by clicking the button labeled “Color Properties.” Choose the color you like by clicking the text box inside the preview window. If you’ve selected an artistic title, consider adjusting the color of the decoration. You can pick a color by clicking the decorations outside of the text box.

In the dashboard’s upper right corner, click “Apply” to save the modifications.

Step 5: Saving Your Video

Once your editing is complete, you can save the final video by clicking the “Export” button.


2. Adding Animated Text to Video for Free with iMovie

iMovie is a fairly capable, low cost video editing software that covers the basics. Although it doesn’t allow you to animate text directly, there are some tricks to help you achieve the same effect.

Basically there are two ways you can use to add text animation to your videos: One is really simple and quick but it only adds very simple animation effect to your text. The other way is a little bit difficult but you will be able to add loads of text animations.

Method1: Make a transparent text image and then overlay it to your background video.

As you may know that you can make a picture pop up in iMovie but you can’t do that with text. So what we are going to do is make the text a transparent picture (in .png format) first, and then use the picture in picture effect in iMovie to overlay it to your background video.

Step1. Go to Google Images, and type in “letterbox 1080p”, simply choose one with the highest pixel, right click the image and download it.

Step2. Import the downloaded image to any photo editor you use, crop out the black bars around the image and then add whatever text you want to the image. When done, save the text image in .png format.

Step3. Open iMovie and import your video (which you want to add animated text to). Then drag the .png image you just made to iMovie and place it on the timeline like below:

Step4. On top of the preview window, select Picture in picture effect to apply so that the text image will be overlaid to your video. Drag the image anywhere you want on top of the video.

Step5. There are three types of animation effects to choose from: Dissolve, zoom in, or Swap. You can further customize the duration time.

Method 2. Animate your text with a pure green background in Keynote, and then remove the green background with iMovie.

Step1. Open Keynote, switch to Wide mode (16:9).

Step2. Select a pure colored background theme to enter. Then change the background color fill to green.

Step3. Click the Text icon on top of the interface and type any text you want. When done, click the Animate button and add an animation effect to text.

Check this detailed video tutorial to learn how you can do it.

Step4. Once finish creating text animation with Keynote, export it to QuickTime. Make sure to export at 1080p to get the best result.

Step5. Open your video project in iMovie, drag the QuickTime text animation video to iMovie and place it on to the timeline.

From the drop down menu, select Green/Blue Screen to apply.

There you have it.


3. Best Android & iPhone App to Create Text Animation: Legend

Available both on Android and iPhone, Legend allows you to add animated text to your GIFs and videos.

At the time of writing, the app limits you to 1:1 aspect ratio videos (aka square videos). To make a 16:9 video for YouTube, you’ll have to use more than one app for the result you’re looking for. Worry not, though – this is easy to do.

Step1. To begin, make an animated video by entering the wording of your choice, then choose a video or photo from your camera roll. On the top right, click the “Next” button when you’re finished.

Step2. From the three design pages accessible to you, select a design you like.

Step3. Once you’ve chosen a text animation, the text color can be customized and filtered.

Step4. On the bottom right, click the three dots to save the video to your camera roll.

If a 1:1 square video isn’t to your satisfaction, you can use PicPlayPost or similar video collage app to merge it with another video or image.

Step1. Click “Create a Collage” in PicPlayPost. Choose a frame design as displayed in this picture:

Step2. After you’re done, adjust the aspect ratio to 16:9 from 1:1 by clicking the “Frame Ratio 1:1 button”. From the menu, choose 16:9.

Step3. Click on every frame in the template to insert the Legend video you have created, as well as a separate image. Upon saving your video, it’s ready to be used!

How to Animate Text in Video (3 Easy Ways)
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Hey, My name is Paul – nice to e-meet you 🙂 I’m a freelance video editor who has over 4 years experiences of making all types of videos. I founded this website to provide step-by-step and easy-to-follow instructions to first-time editors or beginners like you who want to start their journey in video editing.

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