How do you overlay text onto a video clip in Final Cut Pro, you know, music video style?

Didja try the searching built-in help for “text overlays”?

The help menu explains this pretty well, try a search. Good luck!

1. In the timeline, double-click on the clip, which brings it up in the viewer window; once the clip is in the viewer window, below the video and to the right, below the jog dial is a button that has an icon that looks like a film strip with an “a”; click on that and you will see the choices for text overlay (lower 3rd, etc.); this will allow you to enter text in a text editor in the viewer window; after you have entered and formatted the text, the text should appear in the clip in the timeline. Note that the text will appear for the duration of the clip.

2. If you want to add text and fade it in/out, you will need to do it using the effects palette (in the browser window), using the video generator/slug function; you can add a blank slug (black empty video clip), and then set the opacity to 100 percent on slug, and add text the same way you did in the previous approach.

sndfreQ is bang on the mark. :)

Thank you! It’s one of those things where after spending 2 hours searching help and trying to figure it out, I’m sure it’s in there somewhere but I just don’t have the time to look. This is incredibly helpful. Thank you!

Okay but no. I want to overlay text ON TOP of video. Not have a black screen with text. I did figure out how to add text in the way the video outlines.

I will try to follow “sndfreQ“s directions ASAP.

The thing is I don’t have enough time to have empty frames in my video. It has to be a certain time limit and I’m at it already!