How To Add Promotional Text To Videos

When using video to market your business, you can get more bangs for your buck by adding promotional text to your videos. It’s easy to do and only takes a few minutes using Windows Movie Maker software. Here’s how.

You will need:

  • Windows Movie Maker
  • Previously Created Video
  • Promotional Text

 

Step 1: Open Movie Maker

When you open Movie Maker, here is what you’ll see.

1-open-movie-maker

 

Step 2: Import Video to Project

Click the Add Videos & Photos icon in the home tab navigation as shown above.

Locate your video on your computer. Select it and click open.

2-import-video

 

Your video should now show up in the story track on right side of Movie Maker as shown here.

3-video-imported

 

Step 3: Select Slide to Edit

Click the slide in the video that you want to add the promotional text to. As you click each slide, you’ll get a preview in the left side of the screen.

In our case, we want our promotion to show on the last slide to direct people back to our website. Therefore, we’ve selected the last file in the story track and we see here the preview of that file.

4-last-file

 

 

Step 4: Add Promotion

On the home tab, next to the snapshots icon, you’ll see a list of three editing features.

  • Title: Adds a new title before the selected item
  • Caption: Adds text that displays over the existing video or photo
  • Credits: Adds the credits, director, stars and location to the video

5-captions

Click the Caption icon and you will have a new text box added to the slide you’ve selected. Simply click to enter your promotional text and click away from the slide when you’ve finished.

6-text-caption

 

Once you add text, you will see a Text Tool tab option open up. Here you can change the text format to suit your needs.

7-promo

 

Step 5: Save Video

At this point, the editing is done. But before you do anything else, you need to save your video as a project in case you need to edit it later. Click the small arrow next to the home tab and then click Save Project As. Name the project and click save.

8-save-as

 

Now that the project is saved for future edits, you can save your video in a format suitable for viewing. Again, click the arrow at the top left of the screen and this time you can do one of two things:

  1. Publish the video to the web (to places like Facebook, YouTube, etc)
  2. Save the video to be viewed on the computer and/or uploaded to the web at a later time.

We want to save the video and upload it later so we mouse over Save Movie.

The next step is to select the size and quality of the video being saved. The most popular settings are pre-defined and include:

  • High Definition: The highest quality and creates a movie at a 1440×1080 pixel resolution.
  • Burn to DVD: The next highest quality creates a 720×480 resolution video.
  • For Computer: Videos with this setting will be of medium quality with a resolution of 640×480.
  • For Email: This is the lowest quality and has a 320×240 resolution.

There are also settings for viewing on mobile devices and manual size settings that you can browse through at your leisure.

9-quality

 

Once the movie is finished saving to the new format, you’ll get the following dialog box where you can play to preview your video.

10-saved