How to Caption Videos Directly Inside Canva

Did you know that you can create captioned videos right inside Canva? It's actually very simple, but it might not be exactly where you think it's going to be. So I'm going to show you exactly how to caption your videos, the effects you might want to use, and if you hang around to the end, I'm going to show you how to export it into the right format so it's ready for you to post to places like Instagram. Let's dive in. So welcome to my channel. Thank you for being here. My name is Jackie and I am a graphic designer who specializes in taking complex design things to complex Canva things, complex branding and simmering it down so that everyday business owners can understand and apply it to save them money and to help to increase their professionalism and therefore bring in the sales. And so if you are a business owner who's looking to caption their videos, you're in the right spot. If you're not a business owner, you're welcome here too, but that is what my channel specializes in. So if that sounds interesting to you, make sure you hit subscribe. And so let's look into how to actually caption your videos. So first up, I've just opened up a Canva design in here. I've done a video Canva design in the shape of a reel. To open up any new design, you can just press create a design. I've toggled down here to video and I've chosen Instagram reel. You can scroll across to do any kind of other video, but it's always great to start with a video format because it just makes the whole process a lot easier. Now, once I'm in this design, I need to first insert my video. So I'm going to go to my uploads and make sure you've toggled across to video. So I've clicked on the videos tab and you can see this video that I've added in. If I click on this, it's going to insert it straight into my design. I could also drag it in and choose right click to set the video as a background if you want it to be full screen, which is a really great look in my humble opinion. So now you'll see the video inserted into what's called the timeline down the bottom. Unless you're doing lots of editing to this, you don't really need to touch this very much. But for me, I'm just going to do a quick edit and just wait till I start talking. So I'm going to just drag this video up to where I've paused the video to about there and then just double check at the end here. To play, I'm just hitting my space bar to play the video through. There we go, I've stopped talking. So I've just paused it by hitting my space bar again. And if I hover my mouse over here, I can click and drag to bring it in and it kind of almost snaps to where this play head is. All right, so once my video is where I want it to be, I'm going to now add the captions. So if I go over here to text, yes, text makes sense. We're editing text. You can go here to captions. If I click on captions, you can see I've got some options here. If you had multiple videos in here, you can choose to select all of them or just select some of them. But today, because we're keeping it simple, I can just have that one selected and then I can press generate captions. Canvas are going to analyze my video and choose what captions it needs to be. Now, there is a few editing things you can do here. So I'm going to go through them now for you. So this is literally just a text box. If I was to zoom in here, you can see this is a text box. I can move it around. I can resize it. I can do anything as if it was text. I might choose to make it a lot larger. I might choose to move it up here a little bit. But honestly, where it's put it, it's pretty good. And the size it had it in was already pretty good. So feel free to not change anything there, because say, for example, if I was making a reel, I want to make sure that the text isn't right down the bottom because that will get covered by the caption. I also want to make sure it's not too big because it gets covered by some of the side tools or maybe cropped depending on what mobile device is viewing it. So exactly as I had it was already pretty darn good. Now I can do some editing. So firstly, I can edit the text and the words that it actually says. So if I click on the text box here and toggle over to captions, it's going to bring up all of the exact words that I've said here. If I want to edit what it says, I can literally just click on here. I haven't done anything other than click and I can type in here and it will add that text to my captions or I could delete it or I could edit anything inside here or I can press delete with a trash can and it will delete that whole line of caption. And that will then be reflected over here in my text. Next up, I can obviously change the fonts as per normal. I can change this to being anything at all that I want to do. I already chose my brand font, so I'm going to go with that. I can also change the sizing. I can change the colouring. So say I wanted to make it purple, I can change all those other aspects. But what I want to show you most is the effects and the animate because they are two fun things that we can play with here. So when I click on the text box and go to effects here, you'll see that it's got this background feature already turned on. This background feature is what makes the background behind the text. So you can see here that I can play with it with the roundness, the spread and the transparency. So the transparency is how see-through it is. So I can bring this all the way up and you can see that the black is totally black now or I could bring it all the way down. Now, a key caveat for you that I want to make sure that I share is if you change the colour somewhere, but not everywhere, then this is what's happened. So you can see earlier on, I changed the as a results to purple, but it hasn't changed all of my text. If I want to change all of my text, I need to click here. So it's kind of actually selected not just this text box, but all future text boxes. Whereas if I click on the text, can you see how there's that purple box around this that's just hitting on the text? If I click to edit now while I'm just on this text, it's going to just change this particular text box. I can move somewhere else and it's still going to be white. Whereas if I click down here where it's selecting everything, then if I press the purple here, it's going to apply that purple across everything. So that's kind of how you can apply we are formatting to multiple things at once. Make sure you're just clicking on this kind of like, it's kind of a little bit below the text box because it's making room for any time. So sometimes my text is probably actually four lines long. And so it's made room for all of them to be there, which is why extending a little bit below because it's making room for all of them. Hard to explain, but in essence, don't click on the exact text box where it's got that dotted line underneath. Click a little bit lower so everything is selected and that's selecting all past and present versions of this text box. All right, now back to our effects here. So if I click on this, go to effects, make sure you click that whole area so that you're applying whatever changes you're making to everything, not just that one text box. And if I go to a background here, I can make that transparency full. Maybe I want to make this into a white. I can make the spread, which is how wide it is away from the text. I can make the roundness if I want it hard edges or if I want it rounded. I'm going to leave them a little bit rounded because that's very Instagram-esque. So it looks more authentic and organic to the platform. And that's kind of done. That's exactly what I want to do. You could also choose to remove this altogether. So if I click on none, it's going to take that away. And you might choose to do an outline instead. An outline is another common effect. Your biggest thing is for readability, all right? Obviously I can't just do it like this because it's not readable. And especially with videos, often the background is changing sometimes. You need to make sure it's visible at all points in the video. So I'm going to click on outline here and I might choose the thickness to be a little bit wider. And I might choose to make, put a white background behind that or a black background behind that. And then that is again, still visible. I'm going to go back to background because I really liked that. I can change the color of that background here. Let's make it into white again. And now I'm going to go to animate. So when I click on animate, I've got the option to animate the text. So I've got all of these different options. If I click on reveal here, you can see it's revealing the text as it goes. I'm going to go on highlight here and it's highlighting the text. And again, I can choose what color I want that highlight to be. That's a gross color highlight. There we go, that's a bit better. I can do snake, which kind of underlines the text. Typewriter, like there's so many options here. You have all of Canva's animation possibilities. You can customize so much more than most captioning platforms that I have seen. The only thing I can't work out how to do my friends is to change the amount of text that's on each line. So say if you only wanted one word to pop up on each thing, then I can't find out how to do that easily. So for now, you're just stuck with the way that the Canva already breaks up your text, but you can totally change how you want them animated. And now, so once you're happy with it, and I'm pretty happy with that, I could add anything more into it. I could add my brand elements. I could add little elements or I could add little pop-ups or things that come up at different parts of the video. So say, for example, I wanted to add in some text here. Sign up now. I could just make that big here. I'm not going to format it at all to save you time, but you can see down the bottom here, it appears in the timeline and I can choose. I want that to be here or here, or do I want it to be up for the whole video, or do I want it to be really short? And you can just, wherever this blue bar sits is where that thumbnail, that text is going to pop up. So it's there now, and now it's gone again. And so once you're happy with the design, you need to share it. So I'm going to show you how to do that in just a moment. But first, I want to invite you to something very exciting. I have a free masterclass and it's called Design Tools to Get to 100K Online. And if you are a business owner who is trying to create your graphics in Canva, but things just aren't quite adding up, you don't know exactly how to use Canva, you don't know what your brand is about, you don't know how to make your designs look professional, I want to help you for free. I have a masterclass and in there, I'm going to teach you three design mistakes you're probably making that are impacting your credibility. I'm also going to share with you Canva hacks that are going to save you absolute hours. Plus, you're going to watch me design a graphic from start to finish live. So you can steal my process and design smarter and not harder in a way that's going to help make you sales because people are trusting the professional graphics you're putting out there. So just head to the link in the description or the QR code on the screen and you can sign up to join me live for that. And I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into sharing this reel. So if I go to share up the top right-hand corner, I want to hit the download button and the version I want to save it in is MP4. MP4 is a high quality video format and it's going to be perfect for pretty much anywhere that you're loading in a video. So just make sure that you've got MP4 selected there. You can leave the quality on 1080p, which is just totally fine. You can bring it up if you want to. Most platforms don't need that high quality and then you just press download. And once that's done, I usually then send that to my phone or if you want to, you can also get Canva up on your phone and download it directly from Canva on your phone to your phone if you want to post it straight to Instagram from there. So thank you for joining me for today's video. I hope you found it exciting and inspiring and I cannot wait to hear all about how you use captions in your videos just from Canva. So thanks for joining me. Make sure you hit subscribe if you love this kind of content. Hit like if you liked this video and I will see you next week for more Canva and branding tutorials. See ya.