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Add text and music

Overview

Name of explainer: Add text and music

Creative theme: Video editing

Software used: Premiere Pro

User level: BEGINNER

This is explainer 4 of 5 in this series

This series includes:

Create a project, import video clips and save the project
Sequence video clips and render an mp4 file
Trim video clips, add fades and cross-fades
Add text and music
Putting it all together: Stonehenge!

The Software

This series of beginner explainers uses Adobe Premiere Pro. You can download a free 7 day demo version from the Adobe website.

Premiere Pro is a PAID app, often purchased as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud ‘All Apps’ subscription. It can also be subscribed to on its own. Here are example monthly pricing options:

Pricing can change at any time – Always see Adobe’s live site for the latest information.

Premiere Pro has a ‘baby brother’ called Premiere Rush, which is a simpler video editor designed to work as well on mobile devices as traditional desktop computers and laptops. It offers a ‘quick and simple’ workflow and doesn’t include many of the tools and features of Pro. Premiere Rush is part of Adobe’s ‘Creative Cloud Express’ bundle which may be suitable for content creators working between mobile and desktop devices. It’s worth trying a free demo to see if it includes the features you need.

Please review all subscription options before committing to a purchase, bearing in mind the various bundles and pricing plans available. Also look for special subscription offers which last between 1 month and 12 months depending on your initial subscription.

This month we’re also running an explainer series for Vegas Pro (paid as a one-off fee or by subscription) as well as offering a single full-workflow explainer for Premiere Rush. Check them out!

The final product

Here’s the simple ‘Spring has sprung’ video we’re creating as we work through explainers 1 to 4. Notice the added text, fades, transitions and music track.

The pre-requisities

This is a BEGINNER workflow explainer, so you just need to install and open the software. We’ll take it from there.

We suggest watching the previous explainers in this series before continuing here.

If you’re new to IT / computing, you may need help downloading and installing the software. Start with a search for ‘how do i install premiere pro’ or speak with someone who’s familiar with downloading and installing.

Why would I do this?

Text is often added to video projects to create a title sequence, provide additional information for the viewer (E.g. Lower thirds) or just introduce individual sections (E.g. For software explainers).

Almost all videos have a soundtrack, which can include any mix of music, sounds effects, ambience (E.g. A busy street or forest) and spoken voice (VO). You might not realise how important a well-mixed soundtrack is until it’s clearly ‘wrong’ or ‘missing’. For example…

Let’s do it!

Click the play icon to watch this video. Subtitles are available – Click the settings cog at the bottom right for options. You can also watch this video full-screen by clicking the full-screen icon at the bottom right.

Good to know

Our short springtime video is complete!

Where to next?

Adding simple, static text is a good place to start. Premiere Pro includes a number of built-in text animation options too…

1: Start by selecting the ‘Captions and Graphics’ workspace, then the ‘My Templates’ tab. Scroll down to find example templates for titles, lower thirds, credits and logos…

2: Drag and drop the template of your choice directly on to the timeline where you want it. For a transition, this will need to be between two existing video clips. Below, we’ve added the ‘bold credits’ template to the end of our very cinematic flower video 🙂

We’ve used a single music track for this video. If you go on to study sound design, you’ll meet the terms diegetic and non-diegetic early on in your studies. Ready for a fun primer?

Notes and updates

There are no notes or advisories at this time. This video explainer was last updated in March 2022. This page was last updated in March 2022.

We at pixels.cool are not responsible for the content of any external webpages or software downloaded from third party sites. Links are included in good faith at the time of writing. All explainer content is compiled in good faith using processes and methods used by the team. Modern software gives users many ways in which to accomplish the same task, and for reasons of clarity we choose not to reference multiple options. All computer users should run up to date virus / security software at all times to minimise risk.

Download the asset pack for this series

If you’d like to follow our explainers using the actual assets demonstrated, you can download them using the link below. Not only do you receive the logos and images used in this series – You also gain access to versions of the videos without the background music. Nice!

ASSET PACK AVAILABLE END MARCH.