Creating Titles in Adobe Premiere Pro v2025

There are two principle ways to create titles in Premiere: Manually or using After Effects templates. Let’s take a look at both.

MANUAL TITLE CREATION

Here’s where we are going – a manually-created title in Premiere.

NOTE: When creating text for any non-broadcast program, I always keep it within Action safe – that’s the outside rectangle displayed when you click the Wrench icon in the Program monitor and choose Safe Margins. For broadcast projects, I keep all text inside the inner, Title safe, rectangle.

Why? Because we have no control over how or where our videos are displayed. Guarding against cutting off the text just makes sense and prevents problems.

Start by placing the playhead at the position you want the title to start.

Next, from the Tool palette, select the Type tool (shortcut: T). Then, click in the Program Monitor itself and start typing.

White text appears at the position you clicked. At the same time, the Properties panel opens, displaying settings for your text, and a new icon appears in the timeline which is your text clip.

NOTE: By default, text titles are created at the same duration as an imported still. You can change the duration of the clip by dragging an edge in the timeline. You can change the default import duration in Premiere Pro > Settings > Timeline, Still image.

Premiere has extensive text formatting controls; most of which are familiar if you used a word processor anytime recently. However, there are several settings I use constantly. With the text selected:

• Change the font using the Text menu (red arrow 1)
• Change the font size by dragging the Font size slider (red arrow 2)
• Change vertical line spacing by dragging these numbers (red arrow 3)
• Change the font color by clicking the Fill color swatch (red arrow 4)
• Enable a drop shadow and adjust settings to taste (red arrow 5)
• Change horizontal or vertical position using the Position settings (red arrow 6).I find changing these numerical settings MUCH easier to use than trying to switch text between edit (red) and move (blue) in the Program monitor

Don’t be afraid to use interesting fonts, colors, or make the line spacing too tight or loose.

ADD ANIMATION

Like any other clip, titles – which are now a separate clip in the timeline – can be animated using dissolves or wipes.

NOTE: If you want to animate individual letters you’ll need to use a MoGraph template, discussed next.

If you find yourself with extra blank lines in the Graphics box, simply select the line you don’t want and press the Delete key. (Blank or empty lines don’t have any text, shape or effect assigned to them)

NOTE: Premiere creates a new title every time you click the Type tool anywhere in the Program Monitor. Until I figured this out, these extra empty titles were driving me nuts.

In my example, I added an Effects > Video Transitions > Slide > Whip effect at the start and a short dissolve at the end.

Feel free to tweak and play to see what else you can do with text in Premiere.

MOGRAPH TEMPLATES

A year or two ago, when Adobe added the Essential Graphic panel to Premiere, they also gave us Motion Graphic templates. These are specially-prepared, animated, After Effects projects (.mogrt files) which allow us to change the text without altering the animation. No knowledge of After Effects is needed to use them.

These come in two flavors: My templates and Adobe Stock templates. My Templates load faster, Adobe Stock provides hundreds of templates to choose from. However, many Adobe Stock titles require purchase.

For this example, drag My Templates > Bold Title into the timeline at the location you want the title to start. If you don’t see it immediately, select My Templates and search for “title”.

Double-click the timeline title to open the Properties panel. Select the line you want to adjust and tweak as we did earlier with the manual title.

For example:

• Double-click the on-screen text in the Program monitor and change it to “Cold, Cold December”.
• Click the eye icon in the Properties panel to make “Episode” invisible
• Delete any empty lines caused by accidentally clicking the Text tool in the Program monitor
• Change fonts, color and shadows as you see fit.

Here I used the Cracked typeface, along with the built-in animation to zoom the title from the center to lower left, then fly it out the center again.

I also selected the Shape layer and changed the color of the box surrounding the text.

SUMMARY

As with all text effects, there are a lot of settings to play with. However, though they are in a different position, these are essentially the same as Word or Pages. The more you play with them, the more opportunities you’ll discover to make your titles look exactly what you need for your project.

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