How to Add Text in Adobe Premiere Pro: A Complete Guide

Adding text to your video project in Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the most common editing tasks — whether you're creating subtitles, lower thirds, title cards, or motion graphics. Premiere Pro offers several ways to do this, and understanding each method helps you choose the right approach for your specific project.

The Two Main Ways to Add Text in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro gives editors two distinct paths for adding text:

1. The Essential Graphics panel (the modern, recommended workflow)
2. Legacy Title tool (older method, still functional in some versions)

Adobe shifted its primary text workflow to the Essential Graphics panel starting with Premiere Pro CC 2017. If you're using a reasonably current version, this is the toolset you'll primarily work with.

Using the Type Tool to Add Text Directly on the Timeline 🎬

The fastest way to add text is directly on the Program Monitor:

1. Open your project and place your playhead at the point in the timeline where you want text to appear.
2. Select the Type Tool from the toolbar (shortcut: T).
3. Click anywhere on the Program Monitor canvas.
4. Type your text.

Premiere Pro automatically creates a new graphic clip on a video track above your footage. This clip behaves like any other clip — you can drag it, trim its duration, and move it around the timeline.

Adjusting Text Properties in the Essential Graphics Panel

Once you've placed text, the Essential Graphics panel (found under Window > Essential Graphics) is where you control:

• Font family and style — choose from any font installed on your system
• Font size — set manually or adjust with on-screen handles
• Alignment — left, center, or right within the text box
• Fill color — solid, gradient, or no fill
• Stroke — outline color and width
• Shadow — drop shadow with adjustable distance, angle, blur, and opacity
• Background — a shaded box behind text, useful for subtitles
• Transform — position, scale, rotation, and opacity

Each of these properties lives under the Edit tab of the Essential Graphics panel when your text layer is selected.

Working With Text Layers and Graphic Clips

When you add text, Premiere creates a graphic clip that can contain multiple layers — text, shapes, and images — stacked together. This is useful for building lower thirds where a text name sits above a colored bar, all within a single clip.

To add more elements to the same graphic clip:

• Keep the clip selected in the timeline
• Use the Type Tool or Shape Tool to add additional layers
• Each new element appears as a separate layer in the Essential Graphics panel's layer list

Locking the aspect ratio and position: Text objects snap to the canvas by default, but you can also use the Align and Transform controls to center text precisely — either to the frame or relative to other layers.

Animating Text With Keyframes ✨

Text added via the Essential Graphics panel supports animation through standard keyframing:

1. Select your graphic clip in the timeline.
2. In the Effect Controls panel, expand the Motion properties or expand the individual text layer.
3. Click the stopwatch icon next to any property (position, opacity, scale) to enable keyframing.
4. Move the playhead to a different point and change the property value.

This creates a motion path or fade between two states. For more complex animations — sliding text, animated typefaces, parallax motion — editors typically use Motion Graphics Templates (.mogrt files), which are pre-built animated templates you can drop into the Essential Graphics panel.

Using Motion Graphics Templates (MOGRTs)

Adobe provides free and paid .mogrt templates through Adobe Stock and the Creative Cloud Libraries. Third-party sites also offer them.

To use a MOGRT:

1. Open the Essential Graphics panel and click the Browse tab.
2. Find a template from your local files or Adobe Stock.
3. Drag the template onto your timeline.
4. Select it and switch to the Edit tab to replace placeholder text and adjust colors.

MOGRTs are useful because the animation is pre-built — you only need to swap in your content. The tradeoff is less granular control compared to building animations from scratch.

The Legacy Title Tool (Older Versions)

In older Premiere Pro versions (pre-2017), the primary text method was File > New > Legacy Title. This opened a separate title editor with its own canvas. While Adobe has deprecated this workflow in favor of Essential Graphics, some editors still encounter it when opening legacy projects.

If you're working on a project that contains Legacy Title clips, you can still edit them by double-clicking the clip — but for new text, the Essential Graphics workflow is the current standard.

Factors That Affect Your Text Workflow

How smoothly — and how creatively — you can work with text in Premiere Pro depends on several variables:

An editor building a fast-paced YouTube intro with animated titles has a very different set of needs than someone captioning a corporate interview or a documentary filmmaker adding location cards. The tools overlap, but how you configure and combine them shifts considerably depending on what you're actually making.

The gap between knowing how to add text and knowing which approach fits your specific project — and your current version of Premiere Pro — is where your own setup and creative goals become the deciding factor.