A handwriting overlay for CapCut, Premiere or DaVinci

Sometimes you want the handwriting but not the editor: the rest of the project lives in CapCut, Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, with your cuts, music and colour grade, and you just need an animated line of handwriting to drop on top. The usual answer is a clip of the writing on its own that you lay over the footage.

The quickest route is the free handwriting animation generator: type your words, set the background to Transparent and download a WebM, which Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and After Effects place over your footage with no keying. It also makes a green-screen MP4 for editors that don’t read transparent video, such as CapCut.

If you’d rather build the overlay in the full editor, with your own timing for several lines, note that it exports MP4 (H.264), which has no transparency channel. There you write on a solid background and remove it in your editor, which takes one setting and works very well.

Black or green?

There are two ways to remove a background, and each suits a different kind of text:

• Black background with the Screen blend mode. Screen drops pure black and keeps anything lighter. It’s the quickest route and keeps soft glows from the Glowing dot, Spark and Comet pen tips intact. The catch: it only works for light ink (white, yellow, pastels), and the ink becomes slightly see-through over bright footage.
• Green background with a chroma key. The keyer cuts out one colour and leaves everything else fully solid, including dark ink and the Outline edge. It takes a minute longer to tune, and very thin lines can pick up a green fringe.

White text over normal footage: use black and Screen. Dark ink, coloured ink, or text that must stay perfectly solid: use green.

Making the background

Black

In the library, click New blank video. Set Length (1 to 60 seconds) and pick a Shape: Portrait 9:16 (1080 × 1920), Square 1:1 (1080 × 1080) or Landscape 16:9 (1920 × 1080). Match the shape of your main project so the overlay lines up without scaling. Click Create.

Green

There’s no green canvas button, but Photo to video keeps the shape of whatever image you give it. Make a solid green image at the size of your project, for example 1920 × 1080 or 1080 × 1920, in any image editor (pure green, #00FF00, is the easiest to key). Pick it with Photo to video, set the Length, and click Create. Images larger than 1920 pixels on the long side are scaled down to fit.

Writing the text

Click Add text and set it up as you normally would: font, Size, Draw time, Easing. A few settings matter more for overlays:

• On black, keep Outline and Background off. A dark outline or box would vanish under Screen anyway.
• On green, Outline is fine and helps readability. Avoid green ink, and prefer Pencil or Off as the Pointer; glows blend into the green and key out unevenly.
• Position it in the frame where it should appear in the final video. Moving it later in your editor is possible but loses the point of matching sizes.
• Leave a little time at both ends, so you can trim the clip in your editor without cutting off the writing.

Then click Export and Download MP4. Blank and photo videos render at 30 frames per second, without sound.

In CapCut

Drag the overlay onto a track above your footage. With it selected, open the Video panel. For black, go to Basic, then Blend, and set the mode to Screen. For green, open Remove BG, switch on Chroma key, pick the green with the colour picker and raise Intensity until the green is gone. On the CapCut phone app, add it with Overlay; Blend and Remove BG are in the clip’s tools.

In Premiere Pro

Put the overlay on V2 above your footage. For black, open Effect Controls, expand Opacity and set Blend Mode to Screen. For green, drag the Ultra Key effect (Video Effects, Keying) onto the clip, choose the green with the Key Color eyedropper, and set Output to Composite. Use the Matte Cleanup and Spill Suppression settings if thin lines show a fringe.

In DaVinci Resolve

Place the overlay on a video track above your footage. For black, open the Inspector and set Composite Mode to Screen. For green, add the 3D Keyer from the Effects library to the clip on the Edit page, pick the green, and adjust until the edges are clean. You can also key it on the Color page with the qualifier and an alpha output, or in Fusion with the Delta Keyer.

Tips

• Make one long overlay instead of many short ones if several lines appear in the same shot. Each text keeps its own timing on Inky Clips’ timeline.
• Keep the projects. Your overlay stays in the library on this computer; open it, change a word and export again when the client asks for a new spelling.
• Need speech captions too? Those can’t go on a blank overlay, since there’s no audio to transcribe. Caption the real footage in Inky Clips instead, as described in Word-by-word captions: how to make them and edit them all at once.

If you came here from After Effects tutorials, The write-on text effect, without After Effects compares the two approaches.