How to Add a Typing Effect to a Video

Step by step

1. Type your text. Enter the word, link or handle you want to appear.
2. Set the rhythm. Pick a typing speed near 110 ms per letter and a one-to-two-second pause before the loop.
3. Choose the look. Dark or light theme, transparent background, and a blinking caret in your accent colour.
4. Export and overlay. Download the transparent GIF and add it as an overlay layer over your footage.

Why generate instead of animate

Animating a typewriter effect by hand means keyframing a text reveal, masking each character, and matching a cursor — minutes of fiddly work per clip. A generated overlay removes all of that: the typing, the blinking cursor, the pause and the loop are baked into the file. You change the text once and re-export in seconds, which is ideal when you publish the same hook across many videos. Because it's a self-contained file, the effect also survives re-uploads and platform re-encoding far better than native editor text.

Getting the timing right

The two numbers that decide how natural it feels are speed and pause. Typing speed around 90–130 ms per letter mimics a real person; faster reads as a machine. The pause after the last letter should be long enough to read the full phrase — about one second for short words, two for a URL. If you'd rather the bar never sits empty, switch to backspace mode so it deletes and retypes in a continuous cycle.

Quality settings that matter

Before exporting, set the scale to 2× or 3× so the text stays sharp at full resolution, and nudge the GIF colours up if the edges look rough. For the cleanest possible text on a solid bar, use the WebM export instead. If you're working in a desktop editor that supports image sequences, the PNG-frames ZIP gives you lossless, soft-edged alpha.