How to Highlight Text in Your Videos Using Adobe Premiere Pro, Plus More Tips

Video editing can be a tricky space and as a video editor, I’m pretty sure you must have come across a time where you had to showcase certain screenshots in a video and highlight them as the anchor or the host is reading that sentence out loud.

At times it’s important for an editor to direct focus on some of the key phrases in a sentence which at times get lost in the anchor’s narration. So, how do you make those parts stand out? By simply highlighting them as we used to do during our school and college days. But please don’t go scribbling away on your monitors, we have a better way to do it using Premiere Pro.

Create a mask around the sentence

Make sure the sentence is in the middle of the frame for better visibility

1. Use the rectangle tool to create a mask around your sentence. Make sure the mask covers the entire sentence.
2. Now, head over to the effect controls and open shape settings.
3. Here, open the fill tab and change the colour of the fill. We recommend yellow colour since it tends to grab the most attention.
4. Once that is done, you can now go under the opacity tab and change the blend mode from normal to multiply.
5. This will highlight the sentence and also make it stand out amongst others.

Add animation to the highlighted graphic

The crop tool will help you add animations to the graphic

1. Go to effects and search for crop.
2. Add the crop effect to the graphic layer you just created.
3. Now, go over to the effect controls and under the crop effect, change the right value to 100.
4. Now, hit the stopwatch button which will create a keyframe.
5. Go to the last frame of the video and now, change the right value to 0.
6. If you play the video, you can see the highlighted effect gets a little animation.
7. To make the animation smoother, right-click on the keyframes and then select ease-in.

For more tutorials, visit our How-To section.

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