I’m working on a music recital video and would like to show the name of the song at the bottom of the screen. When I did this in the past, I chose the font and color myself. I’m not much of a designer, so I’ve never been completely happy with the aesthetics.
Are there templates for Shotcut that I can use for titles and descriptive text? Or maybe someone knows about a 3rd party product or gallery that I can leverage?
I’ve needed the same. I went looking on different graphic-arts websites and found these html codepens. They generate a HTML that you could capture with OBS studio. They easily allow you to change the text.
Text blurring animation (codepen.io)
Hero Image Staggered Hover Zoom Effect – CSS Only (codepen.io)
CSS Gradient Hover Effect (codepen.io)
17 CSS Glow Text Effects (freefrontend.com)
I haven’t worked out how to download and run these locally yet. Maybe a HTML expert like @Elusien would know.
I’m still working out how to use these myself but recording the output in OBS studio is the only choice that I know of right now.
From bottom right, choose export → ZIP
Unzip anywhere but make sure to keep the folder structure. Then under the dist folder, simply double click index.html (or load that file in anything that isn’t IE). Tested on the text blur effect and Neon.
Edit: you need to be logged in with an account to do the above.
Hi @bburtin, I guess if its a music recital you don’t want anything too flashy or bold. I’m not sure your level of expertise, but I’m going to assume you don’t know this - Shotcut allows you to use any font installed on your system. There are zillions of free fonts to download on the internet.
If it’s a classical recital I’d go for either a plain font such as SEGOE UI or a cursive font.
Alternative to fonts you could look at cooltext.com which creates a transparent PNG of the text you input. Then bring the png into Shotcut and place on a higher track, and position with the Size position and rotate filter.
Often, a simple fade-in is very effective but if you’d like to give your text an animation you might like to look at my tutorial:
or this one by a fellow shotcut forum member:
or this one of mine 
or more text effects here:
@musicalbox has created several text templates too. I’ll search for a few of his posts and give the links.
Good luck
Here’s just 3 of @musicalbox’s text effects and presets. They are all excellent. H’e done more like this and they are terrific resources. Search “@musicalbox text preset” in the advanced search on this forum.
Thanks guys. I hobbled together my own descriptive titles by creating a gradient background, masking a rectangle of it, then putting white text on top. I’m happy with the result, but it required a bit of manual work. I’ll take a look at the suggested links and see if there’s a more automated way to do what I need.
To extend what @jonray was suggesting. If you make a transparent PNG sized to 1920x1080 (assuming that’s your video size), then it will show on top of your video. You have to put it on a track above of course. I’ve uploaded an example you can download and see for yourself. If you want the box to be transparent, then only do the text in your PNG and add a transparent box in Shotcut.
Looks fine, @bburtin. I like the gradient background. I think a simple fade-in (and fade-out) added to the text would be nice.
Downloaded. Thank you, this idea works well.
A variation - I made this short demo video in which I’ve made the black gradient rectangle expand (keyframed the crop filter) and made each line of text fade in separately. I added a touch of opacity to the black rectangle.
My timeline looked like this:
PS lovely song. For those who don’t know, Offenbach composed the “Can-can”.
A variation of your variation @jonray 
The text reveal doesn’t look quite as good, but this method only requires 3 tracks in the timeline.
descriptive-text.mlt (10.3 KB)
Very nice! BTW did you notice me playing the flute at the beginning of that clip? 
.
.
.
(only joking - I’m not that good… 
)…
@bburtin, another variation… you could do something like this (although it may be a little complex for your needs)…
By the way Jon. While watching your first video again I noticed the singer says Charmille, not Chamille.
I looked it up and the title of the song is indeed Les Oiseaux dans la ChaRmille
So we both wrote the title wrong 
I don’t remember hearing or reading that word before. I looked that up too.
Charmille in French means Tree tunnel in English.
That little mistake made me learn a new word
After thinking about it some more, I realized that I probably want the text background to be partially transparent, but not the text itself, since I want the text to be legible. So I’m back to separate background and text. Oh well, no free lunch! 
Thanks everyone for your support and suggestions.
I looked it up myself in the old language dictionaries that I use and a clearer English translation might be “Charms of/within a thousand trees”…
I agree.
Pour la Charmille je ne sais pas si la chanteuse parle vraiment de l’arbre, mais pour les Comptes c’est plutôt Contes (Récit d’aventures imaginaires)
La Charmille en Français c’est un Charme (Carpinus betulus) taillé en haie ou en topiaire, c’est-à-dire contraint de conserver une petite taille et un port trapu et ramifié.
For the Charmille I don’t know if the singer is really talking about the tree, but for the Counts it is rather Contes (Tale of imaginary adventures).
The Charmille in French is a Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) pruned as a hedge or topiary, that is to say, forced to keep a small size and a stocky and branched habit.
Translated by DeepL
C’est pas ma journée on dirait 
Pour réaliser cette animation, je suppose que vous avez employé votre html ‘FlipSpin text effect’ ?
To make this animation, I suppose you used your html ‘FlipSpin text effect’?
