Fast way to add titles to music videos

Question

I have lots (1000+) music videos ready to be aired but without usual titles (artists, album, publisher).

I need fastest way to add (bulk?) titles to all of them. Graphics or simple text will be same for all of them, just the text itself changes for each video.

So the process would look like:

• import video

• add text to same position for all videos (same font, size, background etc.), just the text itself changes

• export video to same format it was imported

I have many software available to use (Mac and PC), but no idea which one would be fastest solution.

I guess some software should be able to do this in bulk, but if not i will do it manually. Just need something simple and fast, without need to tweek all the render option from start as each video is already prepared for airing.

Answer 1

I believe you can do it with ffmpeg with command drawtext

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "drawtext=enable='between(t\,0,60)':fontfile=/Windows/Fonts/Tahoma.ttf:fontcolor='White':> > text='YourText'" -acodec copy output.mp4

See this tutorial, for batch conversion.

You can add drawbox to make it more nice. See documentation here.

Answer 2

If you're doing this for broadcast and you want animated text and graphicse you could use After Effects with scripting. To pull in the track data automatically you'll either need something like this or this or you could learn / hire someone who knows extendscript to script After Effects. That way you can use your own graphics, animated text treatment and so on, rather than just static text.

Otherwise, as @Shultc says, ffmpeg could be the go. If you wanted to jazz up the text you could use a pre-rendered animated lower-third background and then use the overlay video filter to composite the background and the text over the footage.

Answer 3

Another way to automate it: Sony Vegas Pro + Vegasaur extension (this tool)

(Sony Vegas Pro also supports scripting based on .NET Framework)