The overlay decides more than you typed

An earlier post, "the bottom fifth of your video belongs to the app", covers where words are allowed to sit on a product film and what is worth writing in them. This one starts after that: you have typed the words, and the pass is about to typeset them. Almost everything it does next is automatic, and two of those automatic decisions are ones people set out to make themselves and then cannot find.

Your two colours do different jobs

The panel offers a text colour and an accent colour, which reads like a pair of alternatives. They are not. The headline and the price are drawn in the text colour. The call to action is never drawn in it. The accent is not a second text colour either — it is the fill of a pill drawn behind the call to action, at 96% opacity, and it is the only place the accent appears.

So if you set both and then look at the frame, you will find your text colour on two lines and your accent on neither of them, because the accent is behind the third line rather than in it. A brand with one strong colour should usually put it in the accent, where it becomes a button-shaped object a thumb recognises, and leave the type white.

The call to action's type colour is not yours to pick

This is the decision that surprises people. Having chosen a pill colour, you do not also choose the colour of the words on it. The pass computes the pill's brightness and picks: a light accent gets near-black type, a dark accent gets white. There is no field for it and no override.

It is the right default — it is the one decision that stops a pale accent shipping white-on-white — but it has a consequence worth knowing, which is that the switch is a threshold rather than a gradient. Two accents that look similar can land on opposite sides of it. Nitaris's own two brand colours do exactly that: the amber lands above the line and takes black type, the teal lands below it and takes white. Between a mid grey and a slightly lighter mid grey, the type flips from white to black with no warning.

The practical version: if your accent is anywhere near the middle of its range, do not reason about it. Render one cut and look, because a nudge of a few per cent either way changes the type, and the pill is the one element on the frame whose job is to be read in half a second.

There is always a band behind the words

Whatever you choose, the pass darkens a strip across the full width of the frame behind the whole text block — a soft black wash, a little over a quarter opaque, running slightly taller than the block itself. It exists so that white type survives a bright frame: a white headline over a sunlit marble surface is the classic way burned-in text disappears, and the band is the cheap insurance against it.

It cannot be turned off, and that is worth planning around rather than fighting. It means a dark, moody film gets a band that is nearly invisible, and a bright, airy, white-background film gets a visible grey stripe across one end of it. If your product sits on white and the band bothers you, the lever is not the colour — it is the position, or using fewer lines, because the band is sized to the block it is protecting. Three lines of text buy a tall stripe; a price on its own buys a thin one.

Order, centring and the things with no switch

A few more decisions, listed because each one is a question somebody has asked of some editor at some point and the answer here is simply no:

• The order is fixed: headline, then price, then call to action, reading downwards. You cannot put the price first.
• Everything is centred horizontally. The position control chooses the top or the bottom of the frame, not the left or the right.
• The call to action is fitted into a narrower column than the other two — about four fifths of the width they get — so it starts shrinking sooner. It is the field where a long phrase costs you the most.
• The headline and the price get a drop shadow; the call to action gets the pill instead. A line cannot have both.
• Asking for a logo when no logo has been uploaded to the brand kit draws nothing at all. It does not warn you; it just leaves it out.

The logo does not know where your text is

The logo is placed from its own corner setting, against the same reserved margins, and it is worked out independently of the text block. Nothing coordinates the two. If the text is at the bottom and you have asked for the logo in a bottom corner, they are both competing for the same band of frame, and on a vertical cut — where that band is already the smallest, because the app is using the rest — that is where they are most likely to meet.

The habit that avoids it entirely is to put them at opposite ends: text at the bottom, logo in a top corner, or the reverse. It costs nothing and it removes the only collision the pass will not protect you from.

What gets frozen, and when

One last thing that matters if you work the way most people do, which is to queue several films and then tidy up the brand kit. The overlay is resolved at the moment you enqueue — this video's fields over the kit's defaults over the built-in defaults — and the resolved result is written onto the job. Editing the kit while a film renders does not reach that film. It will use the logo, the accent and the default call to action that existed when you pressed the button.

That is deliberate, and it is the behaviour you want: it means a film cannot change its mind halfway through. But it does mean the order of operations is worth getting right. Fix the kit first, then queue the batch.

The short version

Put your colour in the accent and leave the type white. Expect the words on the pill to be chosen for you, and check them on a real render if your accent is a mid-tone. Expect a darkened band behind the block, and keep the block short if the film is bright. Put the logo at the opposite end from the text. And finish the brand kit before you queue anything, because the film keeps whatever the kit said at the moment you asked for it.