The editing tools within Canva keep getting better. So I wanted to make this post to show you how to use Element Timing. For those of you looking to use Canva to edit your Reels, this could be an alternative to editing within Instagram. Without further ado, let's hop in.

Instagram Reels are a fantastic way for you to grow your following on Instagram. A very popular style of Reel is to take B roll clips and overlay text boxes on them. This is something that I do fairly often after a photo shoot, I will create multiple pieces of content utilizing behind-the-scenes footage, and then I can simply add text later, giving the clips a little bit more meaning and put some tips in the description.

One of the things that I thought about when Canva rolled out Element Timing is Element Timing could be a way to create this look and feel within Canva instead of having to use the Instagram editor so you can use it to just overlay text or you can even use it to add subtitles to your Instagram Reels and here is how you would do that. Don't forget, I'm always demoing inside of a Canva Pro account so if you would like access to all of the Pro features, like the Video Background Remover, I would encourage you to use my link lashondabrown.com/canva45 to get access to a free 45-day trial. So you can play around with some of the features. I have a video about Video Background Remover if you’d like to watch it and also a video about Video Adjustments.

This is actually the sample clip that we adjusted in Canva. I recorded this on my cell phone I flipped the image so that you could read my necklace. I made it more vibrant by utilizing a filter and I did some slight adjustments to the contrast and the brightness. Now that I have done those adjustments to how the video appears, I want to use Canva to create subtitles. So I'm actually going to click in the notes section of this video and I am going to play and pause the video and type what I hear. So in this clip, I simply say this is a test clip or the element timing video. Thank you so much for watching my tutorials.

What I love about doing subtitles inside of Canva versus Instagram is it's so much easier to start and stop the clip and being able to type everything in one convenient location gives you the ability to simply copy and paste it when you're done. So this took me a few seconds versus multiple minutes inside of Instagram. Once you have that text typed out, then you can style it however you would like. I would click on text, select text from your brand kit so it matches your branding, and then decide how big you want your subtitles to appear and where you want them to be located. So I obviously don't want the text on top of my face. I'm gonna move it down here and I'm okay with a couple lines of text, beyond that I would start a brand new subtitle.

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I also want it in all caps, so I'll just click on this here to select uppercase and then I'm going to click on effects and add a text background to make it easier to read on top of my pattern shirt. Now I also don't have yellow in my brand kit so what I could do is select yellow and change it to this hunter green and this is more on-brand for me or even a dark brown. Now if I use a dark color, that black text is not legible. So from there I can select white at the top and I like the way that this appears.

Once you have styled your first text element, we're going to open those notes again and we're going to simply copy and paste. From there, I'm going to select the element, click on the three dots, and duplicate. You can also click on Ctrl D on your keyboard to duplicate whatever you have selected. Once you have your subtitles on your clip, we're going to select them all, click on those three dots again, and show timing. From there, I want you to locate a little arrow in the right-hand corner and that's going to reveal all the text boxes. Once you select that text, you can drag from left to right to adjust the duration. So what I like is if I select the thank you for watching my tutorials, I can drag it here so that it appears at a different time or if I want it to show up after this one, I can drag it here. So I'm just gonna say here, show that one first, and then fade to this one. Once you have your textboxes in place, you can click on the play button in the left-hand corner to make sure that your text appears when you'd like for it to.

I want to make a slight adjustment to the duration. So I'm going to drag this out a little bit more and I'm going to pull this one in so that they don't overlap. And now I will go back to the beginning and see what I think. Love it. Now if I wanted to do more of an effect for that first textbox, I could click on it and even animate it. So I could have it pan in, I could have it wipe in, or breathe. And so this is going to give you so many more options than what's available and Instagram.

I'm going to do something very simple. We'll click on bounce, and we'll just leave everything selected except the writing style and we'll do word instead. We'll do the same thing here. We'll do bounce and we'll say a word. So again, we can click on play at the bottom and we can add animation to our text elements to make it a bit more exciting when our subtitles come in.

I think leveraging Element Timing inside of Canva is going to be a fantastic way for you guys to save time adding subtitles or simply adding text overlays to your videos. You can stitch together multiple clips within the Canva Video Editor so you could upload those into Canva, apply your filters, adjust your lighting, and add those text boxes later. So I think this is going to be a huge time saver for you guys moving into the new year. And I really hope you've enjoyed learning about this little Canva hack.

Thanks so much for watching this video. I’m Lashonda Brown, a Canva Verified Expert from Virginia. If you would like a Canva Pro free trial for 45 days, visit lashondabrown.com/canva45. If you liked this post, you'll definitely want to watch my tutorial about Reel Covers. Until next time to talk for now.

Canva Hack for Instagram Captions

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