How to Put Text Behind a Person in a Video (Free, No After Effects)

What the effect is

You've seen it all over TikTok and Reels. Someone walks toward the camera and a big word sits behind them, their head and shoulders passing in front of the letters like the text is a real sign in the room. That one detail makes a normal clip look like it had a motion designer on it.

It used to take After Effects and an afternoon of rotoscoping. Now it takes about a minute.

How to do it, step by step

1. 1Open the depth text editor and drop in your clip. MP4, MOV and WebM all work, vertical phone video is fine.
2. 2Hit Add layer and type your text. Pick a font, size and color. Big and bold reads best behind a person, thin fonts get eaten by the subject.
3. 3Click the person in the preview. The tool cuts them out and a green Tracking card shows up in the panel. From now on your text is drawn behind them.
4. 4Scrub through the clip. The cutout is worked out for every frame, so when they move the text stays behind them.
5. 5If the outline looks harsh, raise Edge softness (0 to 12, the default is 3). Hair usually looks better around 4 or 5.
6. 6Optional: pick a Motion preset so the text animates in. Pop and Cascade work well for names, Type for a slower title.
7. 7Export. Free exports are 1080p with a small watermark. Pro gives you 4K without it.

You can add more than one layer, for example a name behind the person and a smaller subtitle on top.

Negative mode

The Effect section has a second option called Negative. Instead of solid color, the letters turn into a window that shows the video underneath in a different treatment: inverted, or one of the duotone schemes like Cinematic, Ember, Gold or Lilac. It looks good on big single words and it's a nice way to stand out from the plain white version everyone else is posting.

Footage that works (and footage that doesn't)

The model needs to tell the person apart from what's behind them. Stuff that helps:

• one person clearly closer to the camera than everything else
• a simple background, a wall, sky, an empty street
• normal movement, walking past or toward the camera is perfect
• decent light on the subject

Stuff that makes it struggle: a busy background the same color as the person's clothes, very fast motion with a lot of blur, and a crowd where several people overlap. If there are several people, it follows the one you clicked.

Tips for TikTok and Reels

Keep the text centered and away from the top and bottom edges, the app's buttons and caption sit there. Two to four words is plenty. Time the text to land as you walk into frame, or right at the start of the clip, and let it go after a few seconds. Heavy fonts like Anton or Bebas Neue hold up on a phone screen. If you talk in the clip, add auto captions for the spoken part and keep the depth text for the title.

How this compares to After Effects

In After Effects you'd trace the person with Roto Brush or the pen tool, clean up the mask on every frame where it slips (hair and fingers always slip), then put the text layer between the cutout and the background. For a 10 second clip that's roughly 20 to 30 minutes for someone who knows the software, plus the subscription.

Here it's one click and the model does the cutout on every frame. The tradeoff is edge quality. A careful manual roto in After Effects gives crisper edges around hair, and if a client is going to pause and inspect the frame, that's still the right tool. For social video watched at phone size, most people can't tell the difference, and you can try five versions in the time one roto takes.

A lot of editors use both: mock the idea up here in a minute, and only do the full After Effects pass if the shot is going in a paid deliverable.

What happens under the hood

When you click, a segmentation model (MediaPipe's interactive segmenter) finds the object under your cursor and builds a mask of it. That runs again on every frame of the video as it plays and during export, and the text is drawn first with the person painted back on top. It all runs in your browser on your GPU, so there's no upload and no waiting in a queue.

Finish the shot

Once the title sits right, a film look makes the whole thing feel graded, and background removal is there if you want to swap the scene behind you. Everything is in the same editor.

Try it on your own clip.

Related: How to add captions to YouTube Shorts | Make iPhone video look cinematic | Best caption styles for social media