Titles and on-screen text

Workflow

1. One command per element: addTitle with a role ("hook", "title", "lower_third", "callout", "end_card"). It sizes for the canvas, keeps inside the safe area, eases the entrance, puts a pill behind lower thirds and callouts, and gives an end card an opaque full-screen background of at least 2 s (so role end_card is a card, not text over footage). Override with style only when the brief asks for a look.
2. Hold for reading (the one rule other skills point to): 0.6 s + 0.25 s per word on screen, entrance not counted, and never under the role minimum: 1 s for any card (under that is decoration, not communication), 3 s for a name lower third, 2 s for an end card. Double it when the viewer is also watching action or the card is a designed hero moment.
3. One idea per card. A title with two clauses is two cards, or one card held twice as long.
4. Entrances and exits: about 0.2 to 0.4 s in with ease-out (easeOutCubic, easeOutExpo), 0.15 to 0.25 s out with ease-in. Stagger related elements 0.15 to 0.3 s apart with the same animation family. Linear reads as robotic.
5. Typography comes from the direction. addTitle and addTextClip inherit the video's type pairing, weights, colours and entrance (setDirection), so leave fontFamily out and two videos look different. style overrides anything: use it when the brief names a font or a look (search the fonts catalogue by mood) or a brand kit requires it. Match existing typography for small additions. Text with letters outside Latin keeps the face the type engine picks for its script. One display face and one support face at most.
6. Kinetic type: the key line gets a word-by-word entrance, style animIn "word-slam" (slams up with a motion smear, for the hard line), "word-pop", "word-slide", "word-fade", "wave" or "bounce" with animInDuration about 0.6 s: one clip per phrase, on the line that matters, not every card. animIn also takes pop, typewriter and blur-in. applyMotionPreset "elastic-pop", "pulse" or "bounce-in", or scale and opacity keyframes, when it must hit an exact beat.

Gotchas