The video-craft encyclopedia.
Every shot, edit, audio trick, and crew role, defined in Cue's voice. Plain English. Industry-fluent.
On-Screen
Name-and-title text overlay in the bottom third of the frame. Broadcast TV's name tag.
Generic name for on-screen text generated by a character generator. The hardware vendor became the noun.
The tiny channel logo in the corner of broadcast TV. Ad-blocker bait.
Text superimposed over picture - captions, names, locations. "Supered" comes from "superimposed."
Final still frame with credits, CTA, subscribe button. YouTube's closing handshake.
Compose by placing subjects on intersections of a 3×3 grid. The starter rule everyone breaks once they know it.
The portion of the frame guaranteed to display on any TV or platform. Keep critical info here.
Designed credits at the start of a film or show. The Saul Bass / Kyle Cooper school is the standard.
90% of the frame. Anything important - keep it here for broadcast.
80% of the frame. Text lives here. Outside it, characters get clipped on legacy displays.
Captions baked into the video file. Can't be turned off. TikTok-style word-by-word lives here.
SubRip Subtitle file format. Plain text + timecodes. Universal.
Web Video Text Tracks. SRT's younger sibling, better styling support, web-native.
Persistent overlay marking ownership or preview status. Use sparingly on real content.
Pointer-and-text annotation to highlight something on-screen. Tutorial bread-and-butter.
An image layered over the main shot. Maps, photos, frames.
Scrolling text along the bottom of the frame. News channels, sports tickers, eSports.
Persistent game-state graphic. Sports broadcast staple.
On-screen indicator of how far you are into something - tutorial step, quiz, video timeline.
Full-width promotional graphic across the screen. Streaming-TV native.
Letterbox or pillar bars masking part of the frame. Used to fake aspect ratios or hide ugly edges.
Black bars top and bottom when a wider image plays on a narrower display.
Black bars left and right when a narrower image plays on a wider display.
Overlay grid showing 90%/80% safe zones on monitors during shooting.