Add Watermark to Video

Text only — no logo

Worth saying immediately, because several tools in this category do offer it. This adds text. It will not place a logo or an image onto the video.

If a logo is what you need, you have two options. Make a short clip differently, or — more practically — accept a text mark for video and use an image watermark where it matters more. ToolsHall's photo watermarking tool does support a logo image, so a brand mark on your stills and a text mark on your clips is a workable split.

In practice text works better on video than people assume. A watermark on a moving image is glanced at, not studied, and a short handle or name in a corner is read faster than a small logo — which at video scale often becomes an unidentifiable smudge anyway.

Position, and the thing a corner watermark cannot do

Nine positions, defaulting to bottom-right, which is the convention and usually right.

Two things to consider, and the first is easy to miss: the watermark stays in one place for the whole video. So check the position against the whole clip, not the opening frame. A bottom-right mark is invisible over an empty corner at the start and unreadable when the subject moves into that corner thirty seconds later. Pick a region that stays quiet throughout.

The second is the honest limitation. A watermark in a corner can be cropped off, and cropping a video takes seconds. Unlike the document and photo watermarking tools here, there is no tiled option that repeats the mark across the frame, so a corner mark is a deterrent and an attribution rather than protection.

The partial answer within what this does: use Mid Centre for anything you genuinely do not want reused. It cannot be cropped out without destroying the video, which is the trade-off — it sits over your subject. For preview copies, unreleased work and clips sent to clients for approval, that is exactly the right trade.

Opacity and size — go lower than you think

The default opacity of 80% is high for video. On a still image a strong watermark is a design element; on video it is on screen for the entire duration, and a bright opaque line in the corner of every frame becomes genuinely irritating to watch.

40 to 60% is usually the sweet spot: clearly legible, not competing with the content. Go higher only when the mark is doing protective work rather than attribution, and lower than 30% only if you accept that it may be unreadable on a busy background.

Size follows the same logic. The scale runs from 12 to 72 with 32 as the default, and 32 suits roughly a 1080p clip. Remember the text is sized in pixels against the video's real resolution, so the same setting is proportionally twice as large on a 720p clip as on a 1440p one — if the watermark comes out bigger or smaller than expected, that is why.

White at moderate opacity is the safest colour because it reads on most footage, and it is why it is the default. On consistently bright footage — snow, a white studio, daylight interiors — black reads far better.

Your text will work, whatever is in it

A small technical point with a practical payoff: symbols and punctuation in the watermark are handled correctly. A © symbol, an apostrophe in your name, a colon in a handle, a percent sign — all fine. In a lot of tools built on the same underlying engine, characters like those break the text rendering entirely or silently mangle the output, because they have special meaning in the filter the engine uses. Here they are escaped properly, so you can write what you actually want.

Quality, audio and format

Adding a watermark changes the frames, so the video is re-encoded — unlike adding or removing an audio track, where the picture can be copied straight through. One pass is visually fine; what costs quality is putting the same clip through several tools in a row, so watermark last if you are also trimming, cropping or compressing.

The audio is stream-copied, so the sound is bit-for-bit what you started with. And the output is an MP4 regardless of what you put in, which is the right default for anything going online.

Everything happens in your browser. That matters here more than for most video tasks, because the clips people watermark are usually the ones they have not released yet — client work awaiting approval, footage going out for review, a course video before launch. Uploading unreleased footage to a free service in order to mark it as yours is an odd bargain.

Related tools

Add Watermark to Image does photos and does support a logo image, plus a tiled mode. Add Watermark to PDF handles PDF documents, also with tiling. Video Compressor reduces the finished file — run it after watermarking, not before.