What is a lower third?

A strip of identifying text

The name comes from where it sits. News and documentary programmes put the speaker's name and role in the bottom third of the frame, below the face, so the viewer learns who is talking without the picture changing. Apple's Final Cut Pro guide describes titles in the lower third as the way documentaries and informational videos convey details about subjects or products on screen, and the software ships a Basic Lower Third title for exactly that purpose. The same strip can carry a place name, a date, a product and its price, a website or a social handle. What makes it a lower third is its job, identifying something, and its position, out of the subject's way.

How it is built

A lower third is usually two lines: a primary line in larger or heavier type, such as a name, and a secondary line underneath, such as a job title or a suburb. It sits on a bar, a panel or a soft shadow so it stays legible over a changing picture. It animates on, holds long enough to read twice, and animates off. Position follows the framing: when the speaker sits on the right of the frame, the strip goes on the left, so text never covers the face or the hands. Broadcasters keep graphics inside a safe area, and the European Broadcasting Union's R 95 recommendation sets the graphics safe margin at 5 percent of the picture on each edge, which on a 1920 by 1080 frame is 96 pixels at the sides and 54 at the top and bottom.

When a lower third matters

Any time a new person speaks for the first time, and any time the viewer needs a fact they cannot hear. Interviews, testimonials, panel recordings, conference talks and training videos rely on them, because a name spoken aloud is quickly forgotten while a name on screen is read and remembered. They also do quiet work in ads: a price, a location or an offer end date in a strip keeps the main picture clean. Once a speaker has been introduced, repeating the strip every time they reappear usually adds clutter. The exception is a long video that viewers may join partway through.

Writing the text itself

The words deserve as much care as the design. Use the name the person is known by, spelled the way they spell it, and check it with them rather than with an email signature. Keep the role short and meaningful to this audience: Head of Nursing, Riverside Private tells a patient more than a formal title with three commas in it. Write places the way locals would search for them. And keep every strip in the video to the same pattern, name above role, so the viewer learns where to look once and never has to work it out again.

Common mistakes

Putting it where the captions go is the most common, because both want the bottom of the frame, and a lower third stacked on a caption leaves two strips of text fighting for attention. The second is holding it too briefly to read; a name with a long job title needs far more time than a single word. The third is decorating the bar until it competes with the speaker. The fourth ignores the platform. On a vertical feed the bottom band is covered by the app's own caption and buttons, so a strip that looks tidy in the edit can disappear under the interface on a phone.

Where it shows up in the product

The video builder here has no separate lower third control and no overlay track to drop one onto. Text lives inside each scene's layout, in the slots that layout defines, so a name, a role, a price or a date is written into a slot of whichever scene carries it. Only two things are drawn over every scene. Captions, when a scene has narration, sit in a dark pill centred at the bottom, 44 pixels up in landscape and 120 in vertical, up to 72 percent of the frame wide. The watermark, when switched on, sits bottom left at 72 percent opacity. Both occupy the band a traditional lower third would use, so identifying text reads better placed higher in a scene, or in a scene with its captions switched off.

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