How to Add a Hook Title to the Start of a Video

There is a specific reason the opening of a video is hard, and it is not that you are bad at writing hooks. It is that you are writing them in the wrong place.

The best title is a sentence you already said

Most people write the hook last, in a text box, cold. That is the hardest possible version of the task: you are trying to compress a video you have already made into a line that sounds natural, while looking at a blinking cursor.

The version that works is backwards. Record the video first. Then listen to your own first fifteen seconds and find the sentence where you actually got to the point. That sentence is already in your voice, already the right length, and already true to what follows. Put it on screen.

This is why a hook title is a different object from a video title. The video title is a promise made to someone scrolling. The hook title is the same promise, reinforced for the person who already stopped, in the two seconds where they decide whether stopping was a mistake.

The three things a strong opening actually does

Watch openings that hold you and you will find the same three moves, in some combination:

It starts closer. A wide, static shot of a person at a desk reads as "settling in". The same shot punched in twenty percent reads as "we have started". Nothing else changed.

It puts the claim on screen. Sound is off by default on most feeds. If the first thing you say is the reason to watch, and it exists only as audio, a silent viewer never receives it.

It refuses to sit still. A frame that has not moved in four seconds looks like a paused video. This is the one people skip, and it is the cheapest of the three.

None of those is a creative decision. They are mechanical, which is why software can do them.

Doing it in one tap on a Mac

Zella has a Strong Open button in the editor sidebar. One tap does all three: it punches in on your opening, takes your first line and puts it on screen as a title, and adds a gentle drift every few seconds so the frame never sits still. Tap it again to remove the whole thing.

Strong Open is a Mac feature. On iPhone the same idea arrives by a different route: Auto-Polish includes a hook title in its one tap, alongside the silence cuts, noise removal, captions and speaker framing.

The captions have to exist first, because the title is lifted from what you said. If you have not transcribed yet, run captions and then Strong Open.

If you would rather do it by hand

The manual version is four steps and worth knowing, because you will want to override the automatic one eventually.

1. Find your line. Scrub the first twenty seconds and read your own captions. The sentence you want is usually the second or third one, not the first, because the first is throat-clearing.
2. Trim to it. Cut everything before it. Almost every video improves by losing its first five seconds. See hook editing in the first three seconds for how far to take this.
3. Add the title. Put those exact words up, held for as long as the line takes to say. Not longer: a title that outlives its sentence starts reading as decoration.
4. Push in. A small scale increase over the opening, or a cut that starts tighter than the rest.

How long should it stay up

As long as the sentence takes to say, plus about half a second. That is usually two to three seconds.

The instinct is to leave it longer "so people read it". They read it in the first four hundred milliseconds. What a lingering title actually communicates is that nothing else is happening yet.

What not to do

Do not use a different sentence than the one you say. A title that contradicts the audio makes the viewer choose which to attend to, and they resolve it by leaving.

Do not stack it with everything else. If your first three seconds contain a hook title, captions, a logo sting, a zoom and a whoosh, none of them lands. Strong Open deliberately does three things, not seven.

Do not put it over your own face. See how to move captions so they do not cover your face; the same geometry applies to titles.

The measurement that matters

Retention graphs are unforgiving about openings. The drop in the first three seconds is the one you can actually move, and it responds to the mechanical things above far more reliably than it responds to better writing.

Which is the honest case for a one-tap version: not that it writes a better hook than you would, but that it does the three boring moves every single time, on every video, including the ones you were going to publish tired.

Apple's own editing documentation covers the underlying title and transform tools in Final Cut Pro if you want the manual, long-form version of the same ideas.

Common questions

How long should a hook title stay on screen? As long as the sentence takes to say, plus about half a second, which is usually two to three seconds. Longer and it starts reading as decoration rather than emphasis.

Should the hook title match the video title? They should make the same promise but they do not have to use the same words. The video title is written for someone scrolling; the hook title is written for someone who already stopped.

Do I need captions before Strong Open works? Yes. The title is lifted from what you actually said, so there has to be a transcript to lift it from. Run captions first, then Strong Open.