Cards lane · 19 styles
Lower thirds and caption cards that fill in as you talk.
Nineteen designed cards and bars — lower thirds, pills, panels and plates — sized to the line and filled in on the beat.
LumaCaption’s Cards lane has 19 caption styles that set the words on a designed card or bar — lower thirds, capsule pills, grid-paper panels and glass plates — which grow to fit each cue and fill in behind the voice instead of popping in complete.
A lower third built in an editor is a fixed rectangle you drop text into. When the line is short it looks empty; when the line is long the text either shrinks or overflows. Every editor has shipped a video where one caption bar is two-thirds air.
These nineteen size themselves to the cue. The card is measured to the line it holds, and it fills in behind the words rather than appearing complete before them — so the shape arrives with the sentence instead of announcing it.
The card fits the line
Each card is measured to the words it holds, so a three-word cue and a nine-word cue both sit in a bar that looks deliberate.
Brand-kit colours
Card, bar, text and accent are separately editable. Set them once to your palette and every caption in the video follows.
Nineteen distinct treatments
Lower Third, Poster Bar, Block Card, Capsule Pill, Grid Paper, Broadside, Neumorph, Clay, Win98, Liquid Glass, Red Noir and more.
Steady enough for long form
Eighteen of the nineteen reveal a whole cue at a time rather than word by word — calmer to read across a webinar or an interview than a bouncing word-pop.
When a card beats bare text
Text sitting directly on video is at the mercy of the video. A card is not — it puts a controlled surface between your words and whatever is happening behind them, which is why broadcast has used lower thirds for fifty years.
That makes this lane the safe pick for footage you do not control: shot outdoors, in a moving vehicle, against a window, over screen recordings with changing content, or over stock B-roll that cuts every two seconds. It is also the right lane for anything with a brand to hold — a card is where a palette actually shows.
- Broadcast bars
- Lower Third, Poster Bar, Broadside, Block Card. Rectangular, aligned, restrained. Reads as television.
- Soft objects
- Capsule Pill, Neumorph, Clay, Daisy Card, Coral Card. Rounded and tactile; suits lifestyle and product.
- Material and screen
- Liquid Glass, Grid Paper, Blueprint-adjacent Cartesian, Win98. The card is a surface with a texture, not just a fill.
- Editorial
- Biennale, Creative Card, Forest Card, Red Noir, Voltage. Designed panels with their own typographic hierarchy.
Cards and the platform UI
A card is a solid shape, which means it collides with platform furniture more visibly than loose text does. On Reels the bottom band is taken by the post caption and the audio tag, and the right edge by the action buttons; on TikTok the same is true with a taller safe area; on Shorts the bottom carries the title and channel row.
The practical answer is to place the card in the middle band of the frame and leave the bottom to the platform. Captions are draggable anywhere on the video and the preview shows exactly what a viewer sees, so this is a ten-second decision rather than a re-export.
How it works
Add your video
Only the audio is used to find the words. The file itself is never uploaded.
Pick a card
Nineteen treatments, each previewing on your own frames so you can see the card against the shot it has to sit on.
Recolour to your brand and export
Card, bar, text and accent colours are all editable. Export burned-in, or take the SRT for a platform that wants a subtitle file.
Common questions
Can I match a card to my brand colours?
Yes. The card fill, the text colour and the accent colour are separately editable on every style in the lane, and a single word can take its own colour without disturbing the line.
Do the cards resize to the text?
Yes — each card is measured to the cue it holds rather than being a fixed rectangle, which is what stops short lines from sitting in a half-empty bar.
Are cards better than word-by-word captions for long videos?
Generally, yes. Eighteen of the nineteen reveal a full cue at a time, which is calmer to read over a twenty-minute interview than continuous word-level motion. Word-by-word earns its keep on short, high-energy clips.
Where should a lower third sit on a Reel or Short?
In the middle band. The bottom of the frame belongs to the platform — post caption and audio tag on Reels, title and channel row on Shorts — and a solid card collides with it more visibly than loose text. Drag the card where you want it and the preview shows what viewers actually see.
