Add watermark

A watermark serves two distinct purposes depending on who you are. For creators distributing draft footage to clients, it signals the video is not cleared for final use and deters unauthorized distribution without needing a contract conversation. For brands publishing content, a corner logo builds recognition across every view: viewers who share the video carry the branding with them.

The most common workaround is adding a watermark inside a full editing suite like Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. That means opening a heavy application, creating a project, importing the file, placing the overlay on a track, configuring alpha, exporting, and waiting for a render. This tool handles the same result in the time it takes FFmpeg to process the video.

Text and image watermarks follow two different browser-side pipelines that converge at the FFmpeg compositing step.

For text watermarks: the browser renders your text into an offscreen HTML canvas element using the Inter font at the size you specified. A drop shadow is applied with a blur radius of 4px and an offset of 1px in both directions. The text fill uses white at your chosen opacity (rgba(255, 255, 255, opacity/100)) on a transparent canvas background, which is then exported as a PNG and written to the in-browser FFmpeg filesystem.

For image watermarks: your uploaded file is drawn onto a canvas with globalAlpha set to opacity/100, scaled to a maximum of 400px on its longest side, then exported as a PNG.

In both cases, FFmpeg receives two inputs (the video and the watermark PNG) and composites them using -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v]overlay=x=...:y=..." with coordinates computed from your chosen grid position. The video is re-encoded using libx264 at the ultrafast preset. The audio is re-encoded to AAC.

For logo watermarks, use a PNG with a transparent background. If you upload a JPG logo, the rectangular background around it will appear on the video because FFmpeg composites the full image rectangle. If your logo is only available as a JPG, convert it to PNG with a transparent background first before watermarking.

Opacity between 40 and 60 percent is the standard range for professional-looking watermarks: visible enough to establish presence without obscuring content. Bottom-right at 50 to 60 percent opacity is the industry convention for channel branding.

Adding a watermark with desktop FFmpeg requires a filter_complex command that most people get wrong on the first attempt. The overlay coordinate expressions differ depending on which corner you are targeting and the syntax is not intuitive. Video editors handle watermarks naturally but require a full project workflow. Mobile apps can watermark videos but typically force their own branding onto the output or restrict resolution. This tool handles the coordinate math for all nine positions, manages both text and image modes, applies opacity at the canvas level before FFmpeg processes anything, and produces a web-compatible MP4.