How to Add a Required Caption Line to Every Clip

Why this is worth automating

If you're clipping for a content-reward campaign, the payout usually depends on a specific line being present — a handle, a campaign tag, sometimes a link. Miss it and the submission is rejected, regardless of how the clip performed. That's a payout lost to a typo.

The same applies to creator agreements. Plenty of creators tolerate clip channels on the condition that clips credit them visibly. Honoring that quietly is the difference between a source you can build on and a takedown notice.

Doing it by hand works until you're posting three a day across several sources with different requirements. Then it becomes exactly the kind of small, repetitive, high-consequence task that gets forgotten on the day you're tired.

Decide what the line says and where it lives

There are two different places a required line can go, and they're not interchangeable.

On the clip. Burned into the frame as a caption line or a watermark. This survives re-uploads and downloads, which is exactly what campaigns want — they're crediting the source of a clip that might travel. Keep it small and outside the main caption zone so it doesn't fight with the word-synced captions or cover the payoff.

In the post text. The description or caption that goes out with the upload. This is where handles and links belong, because they're clickable there and they're not clickable when they're pixels. Note that some destinations don't support clickable links in post text at all, which is why the burned-in version matters.

Most campaign requirements want both: visible credit on the clip, plus the tag in the post text. Read the requirement literally — campaigns are strict about exact wording, and "credit @handle" does not mean "credit the creator's name."

Make it automatic with a brand kit

Save the visual half in a brand kit: the caption styling, the font, a logo, and a custom watermark carrying the credit line. Once it's saved, every clip you produce carries it without you thinking about it, and it looks identical across the whole channel — which is separately valuable, because consistency is how faceless channels get recognized.

Keep one brand kit per set of requirements rather than one for everything. If you clip three sources with three different credit requirements, that's three kits. Scale's unlimited brand kits exist for exactly this; Pro's kit plus two custom fonts covers most single-campaign clippers. Pricing has the full breakdown.

For the post-text half, write the required tag into the clip's caption text before it goes out. Caption text is editable on the web app, so the review pass is where you confirm both halves are present.

Verify on the next clip, then stop thinking about it

Don't trust the setup — check it once on a real clip. Look at the exported file, not the preview, and confirm the line is legible at phone size. A watermark that reads fine on a laptop can be unreadable on the device where it'll actually be seen.

Two things to check while you're there: the line isn't covering the speaker or the action, and it isn't sitting where the platform's own UI overlays it. Every short-form app puts its interface over the bottom and right of the frame, and a credit line hidden behind a follow button doesn't count as credit.

One honest note on performance: a small credit line costs you almost nothing in reach. A large one, or one that overlaps the first second's hook, does. The failure mode isn't having the line — it's making it loud.

After that, the setup runs itself. New clips from that source carry the line; you go back to reviewing content instead of proofreading captions. More on caption workflow.