Video themes

Vocal Video themes define the visual and motion style of your videos. A theme controls the overall look of your scenes, including typography, accents, transitions, color treatments, and background music.

The Vocal Video editor with the Design panel open on the Theme tab, showing the six themes. An arrow points to the Design button in the right sidebar.

Themes adapt to your account branding, so the same theme can look different depending on your logo, brand colors, and video content.

In this article:

Switch themes in the video editor

  1. Open a video in the Video Editor.
  2. Open the Design panel.
  3. Select Theme.
  4. Choose a theme to preview it on your video.
  5. Preview the video before publishing or republishing.

Changing the theme updates the whole video. You can still customize individual design settings after choosing a theme.

The Vocal Video editor after choosing the Janus theme, with the preview restyled. An arrow points to the Janus theme on the Theme tab.

Preview Pro themes

Some themes, including Atlas, Sirius, Callisto, and Janus, are available only with Pro, Scale, and Enterprise plans. If you are on a Free or Essential plan, you can still preview these themes in the Video Editor before upgrading.

Theme examples

Each theme gives your video a different visual style. The best way to compare themes is to open a video in the editor, switch themes from Design > Theme, and watch the preview.

  • Europa is the default theme and includes Shaded and Flat styles. Europa Shaded uses gradients, while Europa Flat uses solid colors.
  • Atlas is designed for a more distinctive social media look.
  • Sirius leans into a futuristic feel.
  • Callisto is sleek and professional
  • Janus uses distinctive geometric elements.

Set a default theme

New draft videos take their theme from your default template, which replaces the old Default Video Settings page. To change the theme new drafts start with:

  1. Go to Video Templates in the left navigation and open the template marked Default (it's called Standard Cut unless you've changed it).
  2. Open the Design panel and select Theme.
  3. Choose the theme you want new drafts to use. Your change saves automatically.

The template editor for Standard Cut, with the Design panel open on the Theme tab and Europa Shaded selected.

Changing the default theme affects new video drafts created after the change. It does not update existing drafts or published videos. Collectors connected to a different template use that template's theme instead.

In the video editor, the Theme tab links straight there: Set the default theme in your video template →. To learn more about templates, see Video Templates: the Complete Guide.

Customize a theme

Themes provide the starting design for a video, but you can still customize the final result.

In the Video Editor, use the Design panel to adjust settings such as colors, fonts, and other visual options. You can also adjust scene-specific settings from the Scene panel after selecting a scene.

You can make these changes on a single video, or keep them for future drafts. To reuse a video's combination of theme, fonts, colors, captions and music, click the video's title in the editor and choose Save to template. To make it what every new draft starts with, make the same changes in your default template. See Video Templates: the Complete Guide.

For related controls, see Customizing Fonts in Videos, Galleries, and Cards, How to Adjust Audio Settings, and How to Change Video Format.

What themes control (animations, transitions, visual elements, default music and fonts) and what they don't (logos and color scheme, video format and cropping, scene types and sequencing, background images).

What themes control

Themes can affect:

  • Scene layouts and visual treatments
  • Typography and font pairings
  • Accent colors and color mapping
  • Motion graphics and transitions
  • Default background music

What themes do not control

Themes do not replace your content or publishing settings. You can still edit transcript text, caption text and style, attribution, scene timing, music volume, format, thumbnail, and sharing settings separately.

Captions have their own styles, chosen in the Captions panel. The Theme Default caption style follows your theme's typography, so switching themes changes how those captions look. To give captions a look of their own, pick a different caption style.

For those workflows, see How to Edit Captions and Attribution, How to Edit Thumbnails in Published Videos, and How to Share and Embed Videos.

Tip: Duplicate a video before experimenting with themes if you want to compare several versions side by side or create separate versions for different distribution channels.