How to Add a Logo to a Video Using FFmpeg (Step-by-Step Guide)

Prerequisites & Setup

Before we start, you need FFmpeg installed on your machine.

You'll also need two files in your working directory: input.mp4 and your logo file, logo.png (which should have a transparent background).

1. The Basic Overlay Command

Let's start with the simplest command: taking the logo and placing it directly over the top-left corner of the video. FFmpeg uses the overlay filter for this.

How this works:

• -i input.mp4: Input video (stream 0)
• -i logo.png: Input image (stream 1)
• -filter_complex: Tells FFmpeg we are combining multiple inputs using a filter graph.
• "overlay=0:0": Places the top-left corner of the image at the 0,0 coordinates (top-left) of the video.

2. Positioning the Logo Correctly

You rarely want the logo jammed hard into the top-left corner. Usually, you want it in the bottom-right corner with a 10px or 20px margin.

FFmpeg provides mathematical variables we can use to calculate the position dynamically:
• W and H are the width and height of the main video.
• w and h are the width and height of the overlay image.

Bottom Right (with 10px margin)

Top Right (with 10px margin)

Bottom Left (with 10px margin)

3. Scaling the Logo

Unless your logo was exported at the exact perfect size for your 1080p or 4K video, it's going to look huge or tiny. We need to chain another filter before the overlay: the scale filter.

Breaking down the filter chain:

• [1:v] grabs the video stream of the second input (the logo).
• scale=200:-1 resizes the logo to 200px width. The -1 automatically calculates the height to maintain the aspect ratio.
• [logo] assigns a label to the newly scaled asset.
• [0:v][logo]overlay=... takes the main video and overlays the newly labeled [logo] on top of it.

4. Adding Transparency (Opacity)

To create a subtle watermark, you'll want to lower the opacity of the logo. We use the colorchannelmixer filter for this. Since we now have three steps (scale → opacity → overlay), our filter graph gets slightly longer.

The aa=0.5 sets the alpha (transparency) channel multiplier to 0.5 (50% opacity). Use 0.3 for a very faint watermark or 0.8 for higher visibility.

5. The Ultimate Production Command (with Audio)

By default, FFmpeg's filter_complex might drop audio if not explicitly mapped, and the default encoding settings might bloat your file size or lose quality.

Here is the rock-solid, production-ready command you should actually copy and paste into your scripts. It scales the logo, sets it to 60% opacity, places it in the bottom right, preserves audio, and uses H.264 encoding for web compatibility.

• -c:a copy ensures the original audio track is copied without re-encoding (saves time and quality).
• -c:v libx264 forces standard H.264 video encoding.
• -crf 23 sets the Constant Rate Factor (between 0 and 51, where lower means better quality and larger file size. 23 is the default sweet spot).
• -preset veryfast speeds up encoding at the expense of slight file size increases.