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Every visual overlay has a Depth: In front of you, or Behind presenter. Send a title behind your head, tuck a logo behind your shoulder, or let a sticker peek out from behind you. Tella cuts you out of your camera recording and draws the overlay between your camera background and you.

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Send an overlay behind you

  1. Open your video and click Overlay.
  2. Add or select a text, media, or sticker overlay.
  3. In its detail view, set Depth to Behind presenter.
You can also right-click the overlay on the canvas, open Depth, and choose Behind presenter. Choose In front to bring it back. New overlays start in front. The Depth control only appears on clips that have a camera recording, and sound effects have no depth.
The first time a recording is used this way, Tella prepares the cut-out on its servers and the canvas shows Preparing cut-out with a percentage. The overlay stays in front until that finishes, and exporting waits for it. Each recording only needs to be prepared once.

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How it looks in each layout

Depth works with any layout that shows your camera:
  • In a Cut-out layout, the overlay sits between the background or screen and you. See Remove your camera background with Cut out.
  • In a layout with a camera frame, such as Camera Bubble, the overlay covers your camera’s original background inside the frame, and you stay in front of it.
  • With Pop-out, you rise out of the frame in front of the overlay. See Create a pop-out camera effect.
Fades, timing, position, and size work the same at either depth.

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Change depth from the timeline

When something sits behind you, the Overlay timeline shows a dashed Presenter row. Overlays in front of you sit above it and overlays behind you sit below it, so the tracks read top to bottom in the same order they stack on the canvas.
  • Drag a visual overlay card across the Presenter row to change its depth.
  • Select a card and press Arrow Up or Arrow Down to move it one track at a time. Crossing the row changes its depth.
Track order still applies within each depth. Two overlays that are both behind you stack by track, the same way overlays in front of you do. See Work with the multi-track timeline. Send to front and Send to back reorder an overlay among the others at its depth and never move it to the other side of you. Duplicating, copying, and pasting an overlay keeps its depth. Depth is also available through the public API and the MCP server as the depth field on image, video, and text overlays.