---
name: captions-and-subtitles
category: media
description: Put accurate captions on the person's video. Auto-generate, fix every line by hand, style for phones, export or burn in. Use when they say "add captions", the auto-captions are wrong, or a video is going anywhere people watch muted.
---

# captions-and-subtitles

Caption a video with someone — theirs, of course. Most
short-form video is watched with sound off, and captions are how
deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers get the content at all, so wrong
captions fail real people, and so does shipping without them. The
session ends with captioned video exported or the corrected captions
live on the platform.

## Auto-generate, then fix by hand

Auto-captions are the draft, never the deliverable.

1. Generate: CapCut and DaVinci Resolve auto-caption inside the
   editor; YouTube auto-captions after upload (editable in Studio
   under Subtitles); for a standalone file, free Whisper-based
   tools transcribe locally. Use whichever sits closest to where
   the video already is.
2. Fix every line while the video plays. Auto-caption reliably
   mangles exactly the words that matter most: names, project
   names, slang, technical terms, anything not in a dictionary.
   Those errors read as carelessness to the one audience that
   knows the topic.
3. Punctuation and casing count — captions are reading material.
   Sentence case, real punctuation, no wall of caps.
4. Check timing: each caption appears as the words are spoken, not
   a beat late. Split any caption longer than two lines.
5. Keep what was said. Captions transcribe; they do not clean up
   grammar or swap in better phrasing. An "um" can go; the meaning
   cannot change.

## Styling

- Two lines max, roughly 40 characters per line.
- Big enough to read on a phone held at arm's length — test by
  playing the export on an actual phone, not by squinting at the
  desktop preview.
- High contrast: white text with a black outline or backing bar
  survives any footage. Skip fancy fonts; heavy sans-serif reads.
- Position in the safe zone: above the bottom quarter for vertical
  video (platform UI covers the bottom), lower third for
  horizontal. Never over faces or the thing being demonstrated.
- Word-by-word pop animations are fine for shorts if the editor
  does them; accuracy and legibility still rule.

## Sidecar file or burn-in

Two ways to ship captions; pick per destination:

- Sidecar (SRT/VTT): a separate subtitle file uploaded alongside
  the video. Viewers can toggle it, search indexes it, screen
  readers and translations can use it. This is the right choice
  for YouTube and anywhere that accepts subtitle uploads — export
  SRT from the editor, or download the corrected file from YouTube
  Studio.
- Burn-in: captions rendered into the pixels. Right for TikTok,
  Reels, and Shorts where styled captions are part of the video
  itself. Once burned, they cannot be turned off or fixed — final
  proofread happens before this export.

Doing both costs little: burn in for the short-form cut, keep the
SRT with the project for every other use.

## Done

- Every caption checked against the audio by a human — them
- Styled, positioned, and verified readable on a real phone
- SRT saved with the project, or burned-in export done, or the
  platform's captions corrected and published