captions-and-subtitles

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