Guide

How to add captions to video clips

Most short-form video is watched muted, and platform auto-captions are not reliably on. Captions burned into the frame are the difference between a clip that reads instantly and one that gets scrolled past — and you should not be typing them by hand.

Nothing to type From the clip's own audio

Why they matter more than they sound

A viewer decides whether to keep watching in about a second, often with the sound off and often before the first spoken word has finished. Captions are the only thing carrying meaning in that window — they are doing the job a headline does on an article.

They are also an accessibility requirement in the plainest sense: without them, a clip is unusable for anyone deaf or hard of hearing, and unusable for everyone scrolling in a quiet room.

Burned-in vs. platform captions

Burned-in captions are drawn into the video's pixels. They look identical everywhere, cannot be switched off, and cannot be shoved out of position by a platform redesign. That reliability is why clip accounts use them.

Platform captions (TikTok's, Instagram's, YouTube's) are selectable text layered on top. They are better for screen readers and search, but they can be off by default, wrongly timed, or positioned over your own text.

Doing both is reasonable: burn them in for appearance, and let the platform generate its own for accessibility tooling.

Where to put them

Keep captions in the middle third of the frame. The bottom is crowded: TikTok and Reels stack the caption text, username and audio row there, and Shorts puts the title and channel name in the same place. Text placed low gets covered on the exact platforms you are posting to.

  • Large and high contrast. Assume a phone screen in daylight.
  • A few words at a time. A full paragraph on screen is unreadable at scroll speed.
  • Don't cover faces. Especially on a reaction clip, where the face is the content.

Getting them without typing

Captions here are transcribed from the clip's own audio — the same transcript ClipFinder uses to find the moments in the first place, so turning captions on costs nothing extra. For AI clips they are on by default.

The one thing worth checking by hand is proper nouns. Transcription handles ordinary speech well and reliably mangles names, places, in-game terms and brand names. Scan for those; ignore the rest.

A caveat worth knowing

Don't caption an already-captioned video. If your source file already has captions burned in — for instance an export from another editor — adding a second layer gives you two sets of text on screen. ClipIt stamps its own exports so a re-uploaded export is not captioned twice, but a file from elsewhere is worth checking first.

Related guides

Add captions to a clip