Subtitles and captions
Accurate, readable captions, supplied as a track or burned in to suit the video and its destination.
The short version
What you get. Checked captions that preserve meaningful speech and sound, with readable timing and placement.
Is this for you? For videos with meaningful speech or sound. We choose between a caption track, native captions and burned-in text according to the destination and viewer’s needs. If automatic captions already serve your audience, keep them.
What leaves your plate. Subtitling begun only once the cut is locked, so the text never chases a moving edit, reading speed treated as the real constraint, and the preset tested short, typical and long before it ships, at a two-line ceiling.
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When captions help, and when they get in the way
Subtitling starts only at picture lock
The locked timeline goes out as audio alone and comes back as an SRT. What travels with it is deliberate: the file name exactly as it reads on the tracking sheet, the folder the captions are to land in, and notes on any term or name that will otherwise be misheard. Caption a cut that is still moving and you will do it twice, then spend a week hunting the version that got away.
One partner gets no burned-in captions at all
On a recipe channel whose owner adjusts her wording just before posting, the captions are typed natively in the app instead. The reason is hers and not ours: typing them in the app keeps her last-minute wording under her own control, where burning them in would take that final edit away from her. Choosing not to burn them in is a service decision, and it is one of the few places a caption preset loses. Either way an accurate caption of the meaningful audio still exists; what changes is whether it is painted into the picture or supplied as a track the viewer controls, never whether the words are there at all.
Reading speed is the constraint, so lines break where a sentence breathes
Speech and reading speed both shape timing. We break lines at natural phrase boundaries, use a two-line house limit and split longer passages into readable cues. We check that viewers have time to read without losing the picture.
The preset is tested at three sentence lengths before it ships
Short, typical and long. A caption style that looks right on four words and breaks its own margins on fourteen is not a style; it is a screenshot. The face, the size, the contrast and the safe margins come from the partner's own type law, so captions read as part of the brand once they are already accurate and legible, and not as something the editing software supplied on the night.
How the words get onto the screen
The SRT round trip
We lock the cut, send the audio with names and terminology notes, then check the returned SRT against the video. Short-form captions can reuse the verified wording, but are retimed and checked against each final cut.
Where captions sit in the frame
Vertical captions sit inside the platform's safe area, clear of the interface furniture along the top, the bottom and the right. Where an inset window and a piece of notation share a frame, each gets a fixed corner and keeps it, so a viewer learns within one video where to look for which.
The notes travel with the audio
Anything a transcriber cannot get from the recording alone goes with it: a technical term said quickly, a name spelled unusually, a passage where two people overlap. Those are precisely the errors an automated pass leaves behind, and precisely the ones an expert audience spots first and mentions in the comments.
Knowing when a caption track serves the viewer better than a burned-in one is as much of the craft as fitting them on.
What changes for you
Checked captions that remain readable in the intended format, with the delivery method chosen for the viewer and the publishing workflow.
Related: Titles and motion · Long-form editing · Shorts and Reels · Vertical video editing
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What you will get
What is working, what could improve and whether we can help.
Two or three priorities, with the reason for each.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
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The work, written up
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