Burned-in captions
Subtitles rendered into the video's pixels, so they always show and the player cannot toggle, restyle, search, or translate them.
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What it is
Burned-in captions are rendered into the picture itself, frame by frame, at export. The opposite is a sidecar caption file (SRT, VTT) that rides alongside the video and gets drawn by the player, which means the viewer can toggle it, restyle it, or swap languages. Burn them in and the words are pixels: always on, always your typeface, always your color.
Reach for them on social video, where feeds autoplay muted and a large share of viewers never turn sound on. Platform caption rendering is inconsistent and usually ugly, so burning in is how you keep control of type, position, and karaoke-style word highlighting. Pair it with transcript-based editing and the caption text falls out of the same pass as the cut.
Gotcha: pixels are not text. The player never gets the words, so nobody can toggle, restyle, search, or translate them without a separate text track or a fresh render. OCR can scrape them back out and you can always re-render in another language, but neither is something a viewer, a screen reader, or a crawler does for free, so ship an SRT alongside anyway if the video lives anywhere other than a feed. Also keep the caption block inside the title-safe area and above the bottom fifth of the frame, since TikTok, Reels, and Shorts stack their own UI over roughly that strip, and where exactly depends on the platform and the month. And a single typo means a full re-export, so proof the transcript before you render.
Ask AI for it
Burn captions into this video from the supplied transcript, styled for a muted vertical feed: bold condensed sans, roughly 5 percent of frame height per line, white text with a 2px black outline and a soft dark drop shadow for legibility over any background. Show a maximum of three words per line and two lines at a time, timed to the spoken word. Highlight the currently spoken word in a bright accent color. Anchor the block at 65 percent of frame height, centered, and keep it inside the title-safe area so the platform's own UI is less likely to cover it. Safe zones are destination-specific, so check the export in the actual app before you call it done. Export an SRT of the same text alongside the video.