Updated October 14, 2026. Written for FilmCraft 0.7.2 (what changed since).
Burned in or sidecar?
Decide this first, because it changes what you export. If the video is going to YouTube, you may not need to export the video again at all: YouTube takes SubRip .srt, WebVTT and SCC files directly, and viewers can turn them on and off. Burning in makes sense when the player won't load a caption file, or when the subtitles have to show everywhere the clip gets reposted.
| Burned in (hard subtitles) | Sidecar file (soft subtitles) | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | One MP4 with the text drawn into every frame | An MP4 plus a .srt or .vtt file with the same name |
| Viewer can turn them off | No | Yes, where the player supports captions |
| Fixing a typo later | Export the whole video again | Edit or replace the text file |
| Styling | Size, color, box and position from FilmCraft | The player decides |
| Several languages | One per exported video | One file per language next to the same video |
Import the video and the SRT
- Open the editor. The first visit downloads the app and opens a demo project.
- Import the video. Drop it anywhere on the editor or use File › Import. It appears in the Project panel.
- Make a sequence from it. Select the clip and choose File › New › Sequence From Clip. The sequence takes the clip's frame size and frame rate, with the clip already on the timeline.
- Import the subtitles. Drop the .srt on the editor, or use File › Import again. FilmCraft recognizes a caption file by its extension and content and adds it to the open sequence as a new caption track, labelled C1, above the video tracks. The subtitles show in the Program monitor straight away.
Do step 3 before step 4. If no sequence is open when the caption file comes in, FilmCraft creates a new one for it, and you end up with the captions in a sequence that has no video.
The SRT reader is forgiving. Files saved as UTF-8 with or without a byte-order mark, UTF-16 or Windows-1252, with Windows line endings, missing cue numbers, a period instead of a comma before the milliseconds, or no hours in the timestamps all import. WebVTT (.vtt) and Scenarist (.scc) files import the same way.
Check and fix the timing
Every cue is snapped to the sequence's frames when it comes in, so times move by less than one frame (40 milliseconds at 25 fps). Play the video through once. If something is off, there are two places to fix it.
On the timeline, the captions are violet blocks on the C1 row. Drag a block to move it, drag either edge to make it start or end earlier, and double-click it to open the Text panel. Captions on one track never overlap, so a block stops at its neighbor.
The Text panel (Window › Text, or the Captions and Graphics workspace under Window › Workspaces) has a Captions tab that lists every subtitle with its In and Out timecodes and its text. Type a new timecode or fix a word, and the change is saved when the field loses focus. The same tab splits a caption at the playhead, merges two neighbors, adds new ones and searches the text.
When every subtitle is early or late by the same amount, usually because the SRT was made for a version with a different intro, select the captions on the timeline (⌘-click or Shift-click adds to the selection) and drag them together. If the offset runs through the whole film, trimming the intro of the video to match is often quicker.
Style the subtitles
The style belongs to the whole caption track, not to each line. In the Text panel's Captions tab, the style strip sets the text size and color, a background box, the alignment (left, center or right) and the position (top, middle or bottom of the frame). The default margin keeps the text 8% of the frame height away from the edge.
Size is measured as pixels on a 1080-line frame and scaled to the actual frame, so a size that reads well in a 1080p sequence takes up the same share of a 720p or 4K frame. A box behind the text is the safest choice for footage with bright skies or white walls; without it, light text over light picture disappears.
Burned-in captions are set in one font, Inter SemiBold, which ships with the app. Italic and bold tags in the SRT (<i>, <b>) are kept in the file but aren't drawn differently yet, so a burned-in subtitle that relied on italics for off-screen speech loses that cue.
Export the video
- Choose File › Export › Media…. Export mode opens on H.264 MP4 with AAC sound.
- Open the Captions section. If it says the sequence has no caption track, the SRT went into a different sequence; open the right one from the Project panel.
- Pick Burn Captions Into Video, or Create Sidecar File and then SRT or WebVTT.
- Press Export and keep the tab open until it finishes. The MP4 downloads, and with a sidecar the caption file downloads beside it.
Either way the video is encoded again from the timeline: FilmCraft has no way to copy the original video stream into a new file untouched. That is why the YouTube route above saves time when it fits.
Only need a different caption format?
Import the file as above, then choose File › Export › Captions…. It writes the caption track in the format of the file name you give it: .srt, .vtt or .scc. No video is encoded and the MP4 is left alone. SCC is the broadcast CEA-608 format at 29.97 fps; FilmCraft writes it as pop-on captions with drop-frame timecode by default. WebVTT files keep their cue ids, cue settings and speaker tags when they come back out.
No SRT yet?
The AI subtitle generator in the same editor transcribes the sequence and puts the result on a new caption track, timed to the word, using your own OpenAI or OpenRouter key or Craft Apps credits. From there, everything on this page applies. For a handful of lines, Sequence › Captions › Add Caption at Playhead adds a three-second caption you can type into.
Long or 4K videos
The browser build of FilmCraft runs on a single thread: decoding, drawing the captions, and encoding the MP4 all take turns on it, and the finished file is held in memory until it downloads. Burning subtitles into a short HD clip suits a tab; the longer and larger the video, the longer the tab works and the more memory the export holds. For an hour of footage or 4K, the desktop app is the same editor with multi-threaded rendering and hardware encoding, and it opens the project you saved in the browser with File › Save. The online vs desktop comparison lists the other differences.
Need to cut the video first? See how to trim and cut a video online.